What's good and bad about projects like Diablo 3 being in development for decades? (Topic)

Polygon analyzes what is happening with a project that has been in development for over 10 years. We've translated the main thing.

What can you do in 10 years of work? Finish training; To buy a house; go up the career ladder; to grow up a child. Many things. In the game industry, during this time, one single project can be created, born of ten years of long work in the middle of the night from a heap of prototypes created in an attempt to make the code work as it should.

The ten-year development cycle of a game is far from the norm in the industry, but there are quite high-profile examples. The infamous Duke Nukem Forever was in development for 14 years from its announcement in 1997 to its final release in 2011, with many internal changes in between. The ambitious Fumito Ueda released The Last Guardian more than 10 years after their 2005 classic Shadow of the Colossus due to technical issues surrounding the Trico prototype.

For some developers, this lead time is one continuous series of mistakes that they regret. For others, often for indie developers, it is a reason to be proud that they did not abandon their project and did it. Here are some of the 10+ club members.

A decade is not enough

Some indie developers don't see ten years of development as a stigma or even a sign of failure. Robert Kurwitz, lead designer at ZA / UM, the studio behind Disco Elysium, an eccentric PC RPG in the tradition of Baldur's Gate, is trying to make 10+ years of development the norm.

Kurwitz believes that they are creating a completely new RPG that will be unfamiliar even to those who grew up on them. He even compares his team to Leo Tolstoy, who for a long time was engaged in rewriting his novels until he brought them to mind. The development of such a project should take as long as it takes.

Disco Elysium was originally created as a board game that later grew into a video game. According to the team, the development of a high-budget project is like a war between a developer and a publisher, where everyone tries to play by their own rules, bringing nothing to the genre, but only minor changes. In this war, they associate themselves with partisans who have gone underground.

The team was given much more freedom during the Disco Elysium development cycle, charting their own path and ditching outside funding to tinker with mechanics in the garage. But soon they needed funds for their continued existence.

“As soon as you leave the basement, the lack of money becomes a serious problem,” laughs Kurwitz. While ZA / UM have been very careful about the game's details so far, even after 15 years of development, it is still a story of a police officer in a dilapidated city investigating strange crimes, including gruesome murders.

The build of your character doesn't just determine the ability, it affects the choices you can make or how you perceive your surroundings. For example, if your character is large and tough with high strength, he is more likely to view violence as the only solution to a problem, while a more intellectually minded character may lack empathy or self-control. This should allow you to create not just your own avatar, but a real living person. Kurvitz is sure that even a decade is not enough to rethink the genre for real. Since anyone can make a game now, the ZA / UM team is confident that good games should take even longer.

Dig even deeper

While some developers are ready to work on some Disco Elysium for years without funding, others who have gone through a decade of development experience do not want to go through this again. We're talking about Joe-Remy Madsen and Simon Staffnes Andersen, the duo behind the complex and beautiful 2D platformer Owlboy, who took nine years of changes to come to Steam.

Development may have officially started in 2007. Andersen was then working on a prototype for the game, but soon his entire team left him. He decided to continue working on the XNA engine, which was created by a friend of his programmer. He met in Madsen when he was working in another field, but the latter liked Simon's work so much that he decided to change his life and become a developer.

Although friends are proud of what they have done over these 9 years, they admit that they made a bunch of mistakes. Starting from the fact that a lot of time was spent on a problematic engine, made by an amateur, which gave out tons of problems. We were also too worried about player feedback. After the release of the first demo in 2011, they received positive reviews, but according to gamers, the game was way too short. This was the reason for rethinking the work.

The duo began working 12-15 hours a day for the next six years to make the game they thought people wanted. They even moved into Madsen's parents' house to save money. As the years passed, the team had to make difficult decisions to make the project work even at its macro level. When the couple began testing builds on modern platforms in 2014, they realized their art assets looked stretched and discolored in the then standard widescreen format.

As the main problem, they emphasize that they cared too much about what the game would be, but forgot about the very process of creating it.

Developers advise other developers to focus on the process rather than the finished product. “There are two forms of reward that you get as an artist: the joy you get from working on a project, and the feedback you get from your peers and players when you finally release the product,” Andersen says.

A cog in a big car

Maybe things are better in the Major League, where there is a multi-million dollar budget, a huge team and a layout? Diablo 3, which has been in production hell for 11 years, shows that this is not always the case. One of the developers anonymously told what went wrong with the continuation of the cult series. When creating Diablo 3, Blizzard faced the fact that they did not understand what their game should be, because the team had different ideas about it.

The team was divided into two parts and each tried to do something different. Instead of teaming up, they created projects that ran into dead ends. One team wanted to show the world outside of the demons, while the other believed that this was contrary to all the canons of the game.

In addition, the employees squabbled because of the environment, someone wanted to introduce new elements, while others were against it. When the ill-fated Diablo 3 came out despite launching problems [this is a separate topic for a lot of material], fans found the game a lot closer to the second part than they expected. The fact is that at one point the developers just started copying the best from the ideal second part.

According to an anonymous developer, although he left the company not because of Diablo 3, the decade of development clearly affected him.

“Studios are trying to sell sequels with big new mechanics, but none of the big new mechanics in Diablo 3 have been better than before,” says the developer. “In the end, in Diablo, you just beat monsters and collect loot. This is what the third part did right. And this is 99% of the game, and I am very proud of how it turned out. ”

The Topic of Article: What's good and bad about projects like Diablo 3 being in development for decades?.
Author: Jake Pinkman