Sequels are a bit of a different situation. (Gaming)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Friday, April 14, 2017, 01:18 (2781 days ago) @ Kahzgul

To be clear, I'm sure there are people at Bungie who would love to have more time to work on Des2ny, but 3 years is not a totally unreasonable amount of time to create a sequel.

And, controversially, on the long side for the majority of mainstream franchises.

Yup. Most franchise games are in the 1-2 year cycle. 1 year if it's a sports type game where it's really just a small feature add and a roster update most years, and a major overhaul every 2-4 years. Call of Duty is a 2 year dev cycle where two different devs work on a staggered schedule so a game can still come out every year.

CoD switched to a three-year dev cycle after 2014, with Sledgehammer, Treyarch, and IW each putting out a three-year product since then (Advanced Warfare, Black Ops 3, and Infinite Warfare, respectively).
That said, Treyarch (as always) seems to be the only dev putting out a high-quality game each time, with Sledgehammer and IW putting out minor tweaks to each other's formula (and mediocre content as a result).

If you're in-house dev-ing the engine (a'la bungie), you're adding a huge amount of work to your dev cycle well before most of the other team members ever get started. I think 3 years for Destiny 2 is pretty reasonable given where they're jumping off from. Destiny 1 had enough time, too, but because of mistakes made early on in the design of the engine (really the backend toolkit design) and disagreements with/lack of coherent direction, they backslid a lot. That aside, it sounds like they know where they're going with Des2ny and I expect it will far outshine the initial offering.

Not to mention that they've had an entire game to see where their weaknesses have been, and what has worked to fix those weaknesses...

Back to the topic at hand, the 6 years for HZD could be a very long time if they used someone else's engine, or a very quick time if they made it all from scratch. I didn't watch the interview so I can't really say.

As CheapLEY pointed out, they use their own engine (Decima), though they did have to overhaul it because it was built with linear gameplay in mind.

Also, it's indeed the one being used by Kojima Productions in Death Stranding; there is a neat story to go with that too...

And what specifically led to the adoption of Guerrilla Games’ Engine?
Kojima: I visited many studios all around the world, meeting many great people. Guerrilla Games in Amsterdam: their technology was just a league ahead of everywhere else. Even though they have an open world they are able to render very rich scenes with many objects. As you know their upcoming game Horizon Zero Dawn, which is coming out in February, has an artistic sensibility, particularly with regards to the use of color, whereas we’re looking for a very photo-realistic sensibility.

Their engine is built for their purposes, for the game that they wanted to create, and as I said we wanted to create a game that even at the very base levels looks very different from that, so we needed to test it to see how far we could tune their engine to fit our purposes.
Usually when you go to use, buy or borrow an engine, someone will say, “Lend us your name,” or of course ask for payment. We had no contract with Guerrilla Games, but when we met them they suddenly gave us a box, a very pretty box. When we opened the box, there was a USB dongle inside that had the source code for the engine.

Keep in mind we had no contract or anything at this stage, yet still they handed over what was basically the crystallization of their efforts over many years. They simply said, “Mr. Kojima please use this engine,” and we thought these people are incredible.
There was one condition though, that Kojima Productions doesn’t just use the engine, but that we develop the engine together with Guerrilla Games, that it should be a collaborative effort. So we were really blown away by their stance on this and being so open with the engine and we thought “Wow, these are the people we have to work with.”