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0 pointsPannoniae2y ago0 comments

They are wasting all that effort in the wrong things though. I fully understand the problem of crunch - but these poor devs wouldn't have to crunch as much if the game's budget wasn't wasted on "analytics" and useless features, instead of polishing the core gameplay, then adding the fluff after launch.

In this game, they've focused on the superficial stuff, yet the core gameplay is still broken (instead of a city builder where citizens have agency, the game is effectively a god simulator where your biggest challenge is traffic management, economy or politics is a joke)

This is why many people prefer older games - the amount of effort spent on the gameplay itself is only decreasing year by year, while most of the budget is spent on useless graphical effects, quirky things everyone forgets in two months and all the usual "analytics"/"cloud" stuff.

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7 comments · 2 top-level

habinero2y ago· 4 in thread

Nobody sets out to make a bad game or "waste effort" on "useless" features.

Things like this happen because the people giving you money have a hard deadline and you ship what you have.

Or you decide to use a game engine that was more difficult to use than expected.

It's insulting to say "well, just make the game better first, duh". I promise you, they know.

But they have to balance a lot of things you don't see.

If you ever find yourself saying "why don't they do [obvious thing]", stop and assume you don't have all the facts.

PannoniaeOP2y ago

I would believe this.... if 1. games made 15 or 20 years ago 2. and indie games made today would not be able to manage it.

It's always the bigger studios who utterly mess up in making an actually playable game, which indicates that the problem is not something inherent but a simple product of laziness and greed. (Latest example: see Creative Assembly's meltdown)

ajmurmann2y ago

As scope increases all the organizational challenges balloon. Coordinating 10 people is much easier than several hundred. It's the same almost regardless of domain. What happens if your core game loop still is no fun, but you got 100 people rolling off a previous project and ready for the next phase of this new project to get to where you need them to start design levels and assets? It's much easier to fix if the additional 3 month of development is just 3 months cost of living for John Romero and John Carmack.

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habinero2y ago

That's just bias on your part.

You don't see the thousands of indie games that were never released because the creators screwed it up, or they ran out of money.

Or the indie studios who never made a second game because they didn't recoup their costs.

Indies that fail just fold and you never hear about them. AAA that fail release their games.

waveBidder2y ago

The indies that don't make a viable product, you don't see.

ajmurmann2y ago· 1 in thread

None of that is the engineers' fault. All that comes from the game directors and business people.

stylepoints2y ago

And for very good reasons. A huge fraction of players buy the game based on how it looks.

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