5 ms·

Supergiant Games is a wonderful studio and they do not have the same kind of crunch that is endemic to other studios. Having said that, I don't know that you ca

by Kranar 5y ago

Supergiant Games is a wonderful studio and they do not have the same kind of crunch that is endemic to other studios. Having said that, I don't know that you can compare the development of a 2D game with a very constrained and linear progression to a massive open 3D world like Cyberpunk 2077 or The Witcher 3. I love Transistor and Bastion, haven't tried Hades... they are great games and I look forward to whatever is next from them, but we're comparing a game that cost about 6 million dollars to make with a game that cost 400 million dollars. While I appreciate your point and even agree to a large degree with your point, the stakes are very different between these two products.

wly_cdgr 5y ago
Cyberpunk 2077 is definitely a dramatically bigger game than Hades, but it also had 400+ people working on it for twice as long as the couple dozen Supergiant employees worked on Hades
- jhanschoo 5y ago
  Which makes scheduling exponentially harder and mistakes costlier.
- teruakohatu 5y ago
  A team of 400 people working on a project do not work at the same speed as 33 teams of 12 working on 33 different projects. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
  - wly_cdgr 5y ago
    Yes, I am well aware. However they do occasionally manage to get more done than 20 people working on the same project would. Not always, admittedly
exdsq 5y ago
Hades was a real surprise - I hadn't heard anything about it and was expecting something pretty average but it might actually be my game of the year.
ehnto 5y ago
> I don't know that you can compare the development of a 2D game with a very constrained and linear progression to a massive open 3D world like Cyberpunk 2077 or The Witcher 3 This is part of the issue I think. AAA games are so high flying in their technical and artistic scope, and they have all the business and power bullshit that comes from their now massive, 100mil+ budgets. Their failures are spectacular because when there is so much complexity inherent in the system and teams, lots can go unnoticed, and it falls apart in many different ways. You can't even really compare the clean delivery of a AAA war shooter from 2005 with one from 2021 for example, the technologies and disciplines involved have grown so much.
- jhanschoo 5y ago
  From a far removed distance, it seems to me that you can create AAA game with good labor conditions, with enough time. But the underlying technology moves so fast and the expectations along with it that you end up requiring to do so much in parallel in lockstep to get it to ship early enough, and with this parallelism comes great cost when things inevitably crop up.

by Kranar 5y ago

wly_cdgr 5y ago

Cyberpunk 2077 is definitely a dramatically bigger game than Hades, but it also had 400+ people working on it for twice as long as the couple dozen Supergiant employees worked on Hades

jhanschoo 5y ago
Which makes scheduling exponentially harder and mistakes costlier.
teruakohatu 5y ago
A team of 400 people working on a project do not work at the same speed as 33 teams of 12 working on 33 different projects. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
- wly_cdgr 5y ago
  Yes, I am well aware. However they do occasionally manage to get more done than 20 people working on the same project would. Not always, admittedly

exdsq 5y ago

Hades was a real surprise - I hadn't heard anything about it and was expecting something pretty average but it might actually be my game of the year.

ehnto 5y ago

> I don't know that you can compare the development of a 2D game with a very constrained and linear progression to a massive open 3D world like Cyberpunk 2077 or The Witcher 3 This is part of the issue I think. AAA games are so high flying in their technical and artistic scope, and they have all the business and power bullshit that comes from their now massive, 100mil+ budgets. Their failures are spectacular because when there is so much complexity inherent in the system and teams, lots can go unnoticed, and it falls apart in many different ways. You can't even really compare the clean delivery of a AAA war shooter from 2005 with one from 2021 for example, the technologies and disciplines involved have grown so much.

jhanschoo 5y ago
From a far removed distance, it seems to me that you can create AAA game with good labor conditions, with enough time. But the underlying technology moves so fast and the expectations along with it that you end up requiring to do so much in parallel in lockstep to get it to ship early enough, and with this parallelism comes great cost when things inevitably crop up.