It’s just not true anymore, especially with Steam. If a game releases in a sucky, broken state where more development time was definitely needed, nowadays the game companies will often just fix those games over time.
Well it stills impacts the game and the brand, The smash-like game that got out in Beta that was almost great has fallen down to me not remmebering the name of the game because it was not memorable enough and not fully polished. They will have a second chance then the game will “fully launch” but for a lot of people the Beta launh was the full laucnh
Yeah, 100%. If a game gets released in a mediocre unfinished state, and it doesn’t capture the attention of the player base back then it can certainly kill the game, I agree completely.
However, my original comment was mostly referring to the fact that games can be updated nowadays, unlike in the older days when you bought a game (when buying games was mostly done via retail stores and physical copies) and if the game was bad, it would be bad forever. There’s also the fact that there were a couple of high-profile cases where the game came out clearly unfinished or even unplayable (such as Fallout 76 and Cyberpunk 2077) that have fixed themselves, and if you were to mention that the game was bad at launch and how it was a bad business practice, you’d immediately get told to shut up and to look at what state the game is now.
I also liked ‘the narcissistic injury of the level ignoring me’ as an excuse for unrealistic hit decals.
I didn’t care for his ‘so what?’ attitude about someone pointing out they were unrealistic - because the game’s supposed to be immersive. If you want an effect and the excuse doesn’t fit, find a different excuse. What else would justify the mechanic you’re trying to convey?
Someone complained about the hit decals from a 25 year old game being unrealistic? I don’t blame him for the “attitude”; this was among the first games to have such a thing. That shit was cutting edge for the time and it blew our minds. Not even Quake 2 had hit decals, IIRC.
Half-life was hella immersive for the time. People take everything for granted nowadays.
When you can literally change the entire game over time with updates to be something entirely different from what it was: Suck isn’t forever. But neither is good.
Even the perceptions don’t necessarily stay forever. Look at NMS.
Their problem is they already made a perfect game. Now they have to do it again. Doing something perfectly once can be chance, doing it twice is massively more difficult.
It would be free marketing if they went with that approach. I can already see the headlines: “Why the ‘Steam Deck 3’ is called the ‘Steam Deck: Episode 1’ and other 5 things with origins on the memeverse”
My Deck64 was turned into a 1tb before you could even buy them like that though. For anyone who had extra 2230s lying around and was going to use a screen protector anyways it was a no brainer.
I modified mine too but I tried to go the 512GB SD card route first and just install everything on that. Yeah still filled the internal storage. 1TB SSD is worth it. Now i just use the SD card for emudeck+roms.
Unless you’re No Man’s Sky? Or Cyberpunk? Like games have been getting patches and updates for a long time, sometimes they get better, sometimes they get worse. Maybe he means your reputation as a developer and as a publisher is forever tarnished no matter how well you patch up the game post-launch.
In the days of Half Life 1? Yeah, it wasn’t really feasible to patch games after they got printed on discs and left the warehouse.
I’ll never touch No Man’s Sky because of the rugpull they did. It is sucky to me forever. If they made that game from the start - I would probably be playing it.
It’s an oversimplification, but first impressions do mean a lot. A lot of people will forever remember No Man’s Sky as being a terrible game, even though they did do a lot to fix it later.
Yeah reptuational is part of the issue but there is also a big financial issue too. Delaying a game is financially difficult as it affects financial projects for each year with shareholders (who only care about share price growth). If you release a game in a poor state you get to hit some of the financial targets which benefits the publisher particularly, but for the developer it means longer terms sales are much lower as reviews and feedback come in that the game is crap. You then have to patch and repair the game.
Patching has allowed publishers and developers to get away with this releasing of games in bad states, but it doesn’t change that fundamental issue which disproportionately affects the developer. Dev studios often only have 1 game being worked on at a time. An unready early release which is poorly recieved can be an existential crisis. For publishers, a poorly recieved game is a disappointment but generally have other many other games also on release so they can move on and not care as much.
No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk are high profile exceptions. The gaming world is littered with abandoned flops, often due to not being ready for release.
I’m pretty sure this is what he means. It’s like first impressions with people. You only get one shot. Yes, you can improve the initial release to be playable and amazing but people will remember you put out a shit game to start with and that alienates people.
Literally what the headline, article, and quote are about. Half life 1. When half life 1 released. When they delayed it because they didn’t want it to suck forever.
IIRC, though, that isn’t “give developer some more money and keep plugging”. It was “take the game in its current state, hand it to another developer to get it into a releasable state, and ship it”.
googles
Yeah. Basically, 3D Realms just kept kicking the can down the road. Gearbox took over, cleaned up what was there, and shipped it in half a year. It wasn’t the perfect, ideal 3D FPS, but I suspect that cleaning up what was there and making what return was possible (and at least getting the people who had preordered the game many years back) was probably the right move. I don’t think that 3D Realms was going to produce a huge success if they had another two years or something. It probably would have been a good idea to have wrapped up the project several years earlier than was the case.
In 1996, 3D Realms released Duke Nukem 3D. Set apart from other first-person shooter games by its adult humor and interactive world, it received positive reviews and sold around 3.5 million copies.[8] 3D Realms co-founder George Broussard announced the sequel, Duke Nukem Forever, on April 27, 1997,[9] which he expected to be released by Christmas 1998. The game was widely anticipated.[8] Scott Miller, 3D Realms’ co-founder, felt the Duke Nukem franchise would last for decades across many iterations, like James Bond or Mario.[8] Broussard and Miller funded Duke Nukem Forever using the profits from Duke Nukem 3D and other games. They gave the marketing and publishing rights to GT Interactive, taking only a $400,000 advance.[8] 3D Realms also began developing a 2D version of Duke Nukem Forever, which was canceled due to the rising popularity of 3D games.[10]
Rather than create a new game engine, 3D Realms began development using Id Software’s Quake II engine.[8] They demonstrated the first Duke Nukem Forever trailer at the E3 convention in May 1998. Critics were impressed by its cinematic presentation and action scenes, with combat on a moving truck.[8] According to staff, Broussard became obsessed with incorporating new technology and features from competing games and could not bear for Duke Nukem Forever to be perceived as outdated.[8] Weeks after E3, he announced that 3D Realms had switched to Unreal Engine, a new engine with better rendering capabilities for large spaces, requiring a reboot of the project.[8] In 1999, they switched engines again, to a newer version of Unreal Engine.[8]
By 2000, Duke Nukem Forever was still far from complete. A developer who joined that year described it as a series of chaotic tech demos, and the staff felt that Broussard had no fixed idea of what the final game would be.[8] As the success of Duke Nukem 3D meant that 3D Realms did not require external funding, they lacked deadlines or financial pressure that could have driven the project. Broussard became defiant in response to questions from fans and journalists, saying it would be released “when it’s done”.[8] In December 2000, the rights to publish Duke Nukem Forever were purchased by Take-Two Interactive, which hoped to release it the following year.[11] By 2001, Duke Nukem Forever was being cited as a high-profile case of vaporware, and Wired gave it the “vaporware of the year” award.[12]
At E3 2001, 3D Realms released another trailer, the first public view of Duke Nukem Forever in three years. It received a positive response, and the team was elated, feeling that they were ahead of their competitors. However, Broussard still failed to present a vision for a final product. One employee felt that Miller and Broussard were developing “with a 1995 mentality”, with a team much smaller than other major games of the time. By 2003, only 18 people were working on Duke Nukem Forever full time.[8] In a 2006 presentation, Broussard told a journalist the team had “fucked up” and had restarted development.[8] By August 2006, around half the team had left, frustrated by the lack of progress.[8]
According to Miller, the Canadian studio Digital Extremes was willing to take over the project in 2004, but the proposal was rejected by others at 3D Realms. Miller later described this as a “fatal suicide shot”.[13] In 2007, 3D Realms hired Raphael van Lierop as the new creative director. He was impressed by the game and felt it could be finished within a year, but Broussard disagreed.[8] 3D Realms hired aggressively to expand the team to about 35 people. Brian Hook, the new creative lead, became the first employee to push back against Broussard.[8] In 2009, with 3D Realms having exhausted its capital, Miller and Broussard asked Take-Two for $6 million to finish the game.[8] After no agreement was reached, Broussard and Miller laid off the team and ceased development.[8] However, a small team of ex-employees, which would later become Triptych Games, continued developing the game from their homes.[14]
In September 2010, Gearbox Software announced that it had bought the Duke Nukem intellectual property from 3D Realms and would continue development of Duke Nukem Forever.[15] The Gearbox team included several members of the 3D Realms team, but not Broussard.[15] On May 24, 2011, Gearbox announced that Duke Nukem Forever had “gone gold” after 15 years.[16] It holds the Guinness world record for the longest development for a video game, at 14 years and 44 days,[17] though this period was exceeded in 2022 by Beyond Good and Evil 2.[18]
In 2022, Miller released a blog post on the Apogee website about 3D Realms’ failure to complete Duke Nukem Forever. He attributed it to three major factors: understaffing, repeated engine changes and a lack of planning.[13] On Twitter, Broussard responded that Miller’s claims were “nonsense”, described him as manipulative and narcissistic, and accused him of blaming others. He blamed Miller for the loss of 3D Realms and the Duke Nukem intellectual property.[13]
I think that one key phrase there might be important: “As the success of Duke Nukem 3D meant that 3D Realms did not require external funding, they lacked deadlines or financial pressure that could have driven the project.” Like, this is maybe a good example of where they really did need someone outside the project to say “I need you to get milestones and a schedule in shape”, and where more money and time isn’t the right answer. It’s not that the project is on the cusp of amazing success and the people managing the project just mis-estimated the schedule by several months. It’s that they just aren’t anywhere near where they want to be and don’t have a realistic roadmap for getting there.
There’s only so much delaying can help a badly designed game, delaying only really helps those games that need that extra polish and likely won’t be receiving it afterwards.
He’s been significantly overweight for most of his life, though, although a bit better than his worst these days… The beard makes him look older than he actually is, though.
Yeah I don’t know why you’re getting down voted. Obesity shortens life expectancy by around 10 years. Life expectancy for men in the US was at 79 years before covid (it is now down to 73 years). Gabe is currently 61 years old so he can be expected to die by the end of this decade.
Perhaps. I suppose saying: “Delaying a game which is making coherent progress is better than forcing devs to cut their work short.” is a much less catchy quote.
Duke Nukem Forever suffered both from not giving the appropriate development time to a single workflow, and from the related problem of upper manglement constantly demanding changing the game so much it was like starting over again and again.
The leaked 2001 Duke Nukem build is promising. If the devs had been supported in focusing on that rather than constantly retooling the game to chase trends, it may have at least been decent.
It can also be difficult to determine when a game has had enough development time. Pretty much every game considered good or great has had some content cut for development time reasons. At the end of the day, somebody does have to be the person who reigns in the excess.
Sometimes cut content would have been better if left in, sometimes cutting it was clearly a good choice.
And then there’s the simple reality that a studio that delays too much risks going under, which kills that game and all future games by them, so when is good enough good enough to ship a game?
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
No humor/memes etc…
No affiliate links
No advertising.
No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
No self promotion.
No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
No politics.
Comments.
No personal attacks.
Obey instance rules.
No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc…)
Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.
My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
Praise be unto papa Gaben.
It’s just not true anymore, especially with Steam. If a game releases in a sucky, broken state where more development time was definitely needed, nowadays the game companies will often just fix those games over time.
Well it stills impacts the game and the brand, The smash-like game that got out in Beta that was almost great has fallen down to me not remmebering the name of the game because it was not memorable enough and not fully polished. They will have a second chance then the game will “fully launch” but for a lot of people the Beta launh was the full laucnh
Yeah, 100%. If a game gets released in a mediocre unfinished state, and it doesn’t capture the attention of the player base back then it can certainly kill the game, I agree completely.
However, my original comment was mostly referring to the fact that games can be updated nowadays, unlike in the older days when you bought a game (when buying games was mostly done via retail stores and physical copies) and if the game was bad, it would be bad forever. There’s also the fact that there were a couple of high-profile cases where the game came out clearly unfinished or even unplayable (such as Fallout 76 and Cyberpunk 2077) that have fixed themselves, and if you were to mention that the game was bad at launch and how it was a bad business practice, you’d immediately get told to shut up and to look at what state the game is now.
True! No Man Sky too, the new goal is “how to hype people again”
Is that why they still have yet to make hl3 TF3 or update TF2 give portal 2 additional support
I also liked ‘the narcissistic injury of the level ignoring me’ as an excuse for unrealistic hit decals.
I didn’t care for his ‘so what?’ attitude about someone pointing out they were unrealistic - because the game’s supposed to be immersive. If you want an effect and the excuse doesn’t fit, find a different excuse. What else would justify the mechanic you’re trying to convey?
Someone complained about the hit decals from a 25 year old game being unrealistic? I don’t blame him for the “attitude”; this was among the first games to have such a thing. That shit was cutting edge for the time and it blew our minds. Not even Quake 2 had hit decals, IIRC.
Half-life was hella immersive for the time. People take everything for granted nowadays.
He was describing a discussion with one of his fellow devs, 25 years ago.
deleted by creator
HL3 gang remembers
When you can literally change the entire game over time with updates to be something entirely different from what it was: Suck isn’t forever. But neither is good.
Even the perceptions don’t necessarily stay forever. Look at NMS.
I should call her
Tell your mom she still owes me for the Uber.
deleted by creator
Halflife 3 is going to be amazing you guys
Hollow Knight: Silksong is gonna be perfect.
(Actually, knowing those devs, it might.)
Their problem is they already made a perfect game. Now they have to do it again. Doing something perfectly once can be chance, doing it twice is massively more difficult.
I can’t wait for my great grandson to play it
Here you dropped this: "great "
I’d settle for an Alyx 2 at this point.
No more Alyx after that though!
Confirmed!
Valve can’t count to 3 though.
Expect after the Steam Deck 2 for its successors to be Steam Deck 2: Episode 1 and Steam Deck 2: Episode 2.
It would be free marketing if they went with that approach. I can already see the headlines: “Why the ‘Steam Deck 3’ is called the ‘Steam Deck: Episode 1’ and other 5 things with origins on the memeverse”
Capcom had years of jokes on exactly that point with the Street Fighter series, but they eventually did release Street Fighter III.
EDIT: For those not familiar, here’s the relevant portion of the series timeline:
Street Fighter
Street Fighter II: The World Warrior
Street Fighter II: Championship Edition
Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting
Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers
Super Street Fighter II Turbo
Street Fighter Alpha
Street Fighter: The Movie (the video game)
Street Fighter Alpha 2
X-Men vs. Street Fighter
Street Fighter EX
Street Fighter III: New Generation
To be fair to Capcom, they did release Ace Attorney 3 quickly and it was the peak of the franchise.
Steam Deck: Alyx
Just stay away from the knockoff Steam Deck: Kill the Freeman.
That was the Steam Deck 64GB: Kill the free space (with shader caches)
My Deck64 was turned into a 1tb before you could even buy them like that though. For anyone who had extra 2230s lying around and was going to use a screen protector anyways it was a no brainer.
I modified mine too but I tried to go the 512GB SD card route first and just install everything on that. Yeah still filled the internal storage. 1TB SSD is worth it. Now i just use the SD card for emudeck+roms.
Yep. I consider HL:Alex to be HL:3. It’s that good.
But I still want another HL game.
Unless you’re No Man’s Sky? Or Cyberpunk? Like games have been getting patches and updates for a long time, sometimes they get better, sometimes they get worse. Maybe he means your reputation as a developer and as a publisher is forever tarnished no matter how well you patch up the game post-launch.
In the days of Half Life 1? Yeah, it wasn’t really feasible to patch games after they got printed on discs and left the warehouse.
I’ll never touch No Man’s Sky because of the rugpull they did. It is sucky to me forever. If they made that game from the start - I would probably be playing it.
It’s an oversimplification, but first impressions do mean a lot. A lot of people will forever remember No Man’s Sky as being a terrible game, even though they did do a lot to fix it later.
Yeah reptuational is part of the issue but there is also a big financial issue too. Delaying a game is financially difficult as it affects financial projects for each year with shareholders (who only care about share price growth). If you release a game in a poor state you get to hit some of the financial targets which benefits the publisher particularly, but for the developer it means longer terms sales are much lower as reviews and feedback come in that the game is crap. You then have to patch and repair the game.
Patching has allowed publishers and developers to get away with this releasing of games in bad states, but it doesn’t change that fundamental issue which disproportionately affects the developer. Dev studios often only have 1 game being worked on at a time. An unready early release which is poorly recieved can be an existential crisis. For publishers, a poorly recieved game is a disappointment but generally have other many other games also on release so they can move on and not care as much.
No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk are high profile exceptions. The gaming world is littered with abandoned flops, often due to not being ready for release.
Agreed. And many of counterexamples belong to the Live Service model. Halo Infinite, Anthem, Evolve (I’m digging deep on that one), etc.
I’m sure they got better, but they never won me back, that original feeling of disappointment is still associated with the games for me.
I’m pretty sure this is what he means. It’s like first impressions with people. You only get one shot. Yes, you can improve the initial release to be playable and amazing but people will remember you put out a shit game to start with and that alienates people.
Literally what the headline, article, and quote are about. Half life 1. When half life 1 released. When they delayed it because they didn’t want it to suck forever.
Also, games that are delayed too much sometimes end up being outdated and therefore relatively bad. Eg. Duke Nukem Forever.
A 12+ year delay is so extreme it needs its own category.
Welly wait for Star Citizen now… :-D
IIRC, though, that isn’t “give developer some more money and keep plugging”. It was “take the game in its current state, hand it to another developer to get it into a releasable state, and ship it”.
googles
Yeah. Basically, 3D Realms just kept kicking the can down the road. Gearbox took over, cleaned up what was there, and shipped it in half a year. It wasn’t the perfect, ideal 3D FPS, but I suspect that cleaning up what was there and making what return was possible (and at least getting the people who had preordered the game many years back) was probably the right move. I don’t think that 3D Realms was going to produce a huge success if they had another two years or something. It probably would have been a good idea to have wrapped up the project several years earlier than was the case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_Forever
I think that one key phrase there might be important: “As the success of Duke Nukem 3D meant that 3D Realms did not require external funding, they lacked deadlines or financial pressure that could have driven the project.” Like, this is maybe a good example of where they really did need someone outside the project to say “I need you to get milestones and a schedule in shape”, and where more money and time isn’t the right answer. It’s not that the project is on the cusp of amazing success and the people managing the project just mis-estimated the schedule by several months. It’s that they just aren’t anywhere near where they want to be and don’t have a realistic roadmap for getting there.
There’s only so much delaying can help a badly designed game, delaying only really helps those games that need that extra polish and likely won’t be receiving it afterwards.
Duke Nukem Forever took 11 years to develop and is considered the greatest narrative since Jesus rose from the dead
Really? I heard it was a disappointment.
Woosh
Mighty GabeN is getting pretty deep into his wizard years, I best prepare myself for his passing.
The dude is 61, not even retirement age in the US. You don’t need to be dramatic just yet.
Before anyone gets their “um actually” comment in…
Yes, he would be eligible for retirement, but your average retirement eligible american isn’t expecting to retire until 65-70.
He’s been significantly overweight for most of his life, though, although a bit better than his worst these days… The beard makes him look older than he actually is, though.
Yeah I don’t know why you’re getting down voted. Obesity shortens life expectancy by around 10 years. Life expectancy for men in the US was at 79 years before covid (it is now down to 73 years). Gabe is currently 61 years old so he can be expected to die by the end of this decade.
I’m not sure that applies to billionaires, who have unlimited access to the best possible medical care.
Sounds like he stole that from Nintendo.
I mean who cares? Truth is truth.
Yeah, but there’s only so much delays can fix. Sometimes suck is sticky.
Duke Nukem Forever PTSD
Perhaps. I suppose saying: “Delaying a game which is making coherent progress is better than forcing devs to cut their work short.” is a much less catchy quote.
Duke Nukem Forever suffered both from not giving the appropriate development time to a single workflow, and from the related problem of upper manglement constantly demanding changing the game so much it was like starting over again and again.
The leaked 2001 Duke Nukem build is promising. If the devs had been supported in focusing on that rather than constantly retooling the game to chase trends, it may have at least been decent.
Daikatana PTSD
If only there had been a 20% higher cocaine budget for John Romero.
It can also be difficult to determine when a game has had enough development time. Pretty much every game considered good or great has had some content cut for development time reasons. At the end of the day, somebody does have to be the person who reigns in the excess.
Sometimes cut content would have been better if left in, sometimes cutting it was clearly a good choice.
And then there’s the simple reality that a studio that delays too much risks going under, which kills that game and all future games by them, so when is good enough good enough to ship a game?
Gabe starts looking like Game-Gandalf more every day
Gandalf the Burger King version
You are the reason we don’t get a Half Life 3 ya know?
I still believe we will se HL3 one day.
He hit hard that Santa Clause.
I was gonna say, maybe he knocked Santa off a roof or something.