Maybe this is why Bungie hates story-telling now? (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Friday, February 06, 2015, 22:38 (3375 days ago) @ Kermit

I don't think we're disagreeing.

When I worked in games, 2 years was considered "rushed" for development from scratch, and acceptable for installments in a franchise. Most annual games are really the same game engine used for 2 or 3 years in a row, just with different content and assets and story and such. Madden is a great example of a game that adds one new feature every year, but only gets a new game engine every 3 years or so.

9 years of development is a crazy long time, but often ideas germinate for a while before you're officially "making" the game. The trick is, large elements like cutscenes, boss fights, etc... all can take a lot of work to pull off. That final year is all testing, bug hunting, and fine tuning. Making major changes in 1 year is a huge red flag (diablo 3 and destiny are two recent examples of games that had major overhauls in their final year of development, and both games have been hugely disappointing to me).

It's more like, I know that at least the final 2 months of that year are lost to manufacturing, and that the 8 months before that are major testing and bug fixing months. So really, the story overhauls were all done in 2 months. 4 if they pushed testing (they clearly did). And then they're set in stone so the bugs can be fixed. Any time you change major plots in a game, you're resetting the clock on testing, and pushing your product 8-10 more months down the line.