Bend Studios Live Service Title Made No Progress In 3 Years Says Ex-Dev, Cancellation Was Expected

Welcome to modern gaming discussion. Days Gone itself literally took over 7 years to make on a generation where developers were making AAA games at half the development time.
Yup.

Those 360/PS3 days were insane. So many good franchises had sequels in 2 or 3 years too. That gen had new architecture, 720P HD gaming was a big console thing, online gaming became standard on consoles where practically every game had online modes, devs had to spend some time doing achievement pts/trophies, mtx was a new thing just getting underway (skins, map packs, season passes), etc....

And they were able to figure all that out that gen with great games, modest budgets and timing.
 
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Publishers: Games are getting more expensive to make, we need to increase prices.

Also Publishers: Let's not check what OUR studios are doing and just pay them for barely any work at all and then later complain that we lost a lot of money on a cancelled game that made barely any progress because us Exec's didn't bother doing regular checkups.
 
Welcome to modern gaming discussion. Days Gone itself literally took over 7 years to make on a generation where developers were making AAA games at half the development time.
7 fucking years? Bend studios is cooked if they don't get their shit sorted out. A AAA game in today's era shouldn't take more than 3 yrs to get made, unless you're building a new engine from scratch or heavily modifying an existing one.
 
7 fucking years? Bend studios is cooked if they don't get their shit sorted out. A AAA game in today's era shouldn't take more than 3 yrs to get made, unless you're building a new engine from scratch or heavily modifying an existing one.
It's human nature.

Anytime a project gets big budgets, big manpower, and a long due date, you can always count on the people to take their time. Then when it's time to finish up they scramble.

No different than kids in school. One teacher gives kids 2 weeks to finish an essay or prep for a test. Another teacher gives a full month lead time. Doesnt matter. I guarantee you'll still get shit loads of kids cramming it all the night before. The chances of any of them finishing studying or completing their essay with a week to spare is going to be almost 0%. To be fair they are kids. So expectations are they still care about having fun, hanging with friends and there's no job on the line (like below). Cant expect miracle work ethic from 15 year olds. I did the same most of the time. But got good marks.

But I see this at work all the time. All the big scheduled monthly or quarterly meetings I got to sit through are in people's calendars. Month's worth of predictable meetings. And you always get some people you know (or can tell), they scrambled doing the PPT the night before. Or if they know their presentation isn't until after lunch, they are still finishing it that morning and they are nervous hoping their PPT is complete (and often times its not). I'm good with numbers and charts so I can eyeball mistakes and notice wrongly calculated numbers, and see sloppy work right on screen. Grown ass adults. Crazy.
 
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Looks to me like a management failure. But managers won't be affected, regardless of what happens.
Reeks of mismanagement, design-by-committee, and lack of distinct vision. Poor leadership all around and it's a plague on this industry.

Yup.

Those 360/PS3 days were insane. So many good franchises had sequels in 2 or 3 years too. That gen had new architecture, 720P HD gaming was a big console thing, online gaming became standard on consoles where practically every game had online modes, devs had to spend some time doing achievement pts/trophies, mtx was a new thing just getting underway (skins, map packs, season passes), etc....

And they were able to figure all that out that gen with great games, modest budgets and timing.

And now we have AI generation, RT so you don't need to do baked lighting, and a jillion other tools that make dev work easier. And shit takes longer than ever - see my comment above.
 
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