8 ms·

I'll go against the grain and say that you can rush a game, you can overwork people, and that in many cases, for many companies, doing so is the only path to su

• kvark 5y ago
  I'm sorry, the game on PC was a crappy bugfest. And as for being "impossible" on consoles... Isn't it effectively GTA in a different setting? GTA managed to run fine, and Cyberpunk could, but they weren't able to reach it.
  • ok_dad 5y ago
    GTA is a crappy bugfest as well, the graphics are very outdated, and the NPCs are quite limited in what they do; the world isn't realistic at all and frame rates routinely drop for no real reason. I haven't played Cyberpunk 2077 (yet), but I highly doubt it's as simple a game and as limited as GTA, which I have played a lot. I think it failed in part because they tried to port the game to those consoles, and it was just too complex for them, after seeing gameplay footage from it a while ago.
    • mhh__ 5y ago
      GTA V is rock solid, better written, better tuned, and more immersive than Cyberpunk. Of any mechanic I'm aware of that both games have, Cyberpunk's implementation is not as good. Compare being chased by the police in GTA vs Cyberpunk for example.
      • emkoemko 5y ago
        really? it took a player upset with its very slow load times to figure out how the code works and made the loading times way better.... a very simple thing if you had the source code to do and devs never bothered, online is a horrible mess everyone cheats, first person game play they added is horribly with its massive input lag, let alone trying to get online was a joke.
        • mhh__ 5y ago
          GTA Online is a mess but offline is completely fine, and has a quite a bit of art to it whereas Cyberpunk's world just feels like it's barely keeping hold of the reigns. The game is simply better made than Cyberpunk. It's not really a knock against CDPR, it's their first attempt up against rockstar, but there is simply not enough polish, not enough game design etc. For me to say anything else. I wanted to love cyberpunk, but the moment I picked my faction and then was immediately funneled into the same story as everyone else it kind of set the tone for the rest of the game. I sincerely hope they keep developing it but at the moment I can't bring myself to play at all vs. GTA which is very satisfying just to drive about a bit before I go to bed.
• ahefner 5y ago
  You can try, but so many games have been released half-finished, never subsequently completed via patches, and as a result sunk their studio and the whole franchise they were a part of. Games that should have become classics instead remain half-finished, mostly forgotten messes, and all the work those people put into the game are wasted in the long run. Why? To meet a holiday ship date?
• fao_ 5y ago
  This is so patently absurd that it goes against around a century's worth of knowledge and scientific research. "Spending more time on a task without rest does not get a job done properly" is not only commonly accepted, but it has been put to the test repeatedly in controlled environments and shown to fail, every single time. The first link is filled with early-mid 20th century resources on this subject. The rest are all from the 80s - 00s because people... stopped studying this. Most of the studies covered the same thing, and it very quickly became an uninteresting problem in the field of Clinical Psychology because the answer was almost unanimously, unequivocally, "yes, this makes people output lower quality work product". It's one of the most settled problems in Psychology that exists in the modern day. The only people still researching it are non-profits, and their research serves simply as advocacy, because otherwise businesses won't listen that this extremely, absurdly well-known and well-supported fact is true. https://igda.org/resources-archive/why-crunch-mode-doesnt-work-six-lessons-2005/ https://igda.org/resources-archive/why-crunch-mode-doesnt-wo... https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02678378908256939 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0267837890825693... https://synapse.koreamed.org/articles/1125602 https://synapse.koreamed.org/articles/1125602 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40967587 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40967587 Nevertheless, here is something specific to Game Development from 2016: https://www.takethis.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/CrunchHurts-TakeThis.pdf https://www.takethis.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/CrunchHu... Select quotations from papers quoted in that article: "In a national Australian survey, employee cognition increased for hours worked up to 25 per week. Beyond that, cognitive abilities decreased. By 60-hours of work per week, cognition was lower than people who weren’t working at all (Kajitani, McKenzie, & Sakata, 2016)" "In a large study of 4 US-based companies, productivity losses related to fatigue were estimated to cost the employers $1,967/employee each year (Rosekind, Gregory, Mallis, Brandt, Seal, & Lerner, 2010)." "Lost productivity due to presenteeism (being at work while ill) is almost 7.5 times greater than that lost to absenteeism (Employers Health Coalition, 2000, p. 3)." "In a study of a large, multi-employer, multi-site employee population, health care expenditures for employees with high levels of stress were 46% higher than those for employees who did not have high levels of stress (Goetzel et al., 1998)." "People identified as workaholics were found to have higher rates of ADHD, OCD, anxiety and depression compared with those who weren’t ranked as being addicted to work (Andreassen, Griffiths, Sinha, Hetland, Pallesen, 2016)."
• thoraway66 5y ago
  I was hoping they’d do something more novel with the gameplay like break the fourth wall gameplay where I can hack the engine to hack the world; replace doors with walls, and characters would react to the state change appropriately. Like a god game in an FPS. I’ve not played but I hear AI is still dumb af, it’s COD with a cliche Hollywood cyberpunk style. Pretty sad our art is still tethered to 80s-90s fanboy stylings. I feel like the obligation for things to fit such a literal expectation constrains creators. Then again the stories coming out of the the dudes running these places. Egh
• rdedev 5y ago
  > I'll go against the grain and say that you can rush a game, you can overwork people, and that in many cases, for many companies, doing so is the only path to success Take a look at the development for the game Hades. They took their time and polished everything, even having a pre release game in steam and incorporating community feedback. Rushing is not the only option
  • spywaregorilla 5y ago
    Hades is a good game. You might enjoy it more than witcher 3. But it's multiple orders of magnitude smaller no matter how you cut it. If you want to build enormous games, you tend to need enormous effort.
    • wpietri 5y ago
      That may be true, but it doesn't justify worker exploitation and abuse. Unless you'd like to claim that is the only way any large project gets done in any industry. Which would be a bold claim indeed.
      • eru 5y ago
        What you call worker exploitation and abuse is reasonably well known about the game industry. Every one who gets into that industry either does so willingly, or otherwise with gross neglect. What happens between consenting adults ain't anybody else's business.
        • tsimionescu 5y ago
          Employers aren't adults, they are massively powerful corporations. Worker exploitation happens between one passionate programmer, artist, QA and a massive corporate organization that holds all the power and has no qualms about deceiving, badgering, shaming it's way I to what it wants.
          • eru 5y ago
• Avshalom 5y ago
  >>Are you going to try to tell me that The Witcher 3 was developed by having everyone work a standard 8 hour day and that the team was given as much time as they felt was needed to produce it? Are you going to tell me that The Witcher 3 was a success because it was released May 19th 2015 instead of October 24th 2015 or even May 19th 2016?
  • 3a2d29 5y ago
    I think you are missing what the comments point was. Cyberpunk could have been delayed again, but it still would have been bad. The Witcher 3 could have had less crunch and released a year later and been as much of a success, but the studio would lose way more money. Labor is extremely expensive and a year more of labor isn't worth it, so they rush. It just worked that time.
  • Kranar 5y ago
    In retrospect no, The Witcher 3 would have been a success even if it were delayed by a year. But consider that CD Projekt almost went bankrupt over the development of Witcher 2 due to costs and delays and that video games are an incredibly risky business. There's a saying that businesses don't fail because they're unprofitable, they fail due to cash flow issues. Development costs only go up, so the longer a game takes the more expensive every single day of development ends up costing. Even if the game would ultimately prove to be successful, the huge risk that comes from having to fund its continued development for an extended period of time can put a company in jeopardy. That The Witcher 3 ended up being a massive success is great but it was never a guarantee.
  • lumost 5y ago
    While I agree on the sentiment, what would have happened if it had gone out on Jan 2017 or 2018? Development cost at least doubles, the graphics would start to look dated relative to other titles. Competition with other open world action rpgs increases. The people responsible for making it the game that it is would have moved on, and other ideas would have come into the dev cycle.
  • greggman3 5y ago
    I'm not saying there should be crunch but there is limited money (no idea for The Witcher). If you get funding for X amount of money you calculate your salaries plus overhead and you have a deadline. Miss the deadline then you renegotiate for more funding but at some point the funders will just pull the plug and your team are out of jobs. It's unrealistic to believe there's no reason for deadlines. For a FAANG company, sure, they're making so much money they can -- mostly -- afford to do things without deadlines but few video game studios are at a level of funding that they can spend another 3, 6, 12, months. The internet claims Cyberpunk 2077 had 500 to 5000 people working on it. I'm sure that 5000 number is not full time but it's not hard to believe the 500 number. Just paying 500 people $15 an hour, 40 hours a week $1.2 million a month, not counting rent/power/taxes etc... And of course some large percent of those people are probably getting closer or $30 per hour $60k yearly salary) to $60 per hour ($120k a year salary) Witcher3 claims 150-250 employees so your delay, shipping October instead of May is easily $4 million needed and I suspect that number is low. $12 million if it took an extra year as you suggested and that's a low-ball estimate.
• deleted 5y ago
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• trabant00 5y ago
  > Are you going to try to tell me that The Witcher 3 was developed by having everyone work a standard 8 hour day and that the team was given as much time as they felt was needed to produce it? No, and it showed. Witcher 3 was a success because of previous games. 3 was a dissapointment for a lot of people, they took the Ubisoft formula of repetitive content and diluted the experience until I got bored after about 100 hours. W3 was a huge financial success but the writing was on the wall and only people who did not pay attention where surprised at Cyperpunk disaster. They tried to force a good game out with W3 and even more so with Cyberbunk. The results where clearly different than W2 which I personally think was their peak - a human curated story pace that left you dreaming for more. Compare this with GTA games. Rockstar knows you can't rush things nor can you force industry revolutions in AI over night. Slow and steady wins the race. To which company do you think will the investor money go next?
  • yople 5y ago
    This was my personal experience as well. I discovered W2 by accident, and enjoyed it so much I pre-ordered W3. While I did have a great time, I personally didn't enjoy it as much. The various quests of varying quality clashed with each other as well as the rather weak, main plot. Cyberpunk was a real let down for me and made me return my pre-order purchase : ( While it's great to see games/companies become widely recognized, I feel that it always slowly gets poisoned by investors. Anyways, cheers all - stay safe.
  • sauntheninja 5y ago
    When talking about the success of the witcher 3 most people don't talk about the gameplay systems but rather people love the writing more specifically the writing in side quests were what elevated this game
  • pimeys 5y ago
    Witcher 3 was the first of the series I played, and I enjoyed the writing and play-through so much I 100%'d the game and playing it again from beginning. There were lots of people like me who really enjoyed it, so saying it was a disappointment feels a bit weird.
• Asooka 5y ago
  Final Fantasy XIV was a massive failure. The original version 1.0 was buggy, tedious and not very fun. People still had fun with it, it wasn't New World levels of complete failure, but it did not live up to the brand. So they replaced the two directors, who had previously worked on FFXI, with one Naoki Yoshida. Naoki-san had perhaps the worst task he could ever have. He had to figure out a way to turn a burning trash heap of an MMO into something that could proudly carry the name Final Fantasy (and make real profit). He spent three months just on planning the design for a completely new MMO to replace the current one. Then went to upper management and told them to choose - they could have him just manage the current game, fix the bugs and issues, and make it a really polished, but still fundamentally flawed game, that would never have the kind of audience like WoW, one that would forever tarnish the brand; or, he could make a completely new MMO from scratch in one year, while also supporting the existing one. They chose the latter. Today FFXIV is the world's most popular MMO. The process of getting there has been documented in interviews and it is what Naoki-san says in this one [1], that I want to bring attention to. Paraphrasing, "we could only get there by aggressively cutting down features and micromanaging daily tasks for each employee, to the point that the tasks fit into a standard 8 hour work day, which generally has about 6 hours of actual work done, when you factor out meetings and breaks". This is a man tasked with fitting 5 years of work into 1, while also supporting the existing product, and he didn't immediately reach for overtime. He absolutely worked himself to death, but he didn't push the team beyond their limits. It helps that he was an MMO fan and had a full design document for the game he wanted to build, but it still shows that with good management you can deliver a product better than everyone else while not doing overtime. To be fair, 6 hours of actual work is still a bit more than I hit most days. Having to work at full capacity every day would still be straining, but nothing on the order of doing 12 hour days 6 days per week for months. [1] https://youtu.be/aoOI5R-6u8k https://youtu.be/aoOI5R-6u8k