RPG veteran and game designer at Obsidian Entertainment. Josh Sawyer You may recognize him from games like Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity, and most recently Pentiment. In posts online X outlined some of his thoughts on how unrealistic release windows games They can cause burnout and demoralize the developers who work on them.
“Having worked as a game developer for so long, I have acquired a useful skill: I can’t tell you when the game will be ready yet I can tell you with almost 100% accuracy when it will not be ready.” writes Sawyer. The most important metric, he says, is that the data shows that content is being delayed so long that even if developers threw out the remaining content, it would require more work than they have. Discarding content saves development time, but it’s not free.
Other indicators include, for example, content being created before the core elements of the game are ready.”If you don’t know how the gameplay works, you can’t create content for it. This means that it will eventually be recycled or scrapped.” Sawyer adds: If a game element is functional, it’s much easier to adjust the content as the element changes.
According to Sawyer, the most reliable way to know if a game is nearing completion is several key factors:
- a) predictable and reliable content creation
- b) all significant game elements are at a minimum level of functionality
- c) all production processes are working
Sawyer further in posts explains disappointment with unrealistic conditions: “The worst thing about dumb deadlines is that anyone with any experience knows that if a, b, and c are not met, the deadline is impossible to predict with any certainty. Yet people try to pad their schedules to make it seem like they can make it. All that will do is burn out developers, demoralize them, and (justifiably) undermine trust in management.”
you say How to predict unrealistic release targets? Sawyer advises: “A fairly reliable indicator that The game, whose gameplay was not shown publicly until the summer, will not be released until later this year.“.
American studio Obsidian is owned by Microsoft. Officially, we know that it is working on Recognized (to be released this year) The Outer Worlds 2 (no date) Both games are planned for PC and Xbox Series X/S.
Source :Indian TV
