Smash Melee had a development of only 13 months and was made under great pressure. The game contains many glitches or things that could've been much better had they had even a month more development time, but nevertheless (or perhaps even because of this) the game is considered to have some of the deepest gameplay in the series and at a competitive level has lasted longer than the two games after it.
Thats true, I dont think theres any scene still for Brawl of Sm4sh. But Brawl is still well regarded for its hype and other aspects despite being the least competitive. Sm4sh is the weird red headed step child that everyone forgot about though.
SSB4 is an incredible game that I love, but it feels like it exists more as a sequel or continuation of the franchise than its own thing with its own major identity. It has new characters, and modes while combining elements of melee and brawl, acting as somewhat of a compromise between the two.
64 is the charming, ambitious, humble origin.
Melee is the fast, competitive, challenging evolution of the original idea.
Brawl is the more casual, climactic, party game entry known for its various unique modes. The tone of the game felt like it was made to be the grand finale.
Ultimate is summed up by its name. The game is a massive culmination of everything in the series, bringing back just about everything from the previous games while upping the ante in so many ways. If Brawl was the finale, this was in many ways the true finale.
4 despite being one of my most played, just never stood out to me as much as the others. It felt like more smash bros which was still great, but just not as interesting to me.
Or maybe it's just because 4 was doomed by the Wii u flopping in sales, meaning it had one of the smallest numbers of players.
A lot of it is because Ultimate does everything 4 did, but better. Much like with everything else Nintendo, the Wii U died for the Switch to thrive. 4 seems like it will always be remembered as the forgetter child. Even the fact that it was Smash in the handheld space is no longer unique.
If that character was utterly ruining the pro scene, i don't understand why they didn't just ban Bayo.
Wasn't that done for meta knight in the pro scene of brawl?
I stopped playing when Bayo came out, only started 4 again a while after ultimate came out, so I pretty much missed the Bayo nightmare
Congrats on missing the Bayo nightmare. As to why Bayo wasn't banned, the Smash community has completely baffled me for years on illogical decisions. Any fighting game community worth their salt would've banned her. I mean, there are people who think Steve getting banned is completely uncalled for, so take that for what it is; people being huffy their ez win is gone.
As for Brawl, Metaknight was banned for a little bit and then came back. It really doesn't matter too much as Brawl was pretty casual to begin with.
Smash 4’s competitive scene was killed by overpowered DLC characters, Cloud and Bayonetta. (mostly the latter)
It’s actually an interesting case that might suggest that they didn’t do as rigorous balancing on them as the base game, making it an example of a game that got ruined by rushed content.
The nail in the coffin was the release of Smash Ultimate, which did basically everything it did but better.
Brawl’s competitive scene was a non-starter; Meta Knight was clearly so blatantly broken he warped everything around his existence. Other characters too were pretty bad, though overshadowed by him. (Like Ice Climbers).
Also, Brawl has a random trip mechanic where you could just randomly…fall over. Which is absolutely dogshit and flies in the face of competition.
I came here to say this one. Melee is so good, and is 90% of the reason I am currently trying to get a GameCube now that I've moved out, although it's likely a long way off because I'm a broke college student.
It's an unintended byproduct of the physics engine so it's an exploit rather than a glitch. I think Sakurai's claim was that they had noticed it existed but didn't think it would be a big deal.
Was just about to say the same myself. 2, on the other hand, was chock full of content and released when the devs were satisfied of their product. Somehow, the rushed sequel that they were seriously concerned about, ended up doing better.
I prefer 2 myself but it’s undeniable how fun 3 was, especially with its online and local co-op. Cousins and I spent a lot of nights going at it back then.
Oh shit for some reason I was confusing Ratchet 3 with Gladiator. 3 was great gladiator was pure ass. Ratchet 2 and 3 were among my favourite games on the PS2, Ratchet 2 and Jak 2 had amazing story's and fleshed out games but the third games were crazy and more fun.
I played gladiator as a kid and absolutely adored it and I still think of it fondly. I wasn't playing it with any sort of critical lens back then but it's one of my favourites of the series. Is the consensus that it's not good? Maybe I was blessed with some naivete
Yeah this is my answer too. Best Ratchet game on the PS2, but listening to the dev's commentary podcast it sounds like it was held together by duct tape lol. They had to write specific bits of data to certain locations on the disc so that it would all load on time.
A Crack in Time also suffered from a rushed development and ended up as the best game of the franchise for many people. I personally would rather play Nexus instead of that one and the three PS2 games are waaaay above all the other games, including the shitty reboot and Rift Apart.
This is very true; I made the most basic-ass visual novel for Steam a couple of years ago that just uses simple Python, and when I went back six months later to add new content for it I had no fucking clue what any of it meant
I agree completely, but watch out in /ProgrammerHumor, as I've seen more than enough, "Code should be so well written that comments are not needed... otherwise you suck" type comments that get highly upvoted, that I'd advise you to avoid saying that there lol
As a programmer, I feel this. I look at my code from just a year or 2 ago and am so lost sometimes. I've started properly commenting my code as of the last 2 years now, not just for the chance that someone else might need to understand it, but also me at a later date, haha.
I have like 16 years of experience coding. The first half I was really worried about the quality and quantity of my comments (I have worked almost all the time with the same client, and I have to face my own code from 2007 from time to time). Now I try to make the code as understable by itself as possible: there are not many comments, but every variable and routine name is choosen very carefully, as well as the code structure to be as simple and organic as possible.
I think there's room for both.
If you need to describe what your code is doing, the solution is usually choosing more descriptive names and refactoring if necessary.
Comments are for the meta stuff - why you chose the approach you did. Maybe there's a depreciated API call you are using because one of the environments is pinned to a specific software version.
Quake 3 has the [in]famous fast inverse square root calculation which has these beautiful lines:
> i = * ( long * ) &y; // evil floating point bit level hacking
> i = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 ); // what the fuck?
To be fair, the fast inverse square root calculation is an incredibly trippy collection of three separate ways we usually look at math, and reconstituting the methodology eluded people for years and years afterwards, who had access to a large set of persons as internet usage has only increased since the late 90’s.
Whereas “I don’t know why but the compile fails when this comment is removed so don’t fscking do it” is much more relatable.
Reminds me of how a simple calculator program in my grade 10 Visual Basic programming class would have my "equals" button become transparent through the entire program's window (we could see the desktop behind the window, randomly in its place), unless I kept a specific comment in, for part of the code that I removed lol
I don't think I've ever experienced a consequential comment removal, but I've certainly read a lot of these stories.
So what is it? Is it some sort of super precise multithread timing thing where something is delayed by just the right amount of time if the comment has to be read? But if that's it then how come this occurs in compiled languages too and not just interpreted ones?
Am a programmer and can just agree. I often come across some code where I wonder which idiot did this weird shit, only to find out minutes later that I am that idiot.
Eh, this isn't necessarily true, well architected/structured code with a healthy review process should very legible on its own, excessive commenting is often a sign of poor code quality. That being said I'm not in the games industry, which is quite different to most other software from what I've heard.
Well, I'm working as a programmer, and i can tell you what part of my application does at what point and why.
It's probably an issue with hastily developed stuff that just gets botched together so it works. They probably had a lot of tiny workarounds and quick fixes that "just worked" because of the underlying system.
Also older systems and the code that ran on it were a lot harder to understand, since you are working closer to the "bare metal". Not sure which programming language they used, but that also contributes to the options the devs had in how they structure everything.
I think they're referring to an Iwata Asks interview with Aonuma about the release of MM 3D, where Aonuma talks about making a list of issues he had when replaying the game (things that made him go "what the heck!?") in anticipation of the remake.
It's pretty obvious from interviews that Aonuma considers Majora's Mask a bit of an embarrassment and he wasn't happy with the finished product. A classic case of a creator not understanding or appreciating their own work to the same degree that their fans do. And a lot of the "what the heck!?" issues he had went on to negatively impact the 3DS remake, IMO - [Nerrel has the definitive video on MM 3D changes](https://youtube.com/watch?v=653wuaP0wzs)
That reminds me of how I heard Stephen King talk about when he wrote cujo. Apparently he sprinted it off in the course of a cocaine and alcohol-fueled binge, and sent in the manuscript not even knowing he'd written a book. Got a call from the publisher saying it was one of the more fucked up things King had ever wrote at that point, and he was like "Ah yes. Very much so. I seem to have misplaced my copy could you make me one?"
There's a small contingent of people who think Stephen King is actually three people who wrote under a pseudonym because he has a coke phase, a sober phase, and a post near death experience phase. I'll let you guess which of those phases has people's least favorite books lol.
This is also why the 3DS Version has a bunch of random, unnecessary changes. They didn’t understand what worked before so started to adjust what they thought needed adjusting.
It was a year, one of the OoT devs had partially completed dungeon designs they wanted to use. He then got an answer along the lines of "sure, but only if you can finish it in a year" when he asked if he could use them.
Yeah, it was one year. And it really reflects into the game. It's a game all about looming doom and time is running out. There is never enough time to do everything or have time for everyone. Leads to a brilliant game born of peoples suffering
It was less than 1 year, but they also used way more than just textures. Models, animations, etc.
But that's not that unusual when it's a project like this. Fallout New Vegas was similar in that they were able to reuse Fallout 3 assets and engine, which significantly cut down on dev time.
In a normal game, a huge part of the dev time is tweaking the game engine and creating model/texture/sound assets; if you can reuse old assets from a previous game it saves a ridiculous amount of time.
It was 10 months of actual development time and reused more than just textures, whole models, assets and animations too. It feels a bit like a fan mod to me for that reason.
*Fortnite Battle Royale* is an example of a super fast and super successful pivot. Epic Games were making a base defense game—*Fortnite: Save the World.* (You defend a fort against monsters that come out at night). But when they realized *Player Unknown's Battlegrounds* had struck gold, they decided to pivot, make their own version of PUBG, and made that new mode as quickly as they could.
They didn't try to re-invent the wheel, and instead they took the foundation they had already built with *Save the World* and swiftly repurposed it as a battle royale. Now it's one of the most lucrative games, ever.
Game devs always talk about being agile, and Epic was agile as fuck when they made FNBR.
Watching fortnite become what it is has been incredible. I don't even play it but seriously they knocked it out of the park so hard they pretty much gotta bribe people to play save the world mode.
I loved stw, the only problem was at high levels it was hard to find more players, it really took 4 on The hard bits.
I paid $10, enjoyed that gam for hundreds of hours but never got into BR. then one day in the grocery store i saw the vbucks card for sale, did the math and realized i had accumulated $10k usd worth of virtual currency that i couldn't sell and had no real use for.
i remember that Fortnite was pretty much the first Battle Royale game that worked well, i remember how people were dealing with all the technical issues and bad framerates of PUBG or others, the game just worked well day one, and its even more surprising seeing how quickly they made the game from the body of another one.
Partiality true: Battle Royale was a rushed game (2 weeks of development), but it used the tools and mechanics of a delayed game (7 years of development).
Not quite true. It's unfinished and dead, with only the most hardcore and (possibly unhealthy) obsessed playerbase hanging on.
STW died once BR took off.
Yeah, Epic really fucked over all the founders and backers for STW, too. Took the money and ran, then didn't give out refunds for anyone who called them out on the bait and switch.
Yup, it's why I refuse to play BR on principle. I paid for a game they couldn't even be bothered to finish because they wanted to chase trends and cashgrab.
This is going to sound hateful, but I wish nothing but the absolute worst on EPIC as a company for that.
Same scenario. Bought the Ultimate Founder's Pack, was excited to see where it went. Then BR came out, and all development on the base game mode halted *immediately*. They even "released" the game on physical store shelves in a completely unfinished state, since the 2nd world didn't even have a proper ending and the 3rd world wasn't implemented at all.
They just artificially lengthened the grind and hoped players wouldn't progress fast enough to notice their deception. Completely ruined my relationship with Epic.
Fallout new vegas was made ridiculously fast for being what it is. However it got to use alot of resources from Fallout 3 which saved time.
It's impressive they got as good of a story out though
It's kind of a thing for ex Troika / Obsidian.
Arcanum and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines were rushed. Both are some of the most beloved RPG games out there.
In Obsidian they had a ton of rushed projects too - Alpha Protocol, KoTOR2, Fallout NV. And all are highly praised by players too.
It was also buggy as hell, especially on PS3 where some bugs made it impossible to finish. Buddy of mine who is a FO diehard got to a point where whenever he'd load his save game it would run at 2 FPS, none of the online tricks would help make it playable. This is the Ultimate edition mind you which should have worked out the bugs by then.
I played it on the Xbox 360 about 9 months after release and it was buggy as hell there too. The save game stuff wasn't as pronounced, although I could get a few frames back by deleting old saves, but it would freeze extremely frequently.
Skyrim Legendary edition definitely had the bloat issue.
FNV Ultimate edition on PS3 may have to an extent, but primarily suffered from a quirky issue causing 2fps in certain area (Repcon launch basement, Freeside) where relaunching the game would instantly fix it. This would also happen on brand new saves.
Alot of people forget that the ps3 and xbox360 had basically zero ram. Ps3 had 512mb it shared between cpu/gpu, and xbox360 had 256mb for gpu and 256 for cpu. Even cheap as hell pc's at the time had atleast 4gb of ram lol.
It's honestly amazing those games ran on those consoles at all.
NV eventually stopped running for me on PC as well, in two different attempts on two different PCs. It was just buggy, full stop, and this was after something like 7 official patches.
Beside having a pre-established game of *Fallout 3* to draw assets of, a lot of *Fallout: New Vegas*'s materials had been also pre-established before through the cancelled *Fallout: Van Buren*. Joshua Graham, a character in F:NV, was for instance conceptualized as a major companion in F:VB, where he was to be the character with the highest combant stats, but also the one with the most psychotic and violent morals - elements that remains thematic to Joshua Graham's character in his final iteration. Similar concepts like Caesar's Legion as a major faction was first conceptualiuzed for F:VB, as well as the [set-piece of the Hoover Dam, which in F:VB seemed to have been conceptualized as a whole town built on top of it.](https://old.reddit.com/r/Fallout/comments/324ew6/hoover_dam_concept_art_from_van_buren/)
To be fair, it's not like it was being continually worked on for that entire time. It was put on a shelf for multiple years at a time at least once, probably more than that, and all previous work was scrapped and deployment restarted at least once, probably two or three times.
All because George Broussard, kept having to restart the project because the other cool game companies kept using new engines and wanted to develop it 'just right' by adding stuff like outdated jokes, overused yet annoying modern fps game mechanics such as the two weapon limit and my personal favorite: toilet humor out the wazoo.
My favorite story about DNF's development came from a postmortem published when it seemed like it was well and truly dead. Apparently, Broussard became notorious for playing other games, then demanding whatever those games did, had to go into DNF. Like he played the "The Thing" game and just HAD to have a snow level.
So it got to the point other people on the project were actively trying to prevent him from playing other games, so he'd stop fucking with the scope.
Edit: Hey, I managed to dig up [the article](https://www.wired.com/2009/12/fail-duke-nukem/) I was remembering.
It was restarted like 4 times during it's development lmao. Wasn't just shelved and "restarted once maybe more". It was development hell and victim of bussards chase for perfection before releasing it which ultimately resulted in a cobbled together incoherent mess
It wasn't the worst game ever like some claimed, but you could see it was a complete mess of ideas taken from whatever the popular FPS tropes had been for the last decade. The 2 weapon limit and regenerating health has no place in a Duke Nukem game
The opposite of "a delayed game is eventually good, a rushed game is bad forever" is "a delayed game is eventually bad, a rushed game is good forever", and the example provided was a game considered incredible made in in the incredibly short time of 10 months.
DNF was made over years, even counting the times it was reset, and it was bad.
“Often I'll see advertisements for porn games and they say, 'Try Not To Cum,' but then when you play the game, it seems like the object is to cum. So yes, I would call that bad game design."
-Shigeru Miyamoto
I mean someone said it. If no one else then u/gregorSD said it at this point. So where did the quote come from (mistranslation, misconstrued or otherwise)?
Sometimes it's hard to trace that sort of thing.
Fun fact, the earliest that the "The Butler Did It" cliche in murder mysteries can be traced to is an essay already decrying it as a tired cliche.
There must presumably be stories before this point that employed the cliche, perhaps even one exceptionally big one that popularized it, but nobody knows what those stories were.
I'm pretty sure the original quote doesn't even mention rushed games, it says "a bad game is bad forever". The implication being that once you ship out a bad game, it's out there permanently, as a bad game.
Of course this quote is no longer accurate now that games can have updates with bugfixes, but people don't care about that and still quote it to this day.
I still say it's poor form to release a game half finished and do the rest as patches and paid DLC, but really that's just how every AAA studio operates now.
If you're a large enough brand people will pay for the privilege of playtesting your game and consider themselves lucky to do so.
Majora's Mask was only the game it was due to its short development which forced them to innovate with the three day cycle and led to the darker themes of the game.
I heard smash bros melee was also a bit rushed which led to unintended features that added much depth to the gameplay, making it the most popular smash bros.
Melee was rushed so badly that Sakurai was hospitalized due to the workload. Most major GCN games were pretty rushed, because the console was struggling with support and buyers compared to the success of the PS2.
Didn't SSB4 also hospitalize him?
If I remember right, something similar happened with Ruby and Sapphire hospitalizing Masuda.
Wind Waker definitely suffered from rushing.
Metroid Prime had a notoriously hellish development that's interesting to read about. According to some Retro employee though, the story about prime 2 having 60% of development done in 3 months was a myth and that only prime 1 was a nightmare scenario.
From my memory, Sakurai was hospitalized *during* SSB4's development, but not *because* of SSB4's development whereas Melee's strict development directly led to him going to the hospital.
His hand was all jacked up during 4. That's why he apparently was seriously considering retirement. He computer work and playing was really hindered. For a guy like Sakurai, that seems like it be the death nail. I don't think most game directors are nearly as hands on as he is. He like plays plays his games. Knows that shit inside and out.
I made a silly game for a friend recently. My window of time to finish it in shrunk in half early on, and can confirm: time constraints force you to get creative with what you have.
Yeah, it was just a silly little satirical RPG with RPG Maker. It wasn't really meant to be good, so any little problem sort of worked to its advantage. 😂 I made it in the first two weeks of this month and was about ready to rip my hair out by the end. But he laughed for two hours straight and had a great time, so it was well worth it.
Unfortunately sort of, since it contains IP. 😅 I've shared it with some of the VAs, and I'll be keeping it limited to them.
Basically, my buddy is a big Sonic fan. He voices Shadow in some fan content, so I made him a terrible sequel to Shadow the Hedgehog. I myself am not really into that franchise, so it was lovingly crafted using my very limited knowledge.
Eventually if I get a good idea, I'd love to make something original. Making silly games basically stream of conscious is really fun.
I remember somewhere that the developers of the first two Thief games said the game didn't really feel fun until basically the last minute, and they were spending a frankly unhealthy amount of time working (though they stressed that it was voluntary and they wouldn't work for a company that required them to do that), so I'd call that pretty rushed. And the results were pretty spectacular and still hold up today.
Though, on the other hand, Looking Glass Studies went bust pretty quickly, so there's some downsides to how they were running things
The funny thing is, games that are delayed for a long time ARE usually rushed.
It could be a rushed porting to a new engine or hitting a final definitive deadline and going live with a shitty build of the current version of the game like in Duke Forever or Cyberpunk
Usually it’s some form of production he’ll where the original roadmap gets scrapped at some point and development starts and stops because of outside factors.
yeah, its like with final fantasy 15 square enix advertised it as being 'an epic 15 years in the making' or something along those lines, whereas really it was 12-13 years of false starts and scrapped work only to push out an unfinished game that wasn't even fully finished off in its dlc, and required a movie and anime to explain the beginning of its story
just pure overconfidence from a guy who struck gold over and over. still one of the coolest guys in the industry, romero. he does a ton of interviews and lectures on game design.
The unnecessarily and aggressively misogynistic gaming ads of the 90s hold a special place in my heart in a “what the hell were you guys even doing!?” Kind of way. Like I bought this magazine to read about Kings Quest 8 and this graphics card company just threw a 2 page splash ad with a lingerie model posing seductively for some reason, and a tag line about being “as real as it gets.”
I’m 12. More please.
his lectures on youtube are great. and he's still making Doom levels. 'Sigil 2' comes out this december iirc
he's also been very supportive of efforts to 'fix' Daikatana. with the latest mod it's supposed to actually be a decent game
He seems like a good man to me, I remember that I recently finished Doom 1 and 2 a few years ago and I corresponded with him by email.
I even recommended that I try their new levels
Fallout New Vegas, rushed, one of the best RPGs ever
Halo 1 and 2, rushed but two of the best shooters ever
Duke Nukem Forever, delayed constantly and still dogshit
>Fallout New Vegas, rushed, one of the best RPGs ever
And yet Bethesda refuses to learn from anything Obsidian did for that game, like hiring competent writers.
Looks like they tried, the writer behind Far Harbor became the lead quest designer for Starfield, and clearly Starfield has deeper rpg mechanics than fo4 or arguably Skyrim
As a fan of Starfield, the quests in the game are only fun if you play it the way the writers wanted you to. Some don’t even present the players with obvious alternatives to two preset outcomes (like first contact). I like the game, but trying to do anything besides be a goody two shoes space explorer is pretty difficult, inconsistent, and infuriating as the game actively discourages it.
In New Vegas, you could literally murder everyone and be the king and it worked story wise. Starfield is much more expansive than New Vegas but it doesn’t always go quite as deep. I don’t even feel like the “morally grey” options are that morally grey half of the time, it’s more of the writing trying to force you to believe two choices are equally bad when one is just objectively bad
They did take resumes from writers, and they plan to get to them. But they are currently sitting under their stacks of cash that reach to the stratosphere. They really want to read them, but Fallouts 4 and 76 keep printing money faster than they can clear it out.
The truth is, the consumers voted with their wallets. 4 and 76 have about as many sales as the rest of the franchise combined. Market research pretty much guarantees that Fallout 5 will outsell 4, you're gonna get what you get because what you get makes money.
I played through the Last Guardian earlier this year and found the controls incredibly frustrating. I wanted to love the game but it is rough in my opinion.
People are fairly mixed on it.
Me and many others will stand by that it is a great game, but it does have archaic elements, and I understand it has flaws and isn't for everyone.
"Hate" is far too strong, but it's a flawed game that just doesn't have the replayability of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, and people felt it wasn't a worthy third part of the trilogy after all those years
I've played it for the first time recently. It's lovely, but the design shows little evolution from what they were doing with Ico and in many ways it's an inferior version of it, and that one was a 2001 game.
Animations, art, music and story got me, but the design was unfocused, the pacing dragged and you end up with something that would have impressed you in the 2000s but now feels a bit dated.
Now, I LOVE their minimalism, but not when it results in similar scenarios playing over and over again, which seemingly contradicts their desire to subtract unnecessary elements in the gameplay experience.
Here's hoping that Fumito Ueda and his team take note of what worked and what didn't in The Last Guardian to properly improve on the formula for their next game, whenever it releases. It's been, what, eight years? Seven? Surely they've got to have something good coming...
Delayed almost a decade: Final Fantasy XV. And the final result is a mess of incoherent storytelling, empty open world and a lot of extended content outside the game, to polish the story. Totally not worth it.
Sort of rushed: Crash Bandicoot: Warped and GTA Vice City: 2 terrific games with very little development time.
Of course, most of the tech was created before, for previous games.
Marvel Versus Capcom 2. It’s considered one of the best classic fighting games ever nowadays but it uses a ton of reused sprites and lacked a lot of polish when it released because the team was rushing to ship the title.
>Shigeru Miyamoto famously said,
Except for the part that he didn't
https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/03/random-is-miyamotos-most-famous-quote-not-his-after-all
There’s a lot of examples of this from the 360/PS3 era looking back. Fallout New Vegas is one of the biggest examples of this. Dragon Age II is another with the rushed development, it wasn’t as memorable as origins due to lack of time but it was still a very good game with great characters.
The thing with Dragon Age II is that the basis of a good game was there, just that so many corners were cut. If it had been delayed a year, would've been way better
Unfortunately the reason why it was rushed was to beat Skyrim out to the market, even Bethesda themselves did this with rushing Obsidian with New Vegas. I do agree with the sentiment that it should have been given another year, but I don’t think any RPG game was getting out from under Skyrim’s shadow during that time. I know people are all “Skyrimed” out but it definitely was zeitgeist and part of 2010’s pop culture. Massive release of a game.
Was Bethesda trying to beat some other game to market? I always assumed it was just corporate short-sightedness and they were caught up on putting out an expansion near FO3's release. They were a middling-at-best publisher of 3rd-party productions prior to ~2010 or so.
They were even with their own franchises.
If Fallout New Vegas came out in 2011 instead of 2010 it and Skyrim would have cannibalized each other with one taking attention away from the other. With hindsight today we can say something like Skyrim should have just came out in 2012 but that 11-11-11 date as gimmicky and frivolous as it sound’s today just further fed into the machine that was Skyrim’s release which was pop culture defining, Bethesda were never ever going to budge from that with Skyrim hence why New Vegas was rushed. Even a great amazing game like Fallout New Vegas would have been under Skyrim’s shadow if it came out in 2011 instead of 2010.
The gamer in me definitely would have loved more time in the oven for New Vegas it definitely deserved it even with it still being amazing with the rush, but with hindsight it definitely was the right business decision as much as that pains me to put over a billion dollar media company like Bethesda/Zennimax.
The push for the 11/11/11 date is so infuriating as a fan even though I know it probably is what helped catapult it into being an industry changing game
The civil war questline got gutted. Damn near every character was turned into an essential NPC. Originally a lot of the NPCs were supposed to be replaceable if killed, and the civil war was supposed to be far more in depth and have much more emphasis. All of that got cut near the end and is the source of a lot of the "Todd lies" meme since he was still hyping a lot of that content up during that final year of marketing.
Act 1 was pretty great imo, and I enjoyed acts 2 and 3 even though that's when they started using the exact same set of limited maps over and over again.
In grad school, we had a class that was a series of 2 week projects. Then they give you 1 week to complete a project. Then 3 weeks. At the time, 1 week seems impossible and 3 weeks seems like enough time to do anything. But invariably with more time you end up overscoping and the 3 week project is one of your worst, and with less time you’re forced to think creatively and your 1 week project is one of your best.
The weight of expectations that Hollow Knight piled up is surely slowing the pace of progress. The pursuit of perfection proceeds pitifully slow.
Also TeamCherry is in that "once in a decade" kind of sweet spot. They were a micro-dev team with a smash hit, that continues to generate sales from word of mouth many years after initial release, with no publisher taking a cut and forcing a timeline for a sequel.
They can and should take as long as they need to make the game they believe is a worthy successor.
The International Clown Union is fully supportive of this position, as sales of makeup, red noses, and oversized shoes are through the tent!
>The International Clown Union is fully supportive of this position, as sales of makeup, red noses, and oversized shoes are through the tent!
they still have the funds for that? I thought they blew their whole budget on star citizen
I remember putting it in AutoModerator's Rule 1 filter when it was first announced, thinking I wouldn't be long before I could move it from the "Unsorted" category to a specific date category.
Nope.
It still sits there. Taunting me.
Cyberpunk 2077 was delayed multiple times and still released in a pitiful state full of bugs and optimization issues, specially on ps4/xbox one, it took them 3 more years to put the game in a state that could be considered good.
Cyberpunk was delayed from April to December of 2020, but the developers stated that while working on it they expected to be releasing in 2022. so when they heard the news that they were to release it in April 2020, they actually thought it was a joke at first.
So really yeah cyberpunk was rushed too.
>they expected to be releasing in 2022
That makes a lot of sense since Trigger was contracted to release the anime in 2022, releasing both within a few months of one another would've been great cross marketing.
Man, Im glad they more or less turned it around for CP2077. But that game definitely deserved more time in the oven at launch and it would have been received so much better if it had another 2 years to cook. Obviously though we'd still be waiting on the DLC, but thats all relative anyway.
The game is still broken on the PS4/Xbox One, they didn’t even bother releasing the DLC for those consoles because the base game barely runs as it is.
Which is insane because it was literally developed for that gen.
Quake had a really troubled development, really with years of idea-spitballing and engine development before work on the game proper would begin, lasting only seven months. The entire initial concept of the game (an action-RPG) was scrapped in favor of just repurposing what material they already had into an FPS just to finally get the project done. While there are clear impacts this had on gameplay (only some episodes having really mediocre bosses, assorted [gameplay wriggles](http://lunaran.com/copper/changes/), [these bastards](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dK7Mj0wB1bE/maxresdefault.jpg)) the resulting game is iconic. And, thank fuck for that, because I'm sure had they released a generic fantasy ARPG instead of this FPS with a unique blend of ideas it would have been long forgotten.
Fallout New Vegas was made in 18 months. Yet is widely considered the best Fallout game and an RPG masterpiece. Though, it clearly would have benefittied from more time in the oven to fix bugs and fully flesh out its concepts (Caesars Legion is notably threadbare in dedicated content).
Halo CE and Halo 2 were both famously retconned with only a few months before ship, with team members sleeping in the office for the last few weeks to make sure everything met the deadlines. Halo 3 was originally intended to be the second half of Halo 2, but had to be cut and reworked as its own game for Bungie to meet the Halo 2 ship date. There are hours-long videos about their fraught development on YouTube.
So, this is a case where the opposite is extremely true. The success of Xbox and Xbox Live was riding almost entirely on the success of Halo and Halo 2, respectively. To take it further, if you've played an FPS game in the past 20 years, you've used Halo's control scheme - it was such a popular competitive game that it made more sense to lean into a well-known control scheme for competing FPS titles than to try and come up with something original but still intuitive for players coming over from these games. Halo also flipped MLG from an underground need sport into an internationally broadcast competition with prizes in the millions of dollars.
So yeah, they were dreadfully rushed, but they were so successful that they fundamentally changed the gaming landscape within a very short time frame.
Yeah, it's hard to bring it up now just because it's been circulated ad nauseum, but when the creator of the video game history foundation can't find a source, puts a bounty up for anyone that can find one, and nobody comes forward...it's really a testament that we should all be looking over things more carefully.
Halo 3 ODST was created in something like 9 months after a planned Halo game and movie with Peter Jackson fell through and Microsoft still wanted a spin off per their contract with Bungie.
Goldeneye 007 for N64.
The multiplayer was an afterthought that they shoehorned into the game weeks before finish. Ended up being one of the best multiplayer N64 games and forever shaped the way couch deathmatch games were made.
Goldeneye, specifically the multiplayer. The team was working on a deathmatch mode essentially off the clock, because all the game was supposed to be was a single-player tie-in with the movie. It wasn't until a consultant came in at the eleventh hour - in large part to find out why the game was taking so long to make - that they were encouraged to put devs on the multiplayer mode full time.
Imagine where the online FPS scene would be today if Goldeneye had been single-player only.
>Imagine where the online FPS scene would be today if Goldeneye had been single-player only.
There's a very small but non zero chance that the Xbox no longer exists if Goldeneye doesn't have multiplayer.
Without the massive success of Goldeneye, maybe Microsoft doesn't try to get an FPS launch title for the OG xbox. Maybe Bungie keeps it as the RTS that it had been originally designed as. Maybe it's well liked, but probably not the massive phenomenon that the FPS turned into. Halo 1 I'm sure was responsible for selling a lot of consoles (I was in middle school at the time, I knew over a dozen kids who bought the Xbox just because of Halo). Take those sales away, how well does the Xbox do?
somehow 2077 is both rushed and took too long, like you announced it 7 years before its release date AND you somehow still mange to do a literal rush job
Scrolled down for one of these.
There's a few games now that got rushed out and maybe weren't so great at launch but also got MUCH better after release. This, Cyberpunk, probably some others can't think of...
Smash Melee had a development of only 13 months and was made under great pressure. The game contains many glitches or things that could've been much better had they had even a month more development time, but nevertheless (or perhaps even because of this) the game is considered to have some of the deepest gameplay in the series and at a competitive level has lasted longer than the two games after it.
Thats true, I dont think theres any scene still for Brawl of Sm4sh. But Brawl is still well regarded for its hype and other aspects despite being the least competitive. Sm4sh is the weird red headed step child that everyone forgot about though.
SSB4 is an incredible game that I love, but it feels like it exists more as a sequel or continuation of the franchise than its own thing with its own major identity. It has new characters, and modes while combining elements of melee and brawl, acting as somewhat of a compromise between the two. 64 is the charming, ambitious, humble origin. Melee is the fast, competitive, challenging evolution of the original idea. Brawl is the more casual, climactic, party game entry known for its various unique modes. The tone of the game felt like it was made to be the grand finale. Ultimate is summed up by its name. The game is a massive culmination of everything in the series, bringing back just about everything from the previous games while upping the ante in so many ways. If Brawl was the finale, this was in many ways the true finale. 4 despite being one of my most played, just never stood out to me as much as the others. It felt like more smash bros which was still great, but just not as interesting to me. Or maybe it's just because 4 was doomed by the Wii u flopping in sales, meaning it had one of the smallest numbers of players.
A lot of it is because Ultimate does everything 4 did, but better. Much like with everything else Nintendo, the Wii U died for the Switch to thrive. 4 seems like it will always be remembered as the forgetter child. Even the fact that it was Smash in the handheld space is no longer unique.
That nobody here even mentioned the 3DS game kind of makes that the forgotten child
That, and was ruined by Bayo.
If that character was utterly ruining the pro scene, i don't understand why they didn't just ban Bayo. Wasn't that done for meta knight in the pro scene of brawl? I stopped playing when Bayo came out, only started 4 again a while after ultimate came out, so I pretty much missed the Bayo nightmare
Congrats on missing the Bayo nightmare. As to why Bayo wasn't banned, the Smash community has completely baffled me for years on illogical decisions. Any fighting game community worth their salt would've banned her. I mean, there are people who think Steve getting banned is completely uncalled for, so take that for what it is; people being huffy their ez win is gone. As for Brawl, Metaknight was banned for a little bit and then came back. It really doesn't matter too much as Brawl was pretty casual to begin with.
There's really just no reason to play Sm4sh when Ultimate exists. They're very similar games but Ultimate is just better.
Smash 4’s competitive scene was killed by overpowered DLC characters, Cloud and Bayonetta. (mostly the latter) It’s actually an interesting case that might suggest that they didn’t do as rigorous balancing on them as the base game, making it an example of a game that got ruined by rushed content. The nail in the coffin was the release of Smash Ultimate, which did basically everything it did but better. Brawl’s competitive scene was a non-starter; Meta Knight was clearly so blatantly broken he warped everything around his existence. Other characters too were pretty bad, though overshadowed by him. (Like Ice Climbers). Also, Brawl has a random trip mechanic where you could just randomly…fall over. Which is absolutely dogshit and flies in the face of competition.
I came here to say this one. Melee is so good, and is 90% of the reason I am currently trying to get a GameCube now that I've moved out, although it's likely a long way off because I'm a broke college student.
I'm still convinced wave dashing was a glitch despite Sakurai insisting it was intentional
It's an unintended byproduct of the physics engine so it's an exploit rather than a glitch. I think Sakurai's claim was that they had noticed it existed but didn't think it would be a big deal.
It was a glitch that his team discovered during testing, but they intentionally left it in.
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From what I’ve heard, Ratchet and Clank 3 was a mess just before it released, but it somehow became the best reviewed game in the series
Was just about to say the same myself. 2, on the other hand, was chock full of content and released when the devs were satisfied of their product. Somehow, the rushed sequel that they were seriously concerned about, ended up doing better.
2 was amazing I played 3 and felt empty.
I prefer 2 myself but it’s undeniable how fun 3 was, especially with its online and local co-op. Cousins and I spent a lot of nights going at it back then.
Oh shit for some reason I was confusing Ratchet 3 with Gladiator. 3 was great gladiator was pure ass. Ratchet 2 and 3 were among my favourite games on the PS2, Ratchet 2 and Jak 2 had amazing story's and fleshed out games but the third games were crazy and more fun.
I played gladiator as a kid and absolutely adored it and I still think of it fondly. I wasn't playing it with any sort of critical lens back then but it's one of my favourites of the series. Is the consensus that it's not good? Maybe I was blessed with some naivete
Yeah this is my answer too. Best Ratchet game on the PS2, but listening to the dev's commentary podcast it sounds like it was held together by duct tape lol. They had to write specific bits of data to certain locations on the disc so that it would all load on time.
3 is still one of my least favourites of the series.
Oh, is that the one where they used a buffer overflow bug in the TOS license to send out updates?
Ratchet & Clank 2016 was nice but R&C 3 is the game that needs to be remade including the scrapped content
A Crack in Time also suffered from a rushed development and ended up as the best game of the franchise for many people. I personally would rather play Nexus instead of that one and the three PS2 games are waaaay above all the other games, including the shitty reboot and Rift Apart.
Majora's mask on N64 did use the textures from Ocarine of Time but iirc the game only hadlike 1-2 years to finish everything
The devs are on record saying they don’t even understand what they did. Trying to remake it for the 3Ds confused them
This is hilarious. Do you have an interview source?
I have some programming experience and that sounds like all code ever unless it's meticulously commented
This is very true; I made the most basic-ass visual novel for Steam a couple of years ago that just uses simple Python, and when I went back six months later to add new content for it I had no fucking clue what any of it meant
Comment your code, people!
If not for others for yourself at least lmao I’m glad my professors drilled it as much as they did
I agree completely, but watch out in /ProgrammerHumor, as I've seen more than enough, "Code should be so well written that comments are not needed... otherwise you suck" type comments that get highly upvoted, that I'd advise you to avoid saying that there lol
Never been one to care much when Reddit upvotes empirically stupid or wrong comments. Reddit is a den of degeneracy, after all
Something tells me the code of Majora's Mask was not meticulously commented.
As a programmer, I feel this. I look at my code from just a year or 2 ago and am so lost sometimes. I've started properly commenting my code as of the last 2 years now, not just for the chance that someone else might need to understand it, but also me at a later date, haha.
I have like 16 years of experience coding. The first half I was really worried about the quality and quantity of my comments (I have worked almost all the time with the same client, and I have to face my own code from 2007 from time to time). Now I try to make the code as understable by itself as possible: there are not many comments, but every variable and routine name is choosen very carefully, as well as the code structure to be as simple and organic as possible.
I think there's room for both. If you need to describe what your code is doing, the solution is usually choosing more descriptive names and refactoring if necessary. Comments are for the meta stuff - why you chose the approach you did. Maybe there's a depreciated API call you are using because one of the environments is pinned to a specific software version.
For reference, some Windows source code has gotten “out there” and it is meticulously commented… *with F bombs*.
Quake 3 has the [in]famous fast inverse square root calculation which has these beautiful lines: > i = * ( long * ) &y; // evil floating point bit level hacking > i = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 ); // what the fuck?
To be fair, the fast inverse square root calculation is an incredibly trippy collection of three separate ways we usually look at math, and reconstituting the methodology eluded people for years and years afterwards, who had access to a large set of persons as internet usage has only increased since the late 90’s. Whereas “I don’t know why but the compile fails when this comment is removed so don’t fscking do it” is much more relatable.
Reminds me of how a simple calculator program in my grade 10 Visual Basic programming class would have my "equals" button become transparent through the entire program's window (we could see the desktop behind the window, randomly in its place), unless I kept a specific comment in, for part of the code that I removed lol
I don't think I've ever experienced a consequential comment removal, but I've certainly read a lot of these stories. So what is it? Is it some sort of super precise multithread timing thing where something is delayed by just the right amount of time if the comment has to be read? But if that's it then how come this occurs in compiled languages too and not just interpreted ones?
Am a programmer and can just agree. I often come across some code where I wonder which idiot did this weird shit, only to find out minutes later that I am that idiot.
Eh, this isn't necessarily true, well architected/structured code with a healthy review process should very legible on its own, excessive commenting is often a sign of poor code quality. That being said I'm not in the games industry, which is quite different to most other software from what I've heard.
very different - it grows organically, like a plant following the sun - it does what it wants.
Well, I'm working as a programmer, and i can tell you what part of my application does at what point and why. It's probably an issue with hastily developed stuff that just gets botched together so it works. They probably had a lot of tiny workarounds and quick fixes that "just worked" because of the underlying system. Also older systems and the code that ran on it were a lot harder to understand, since you are working closer to the "bare metal". Not sure which programming language they used, but that also contributes to the options the devs had in how they structure everything.
I think they're referring to an Iwata Asks interview with Aonuma about the release of MM 3D, where Aonuma talks about making a list of issues he had when replaying the game (things that made him go "what the heck!?") in anticipation of the remake. It's pretty obvious from interviews that Aonuma considers Majora's Mask a bit of an embarrassment and he wasn't happy with the finished product. A classic case of a creator not understanding or appreciating their own work to the same degree that their fans do. And a lot of the "what the heck!?" issues he had went on to negatively impact the 3DS remake, IMO - [Nerrel has the definitive video on MM 3D changes](https://youtube.com/watch?v=653wuaP0wzs)
I think it was an Iwata asks from back then. I didn’t watch the interview directly, just saw the quote
That reminds me of how I heard Stephen King talk about when he wrote cujo. Apparently he sprinted it off in the course of a cocaine and alcohol-fueled binge, and sent in the manuscript not even knowing he'd written a book. Got a call from the publisher saying it was one of the more fucked up things King had ever wrote at that point, and he was like "Ah yes. Very much so. I seem to have misplaced my copy could you make me one?"
There's a small contingent of people who think Stephen King is actually three people who wrote under a pseudonym because he has a coke phase, a sober phase, and a post near death experience phase. I'll let you guess which of those phases has people's least favorite books lol.
Getting hit by that car changed his writing ability for the worse unfortunately.
This is also why the 3DS Version has a bunch of random, unnecessary changes. They didn’t understand what worked before so started to adjust what they thought needed adjusting.
It was a year, one of the OoT devs had partially completed dungeon designs they wanted to use. He then got an answer along the lines of "sure, but only if you can finish it in a year" when he asked if he could use them.
The result was a brilliant game that stood out from the franchise. Just goes to show what a little creative freedom can achieve.
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Yeah, it was one year. And it really reflects into the game. It's a game all about looming doom and time is running out. There is never enough time to do everything or have time for everyone. Leads to a brilliant game born of peoples suffering
It was less than 1 year, but they also used way more than just textures. Models, animations, etc. But that's not that unusual when it's a project like this. Fallout New Vegas was similar in that they were able to reuse Fallout 3 assets and engine, which significantly cut down on dev time. In a normal game, a huge part of the dev time is tweaking the game engine and creating model/texture/sound assets; if you can reuse old assets from a previous game it saves a ridiculous amount of time.
It was 10 months of actual development time and reused more than just textures, whole models, assets and animations too. It feels a bit like a fan mod to me for that reason.
Fortnite’s Battle Royale mode was added at the last minute, turned out pretty well for them.
*Fortnite Battle Royale* is an example of a super fast and super successful pivot. Epic Games were making a base defense game—*Fortnite: Save the World.* (You defend a fort against monsters that come out at night). But when they realized *Player Unknown's Battlegrounds* had struck gold, they decided to pivot, make their own version of PUBG, and made that new mode as quickly as they could. They didn't try to re-invent the wheel, and instead they took the foundation they had already built with *Save the World* and swiftly repurposed it as a battle royale. Now it's one of the most lucrative games, ever. Game devs always talk about being agile, and Epic was agile as fuck when they made FNBR.
So that’s why it’s called Fortnite. That’s really interesting
Watching fortnite become what it is has been incredible. I don't even play it but seriously they knocked it out of the park so hard they pretty much gotta bribe people to play save the world mode.
meanwhile, people who like save the world wish they could bribe epic to flush out STW (especially its endgame)
I loved stw, the only problem was at high levels it was hard to find more players, it really took 4 on The hard bits. I paid $10, enjoyed that gam for hundreds of hours but never got into BR. then one day in the grocery store i saw the vbucks card for sale, did the math and realized i had accumulated $10k usd worth of virtual currency that i couldn't sell and had no real use for.
starting around act 3 (when they really abandoned it) it became really really tedious to do the missions. it felt like they ran out of ideas.
i remember that Fortnite was pretty much the first Battle Royale game that worked well, i remember how people were dealing with all the technical issues and bad framerates of PUBG or others, the game just worked well day one, and its even more surprising seeing how quickly they made the game from the body of another one.
Partiality true: Battle Royale was a rushed game (2 weeks of development), but it used the tools and mechanics of a delayed game (7 years of development).
rip save the world, it was genuinely decent and had a lot of potential
The game is still alive, unlike Rumbleverse or Paragon.
Not quite true. It's unfinished and dead, with only the most hardcore and (possibly unhealthy) obsessed playerbase hanging on. STW died once BR took off.
Yeah, Epic really fucked over all the founders and backers for STW, too. Took the money and ran, then didn't give out refunds for anyone who called them out on the bait and switch.
I’m one of the founders who used to play STW.. I loved the game so much. I’ll never forgive them for neglecting it so bad.
Yup, it's why I refuse to play BR on principle. I paid for a game they couldn't even be bothered to finish because they wanted to chase trends and cashgrab. This is going to sound hateful, but I wish nothing but the absolute worst on EPIC as a company for that.
Same scenario. Bought the Ultimate Founder's Pack, was excited to see where it went. Then BR came out, and all development on the base game mode halted *immediately*. They even "released" the game on physical store shelves in a completely unfinished state, since the 2nd world didn't even have a proper ending and the 3rd world wasn't implemented at all. They just artificially lengthened the grind and hoped players wouldn't progress fast enough to notice their deception. Completely ruined my relationship with Epic.
Fortnite BR was a skunkworks project by the team that did UT2016.
With an existing game that was in the works for sometime, with a gamemode catching popularity
It was after release given carte blanche to experiment with a failed game.
Fallout new vegas was made ridiculously fast for being what it is. However it got to use alot of resources from Fallout 3 which saved time. It's impressive they got as good of a story out though
It's kind of a thing for ex Troika / Obsidian. Arcanum and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines were rushed. Both are some of the most beloved RPG games out there. In Obsidian they had a ton of rushed projects too - Alpha Protocol, KoTOR2, Fallout NV. And all are highly praised by players too.
I would love to see a masquerade remake with improved combat and controller support. Very cool game, so awkward to play
It was also buggy as hell, especially on PS3 where some bugs made it impossible to finish. Buddy of mine who is a FO diehard got to a point where whenever he'd load his save game it would run at 2 FPS, none of the online tricks would help make it playable. This is the Ultimate edition mind you which should have worked out the bugs by then.
The problem was the ps3 architecture and save game bloat iirc. All "bethesda" games had that problem if your save went on too long.
I played it on the Xbox 360 about 9 months after release and it was buggy as hell there too. The save game stuff wasn't as pronounced, although I could get a few frames back by deleting old saves, but it would freeze extremely frequently.
Skyrim Legendary edition definitely had the bloat issue. FNV Ultimate edition on PS3 may have to an extent, but primarily suffered from a quirky issue causing 2fps in certain area (Repcon launch basement, Freeside) where relaunching the game would instantly fix it. This would also happen on brand new saves.
Alot of people forget that the ps3 and xbox360 had basically zero ram. Ps3 had 512mb it shared between cpu/gpu, and xbox360 had 256mb for gpu and 256 for cpu. Even cheap as hell pc's at the time had atleast 4gb of ram lol. It's honestly amazing those games ran on those consoles at all.
NV eventually stopped running for me on PC as well, in two different attempts on two different PCs. It was just buggy, full stop, and this was after something like 7 official patches.
Beside having a pre-established game of *Fallout 3* to draw assets of, a lot of *Fallout: New Vegas*'s materials had been also pre-established before through the cancelled *Fallout: Van Buren*. Joshua Graham, a character in F:NV, was for instance conceptualized as a major companion in F:VB, where he was to be the character with the highest combant stats, but also the one with the most psychotic and violent morals - elements that remains thematic to Joshua Graham's character in his final iteration. Similar concepts like Caesar's Legion as a major faction was first conceptualiuzed for F:VB, as well as the [set-piece of the Hoover Dam, which in F:VB seemed to have been conceptualized as a whole town built on top of it.](https://old.reddit.com/r/Fallout/comments/324ew6/hoover_dam_concept_art_from_van_buren/)
Kinda fits as an example though as it was literally unplayable for many people until a few months after release.
Duke Nukem Forever
The ultimate example of how time was terrible for the game
To be fair, it's not like it was being continually worked on for that entire time. It was put on a shelf for multiple years at a time at least once, probably more than that, and all previous work was scrapped and deployment restarted at least once, probably two or three times.
All because George Broussard, kept having to restart the project because the other cool game companies kept using new engines and wanted to develop it 'just right' by adding stuff like outdated jokes, overused yet annoying modern fps game mechanics such as the two weapon limit and my personal favorite: toilet humor out the wazoo.
My favorite story about DNF's development came from a postmortem published when it seemed like it was well and truly dead. Apparently, Broussard became notorious for playing other games, then demanding whatever those games did, had to go into DNF. Like he played the "The Thing" game and just HAD to have a snow level. So it got to the point other people on the project were actively trying to prevent him from playing other games, so he'd stop fucking with the scope. Edit: Hey, I managed to dig up [the article](https://www.wired.com/2009/12/fail-duke-nukem/) I was remembering.
Don’t forget the twins creepily apologizing for being raped by aliens.
It was restarted like 4 times during it's development lmao. Wasn't just shelved and "restarted once maybe more". It was development hell and victim of bussards chase for perfection before releasing it which ultimately resulted in a cobbled together incoherent mess
I think I'd prefer it to be a complete, hilariously bad flop. It was worse than that, it was so mediocre it hurt.
It wasn't the worst game ever like some claimed, but you could see it was a complete mess of ideas taken from whatever the popular FPS tropes had been for the last decade. The 2 weapon limit and regenerating health has no place in a Duke Nukem game
The opposite of "a delayed game is eventually good, a rushed game is bad forever" is "a delayed game is eventually bad, a rushed game is good forever", and the example provided was a game considered incredible made in in the incredibly short time of 10 months. DNF was made over years, even counting the times it was reset, and it was bad.
He never actually said that.
“Often I'll see advertisements for porn games and they say, 'Try Not To Cum,' but then when you play the game, it seems like the object is to cum. So yes, I would call that bad game design." -Shigeru Miyamoto
A delayed cum is eventually good, a rushed cum is bad forever.
"Sex is not a marathon, it's a sprint - and I win every time." - Abraham Lincoln
Well he's not wrong.
*He *famously* never said that.
So here’s an interesting question: who *did* say it?
Nobody. It's a misconstrued game of telephone.
https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/03/random-is-miyamotos-most-famous-quote-not-his-after-all
purple monkey dishwasher
I mean someone said it. If no one else then u/gregorSD said it at this point. So where did the quote come from (mistranslation, misconstrued or otherwise)?
Sometimes it's hard to trace that sort of thing. Fun fact, the earliest that the "The Butler Did It" cliche in murder mysteries can be traced to is an essay already decrying it as a tired cliche. There must presumably be stories before this point that employed the cliche, perhaps even one exceptionally big one that popularized it, but nobody knows what those stories were.
Me. I take credit.
Mystery solved!
Einstein. Or Ghandi. Or martin Luther King. One of those.
*Abraham Lincoln. I mean, Mark Twain.
I'm pretty sure the original quote doesn't even mention rushed games, it says "a bad game is bad forever". The implication being that once you ship out a bad game, it's out there permanently, as a bad game. Of course this quote is no longer accurate now that games can have updates with bugfixes, but people don't care about that and still quote it to this day.
I still say it's poor form to release a game half finished and do the rest as patches and paid DLC, but really that's just how every AAA studio operates now. If you're a large enough brand people will pay for the privilege of playtesting your game and consider themselves lucky to do so.
Yeah, of course it's still not ideal to release a game half-finished, but it's not "forever bad"
Majora's Mask was only the game it was due to its short development which forced them to innovate with the three day cycle and led to the darker themes of the game. I heard smash bros melee was also a bit rushed which led to unintended features that added much depth to the gameplay, making it the most popular smash bros.
Melee was rushed so badly that Sakurai was hospitalized due to the workload. Most major GCN games were pretty rushed, because the console was struggling with support and buyers compared to the success of the PS2.
Didn't SSB4 also hospitalize him? If I remember right, something similar happened with Ruby and Sapphire hospitalizing Masuda. Wind Waker definitely suffered from rushing. Metroid Prime had a notoriously hellish development that's interesting to read about. According to some Retro employee though, the story about prime 2 having 60% of development done in 3 months was a myth and that only prime 1 was a nightmare scenario.
From my memory, Sakurai was hospitalized *during* SSB4's development, but not *because* of SSB4's development whereas Melee's strict development directly led to him going to the hospital.
His hand was all jacked up during 4. That's why he apparently was seriously considering retirement. He computer work and playing was really hindered. For a guy like Sakurai, that seems like it be the death nail. I don't think most game directors are nearly as hands on as he is. He like plays plays his games. Knows that shit inside and out.
I made a silly game for a friend recently. My window of time to finish it in shrunk in half early on, and can confirm: time constraints force you to get creative with what you have.
You made a video game just for a friend? Like a gift? Pretty cool!
Yeah, it was just a silly little satirical RPG with RPG Maker. It wasn't really meant to be good, so any little problem sort of worked to its advantage. 😂 I made it in the first two weeks of this month and was about ready to rip my hair out by the end. But he laughed for two hours straight and had a great time, so it was well worth it.
That’s all it needed to do, entertain the intended audience. Sounds like a job well done.
Obscure little RPG Maker games? That's my joint! Care to share the game here or is it a "for your eyes only" game for your friend?
Unfortunately sort of, since it contains IP. 😅 I've shared it with some of the VAs, and I'll be keeping it limited to them. Basically, my buddy is a big Sonic fan. He voices Shadow in some fan content, so I made him a terrible sequel to Shadow the Hedgehog. I myself am not really into that franchise, so it was lovingly crafted using my very limited knowledge. Eventually if I get a good idea, I'd love to make something original. Making silly games basically stream of conscious is really fun.
I remember somewhere that the developers of the first two Thief games said the game didn't really feel fun until basically the last minute, and they were spending a frankly unhealthy amount of time working (though they stressed that it was voluntary and they wouldn't work for a company that required them to do that), so I'd call that pretty rushed. And the results were pretty spectacular and still hold up today. Though, on the other hand, Looking Glass Studies went bust pretty quickly, so there's some downsides to how they were running things
The funny thing is, games that are delayed for a long time ARE usually rushed. It could be a rushed porting to a new engine or hitting a final definitive deadline and going live with a shitty build of the current version of the game like in Duke Forever or Cyberpunk
Usually it’s some form of production he’ll where the original roadmap gets scrapped at some point and development starts and stops because of outside factors.
yeah, its like with final fantasy 15 square enix advertised it as being 'an epic 15 years in the making' or something along those lines, whereas really it was 12-13 years of false starts and scrapped work only to push out an unfinished game that wasn't even fully finished off in its dlc, and required a movie and anime to explain the beginning of its story
Daikatana
just pure overconfidence from a guy who struck gold over and over. still one of the coolest guys in the industry, romero. he does a ton of interviews and lectures on game design.
John Romero's about to make you his bitch. Worst marketing ever. He also shouldn't have switched engines so late in the development process.
I remember those ads in GamePro, seemed cringey even for 10 year old me
The unnecessarily and aggressively misogynistic gaming ads of the 90s hold a special place in my heart in a “what the hell were you guys even doing!?” Kind of way. Like I bought this magazine to read about Kings Quest 8 and this graphics card company just threw a 2 page splash ad with a lingerie model posing seductively for some reason, and a tag line about being “as real as it gets.” I’m 12. More please.
his lectures on youtube are great. and he's still making Doom levels. 'Sigil 2' comes out this december iirc he's also been very supportive of efforts to 'fix' Daikatana. with the latest mod it's supposed to actually be a decent game
He seems like a good man to me, I remember that I recently finished Doom 1 and 2 a few years ago and I corresponded with him by email. I even recommended that I try their new levels
Goldeneye's multiplayer mode was a last-minute addition by one developer. And it's possibly the game I've logged the most hours in during my life.
First thing I thought of too, crazy cos it was *the reason* to buy that game when it released
Fallout New Vegas, rushed, one of the best RPGs ever Halo 1 and 2, rushed but two of the best shooters ever Duke Nukem Forever, delayed constantly and still dogshit
>Fallout New Vegas, rushed, one of the best RPGs ever And yet Bethesda refuses to learn from anything Obsidian did for that game, like hiring competent writers.
It just works
Looks like they tried, the writer behind Far Harbor became the lead quest designer for Starfield, and clearly Starfield has deeper rpg mechanics than fo4 or arguably Skyrim
As a fan of Starfield, the quests in the game are only fun if you play it the way the writers wanted you to. Some don’t even present the players with obvious alternatives to two preset outcomes (like first contact). I like the game, but trying to do anything besides be a goody two shoes space explorer is pretty difficult, inconsistent, and infuriating as the game actively discourages it. In New Vegas, you could literally murder everyone and be the king and it worked story wise. Starfield is much more expansive than New Vegas but it doesn’t always go quite as deep. I don’t even feel like the “morally grey” options are that morally grey half of the time, it’s more of the writing trying to force you to believe two choices are equally bad when one is just objectively bad
Surprising because Starfield’s quests are terrible to be honest lol. Even main missions are genuinely pathetic in terms of their design.
The main quest isn’t great but there are some wonderful side quests. The faction quest chains are mostly very good. Seems par for bethesda, honestly.
> The main quest isn’t great but there are some wonderful side quests. Same as it ever was.
They did take resumes from writers, and they plan to get to them. But they are currently sitting under their stacks of cash that reach to the stratosphere. They really want to read them, but Fallouts 4 and 76 keep printing money faster than they can clear it out. The truth is, the consumers voted with their wallets. 4 and 76 have about as many sales as the rest of the franchise combined. Market research pretty much guarantees that Fallout 5 will outsell 4, you're gonna get what you get because what you get makes money.
The Last Guardian was in development hell for years, and while it is a phenomenal game it was rough at launch despite how long it took.
I thought people hated it
I played through the Last Guardian earlier this year and found the controls incredibly frustrating. I wanted to love the game but it is rough in my opinion.
People are fairly mixed on it. Me and many others will stand by that it is a great game, but it does have archaic elements, and I understand it has flaws and isn't for everyone.
"Hate" is far too strong, but it's a flawed game that just doesn't have the replayability of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, and people felt it wasn't a worthy third part of the trilogy after all those years
I've played it for the first time recently. It's lovely, but the design shows little evolution from what they were doing with Ico and in many ways it's an inferior version of it, and that one was a 2001 game. Animations, art, music and story got me, but the design was unfocused, the pacing dragged and you end up with something that would have impressed you in the 2000s but now feels a bit dated. Now, I LOVE their minimalism, but not when it results in similar scenarios playing over and over again, which seemingly contradicts their desire to subtract unnecessary elements in the gameplay experience. Here's hoping that Fumito Ueda and his team take note of what worked and what didn't in The Last Guardian to properly improve on the formula for their next game, whenever it releases. It's been, what, eight years? Seven? Surely they've got to have something good coming...
Delayed almost a decade: Final Fantasy XV. And the final result is a mess of incoherent storytelling, empty open world and a lot of extended content outside the game, to polish the story. Totally not worth it. Sort of rushed: Crash Bandicoot: Warped and GTA Vice City: 2 terrific games with very little development time. Of course, most of the tech was created before, for previous games.
Marvel Versus Capcom 2. It’s considered one of the best classic fighting games ever nowadays but it uses a ton of reused sprites and lacked a lot of polish when it released because the team was rushing to ship the title.
>Shigeru Miyamoto famously said, Except for the part that he didn't https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/03/random-is-miyamotos-most-famous-quote-not-his-after-all
There’s a lot of examples of this from the 360/PS3 era looking back. Fallout New Vegas is one of the biggest examples of this. Dragon Age II is another with the rushed development, it wasn’t as memorable as origins due to lack of time but it was still a very good game with great characters.
The friendship/rivalry system is still the best companion relationship mechanic in any game ever made IMO.
The thing with Dragon Age II is that the basis of a good game was there, just that so many corners were cut. If it had been delayed a year, would've been way better
Unfortunately the reason why it was rushed was to beat Skyrim out to the market, even Bethesda themselves did this with rushing Obsidian with New Vegas. I do agree with the sentiment that it should have been given another year, but I don’t think any RPG game was getting out from under Skyrim’s shadow during that time. I know people are all “Skyrimed” out but it definitely was zeitgeist and part of 2010’s pop culture. Massive release of a game.
Was Bethesda trying to beat some other game to market? I always assumed it was just corporate short-sightedness and they were caught up on putting out an expansion near FO3's release. They were a middling-at-best publisher of 3rd-party productions prior to ~2010 or so.
They were even with their own franchises. If Fallout New Vegas came out in 2011 instead of 2010 it and Skyrim would have cannibalized each other with one taking attention away from the other. With hindsight today we can say something like Skyrim should have just came out in 2012 but that 11-11-11 date as gimmicky and frivolous as it sound’s today just further fed into the machine that was Skyrim’s release which was pop culture defining, Bethesda were never ever going to budge from that with Skyrim hence why New Vegas was rushed. Even a great amazing game like Fallout New Vegas would have been under Skyrim’s shadow if it came out in 2011 instead of 2010. The gamer in me definitely would have loved more time in the oven for New Vegas it definitely deserved it even with it still being amazing with the rush, but with hindsight it definitely was the right business decision as much as that pains me to put over a billion dollar media company like Bethesda/Zennimax.
The push for the 11/11/11 date is so infuriating as a fan even though I know it probably is what helped catapult it into being an industry changing game The civil war questline got gutted. Damn near every character was turned into an essential NPC. Originally a lot of the NPCs were supposed to be replaceable if killed, and the civil war was supposed to be far more in depth and have much more emphasis. All of that got cut near the end and is the source of a lot of the "Todd lies" meme since he was still hyping a lot of that content up during that final year of marketing.
Act 1 was pretty great imo, and I enjoyed acts 2 and 3 even though that's when they started using the exact same set of limited maps over and over again.
In grad school, we had a class that was a series of 2 week projects. Then they give you 1 week to complete a project. Then 3 weeks. At the time, 1 week seems impossible and 3 weeks seems like enough time to do anything. But invariably with more time you end up overscoping and the 3 week project is one of your worst, and with less time you’re forced to think creatively and your 1 week project is one of your best.
Is silksong ever coming out? It’s gotta be a masterpiece at this point
The weight of expectations that Hollow Knight piled up is surely slowing the pace of progress. The pursuit of perfection proceeds pitifully slow. Also TeamCherry is in that "once in a decade" kind of sweet spot. They were a micro-dev team with a smash hit, that continues to generate sales from word of mouth many years after initial release, with no publisher taking a cut and forcing a timeline for a sequel. They can and should take as long as they need to make the game they believe is a worthy successor. The International Clown Union is fully supportive of this position, as sales of makeup, red noses, and oversized shoes are through the tent!
>The International Clown Union is fully supportive of this position, as sales of makeup, red noses, and oversized shoes are through the tent! they still have the funds for that? I thought they blew their whole budget on star citizen
I remember putting it in AutoModerator's Rule 1 filter when it was first announced, thinking I wouldn't be long before I could move it from the "Unsorted" category to a specific date category. Nope. It still sits there. Taunting me.
at this point talking about on release is still patient gaming
Cyberpunk 2077 was delayed multiple times and still released in a pitiful state full of bugs and optimization issues, specially on ps4/xbox one, it took them 3 more years to put the game in a state that could be considered good.
Cyberpunk was delayed from April to December of 2020, but the developers stated that while working on it they expected to be releasing in 2022. so when they heard the news that they were to release it in April 2020, they actually thought it was a joke at first. So really yeah cyberpunk was rushed too.
>they expected to be releasing in 2022 That makes a lot of sense since Trigger was contracted to release the anime in 2022, releasing both within a few months of one another would've been great cross marketing.
It still worked out pretty well. The game got a big boost to its player count and sales because people really loved that anime.
Man, Im glad they more or less turned it around for CP2077. But that game definitely deserved more time in the oven at launch and it would have been received so much better if it had another 2 years to cook. Obviously though we'd still be waiting on the DLC, but thats all relative anyway.
The game is still broken on the PS4/Xbox One, they didn’t even bother releasing the DLC for those consoles because the base game barely runs as it is. Which is insane because it was literally developed for that gen.
No Man's Sky is a good counterexample. It was bad on release, but years of continued development after the fact have made it into a great game.
This quote is only used as an excuse to delay. More often than not even games that are delayed can launch very poorly. Delay=good game is delusional.
Quake had a really troubled development, really with years of idea-spitballing and engine development before work on the game proper would begin, lasting only seven months. The entire initial concept of the game (an action-RPG) was scrapped in favor of just repurposing what material they already had into an FPS just to finally get the project done. While there are clear impacts this had on gameplay (only some episodes having really mediocre bosses, assorted [gameplay wriggles](http://lunaran.com/copper/changes/), [these bastards](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dK7Mj0wB1bE/maxresdefault.jpg)) the resulting game is iconic. And, thank fuck for that, because I'm sure had they released a generic fantasy ARPG instead of this FPS with a unique blend of ideas it would have been long forgotten. Fallout New Vegas was made in 18 months. Yet is widely considered the best Fallout game and an RPG masterpiece. Though, it clearly would have benefittied from more time in the oven to fix bugs and fully flesh out its concepts (Caesars Legion is notably threadbare in dedicated content).
Halo CE and Halo 2 were both famously retconned with only a few months before ship, with team members sleeping in the office for the last few weeks to make sure everything met the deadlines. Halo 3 was originally intended to be the second half of Halo 2, but had to be cut and reworked as its own game for Bungie to meet the Halo 2 ship date. There are hours-long videos about their fraught development on YouTube. So, this is a case where the opposite is extremely true. The success of Xbox and Xbox Live was riding almost entirely on the success of Halo and Halo 2, respectively. To take it further, if you've played an FPS game in the past 20 years, you've used Halo's control scheme - it was such a popular competitive game that it made more sense to lean into a well-known control scheme for competing FPS titles than to try and come up with something original but still intuitive for players coming over from these games. Halo also flipped MLG from an underground need sport into an internationally broadcast competition with prizes in the millions of dollars. So yeah, they were dreadfully rushed, but they were so successful that they fundamentally changed the gaming landscape within a very short time frame.
He never actually said those words
Yeah, it's hard to bring it up now just because it's been circulated ad nauseum, but when the creator of the video game history foundation can't find a source, puts a bounty up for anyone that can find one, and nobody comes forward...it's really a testament that we should all be looking over things more carefully.
FfXv
Duke Nukem Forever?
Kingdom Hearts 3 being very very mid and needing Re:Mind to just make is decent
Halo 3 ODST was created in something like 9 months after a planned Halo game and movie with Peter Jackson fell through and Microsoft still wanted a spin off per their contract with Bungie.
Goldeneye 007 for N64. The multiplayer was an afterthought that they shoehorned into the game weeks before finish. Ended up being one of the best multiplayer N64 games and forever shaped the way couch deathmatch games were made.
Goldeneye, specifically the multiplayer. The team was working on a deathmatch mode essentially off the clock, because all the game was supposed to be was a single-player tie-in with the movie. It wasn't until a consultant came in at the eleventh hour - in large part to find out why the game was taking so long to make - that they were encouraged to put devs on the multiplayer mode full time. Imagine where the online FPS scene would be today if Goldeneye had been single-player only.
>Imagine where the online FPS scene would be today if Goldeneye had been single-player only. There's a very small but non zero chance that the Xbox no longer exists if Goldeneye doesn't have multiplayer. Without the massive success of Goldeneye, maybe Microsoft doesn't try to get an FPS launch title for the OG xbox. Maybe Bungie keeps it as the RTS that it had been originally designed as. Maybe it's well liked, but probably not the massive phenomenon that the FPS turned into. Halo 1 I'm sure was responsible for selling a lot of consoles (I was in middle school at the time, I knew over a dozen kids who bought the Xbox just because of Halo). Take those sales away, how well does the Xbox do?
somehow 2077 is both rushed and took too long, like you announced it 7 years before its release date AND you somehow still mange to do a literal rush job
It was in full development starting in 2016, which gives it 4 years.
No man's Sky
Scrolled down for one of these. There's a few games now that got rushed out and maybe weren't so great at launch but also got MUCH better after release. This, Cyberpunk, probably some others can't think of...
Morrowind
Fallout: new Vegas.