Games so long in development that they felt archaic at release

SantaC

Member
I say duke nukem forever. The game had awesome stuff going on in 2001, but was worse and bland when it came out.
 
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Final Fantasy XV IMO.

As an open world game it felt dated. It was like a japanese studio trying to make a western open world.....from last gen.
 
I've heard the recent Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord falls into this category.

The Last Guardian is another one that comes to mind.
It's an updated Warband. As someone who had never played Mount and Blade before Bannerlord, I've been really enjoying it. I think it feels great.
 
The game that came to mind was Diablo 3 but idk if it felt archaic but it felt like it was in development for so long the jump from 2 to 3 didn't feel substantial.
 
The Last of Us 2 aka another Naughty Dog walking simulator with the occasional hide in long grass stealth routine.

...

In all seriousness, Red Dead 2 is a real candidate, i.e. despite all the ultra-realism-super-duper-graphics-animationz & pretences at creating a living breathing world, underneath all the exterior polish it's just the same old "follow waypoint on minimap, do not deviate from mission waypoint objective" game design. That sort of handholding was already really, really old in GTA 5, ergo RDR2 was already archaic at its conception.
 
Yeah, they had no business turning Final Fantasy into a boring western-style open-world RPG full of boring quests to pad out playtime and mindless combat.

There have been other Final Fantasy games that I felt missed the high standards of the series set through the SNES and PS1 years, but I didn't feel betrayed as a fan of the franchise until XV.
 
This mod.


Its neat, but it is going to look old as hell if they ever finish it.

Also no hate for the one neogaf user that does the RE4 mod, but Capcom will probably release RE4 remake before he's done. Granted Capcom very likely wouldn't do a 1:1 remake, so he's pro ably good.
 
It's an updated Warband. As someone who had never played Mount and Blade before Bannerlord, I've been really enjoying it. I think it feels great.
Warband was essentially a collection of fan mods and some developer tweaking, so I'm not dogging the game, just pointing out that it's kind of archaic in many ways.

I'm an OG M&B fan, so don't take my mention as hate for the game.
 
The Last Guardian is another one that comes to mind.
I wouldn't call The Last Guardian as "archaic" though. Maybe for textures,resolution and framerate yes it showed its age but in terms of the technology behind its AI that had a huge beast navigating narrow interiors while behaving and reacting as a real animal was really impressive and i think it was way ahead of its time.
 
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I wouldn't call The Last Guardian as "archaic" though. Maybe for textures,resolution and framerate yes it showed its age but in terms of the technology behind its AI that had a huge beast navigating narrow interiors while behaving and reacting as a real animal was really impressive and i think it was way ahead of its time.
I meant the controls but yeah the AI was impressive.
 
Couldn't have said it better:



Holy shit... the English dialogue is so cringe-worthy. The English language will never work with anime themes without coming across as extremely embarrassing.
 
Duke Nukem Forever seems like the ideal candidate, but this game was more like saved from being abandoned rather than being in constant active development for so many years.
 
I've heard the recent Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord falls into this category.

The Last Guardian is another one that comes to mind.
The last guardian it's impressive even today, it'll probably become an obscure classic.

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The dig, announced in 1989 and released in 1995 (at which point development had started from scratch three times). It seriously looks like it belongs to the former era.

The-DIG-01.jpg


Full throttle came out the same year and looks so much better.

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I wouldn't call The Last Guardian as "archaic" though. Maybe for textures,resolution and framerate yes it showed its age but in terms of the technology behind its AI that had a huge beast navigating narrow interiors while behaving and reacting as a real animal was really impressive and i think it was way ahead of its time.

Is there any technical information on its AI? To me personally, the Last Guardian looks like a set of beautifully hand-animated routines for Trico, triggered at different moments to provide the illusion of an intelligent creature. While playing I didn't feel anything unusual about Trico's responses, if anything, the game was extremely frustrating to play.
 
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

We waited almost six years for that game, they accomplished nothing with it essentially. Established a little bit more with the creation of Hyrule and certain other things regarding the beginning, but I vehemently believe it's a poor entry in the series. A decent game, but it's hardly a Zelda game due to all the shortcomings and lack of effort really...

That's definitely my one pick for this topic. Despite tge controls, feels like it could have been a PS2 game
 
Is there any technical information on its AI? To me personally, the Last Guardian looks like a set of beautifully hand-animated routines for Trico, triggered at different moments to provide the illusion of an intelligent creature. While playing I didn't feel anything unusual about Trico's responses, if anything, the game was extremely frustrating to play.

To me it felt like the frustrating play was on purpose, I have a cat and she listens about as good as Trico does, Altho i can see where people come from when they don't like the controls, I find them charming because they remind me so much of dealing with a giant cat.

Also the game looks amazing on a projector, really captures the scale of the beast. This is an old vid I made, sorry for the crappy quality guys


I have yet to play with the pro patch but looking at those screens in the thread made me install the game again.
 
Is there any technical information on its AI? To me personally, the Last Guardian looks like a set of beautifully hand-animated routines for Trico, triggered at different moments to provide the illusion of an intelligent creature. While playing I didn't feel anything unusual about Trico's responses, if anything, the game was extremely frustrating to play.
There is nuance to Trico, several actions don't manifest themselves as bars you fill up or numbers, but affect how Trico reacts to you.
I've was puzzled how so many posters had trouble giving Trico orders while in my run he responded almost like a trained husky, after watching some interviews it all made sense.
Giving him barrels, paying atention to where Trico is looking, tending to his wounds, etc, all affect how Trico behaves.

 
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The Last of Us 2 aka another Naughty Dog walking simulator with the occasional hide in long grass stealth routine.
Ugh. While I love TLOU and will play TLOU2, watching released gameplay of TLOU2 I was was less than enthused by the sheer amount of long grass.

I hope this trope dies in the coming gen.
(Looking at you: all of Naughty Dog, HZD, Assassins Creed)
 
Star Wars: The Old Republic. How many years after WoWs release was it when this came out? Only to play EXACTLY like WoW which had since become very dated and the genre in general was cooling off.
 
Is there any technical information on its AI? To me personally, the Last Guardian looks like a set of beautifully hand-animated routines for Trico, triggered at different moments to provide the illusion of an intelligent creature. While playing I didn't feel anything unusual about Trico's responses, if anything, the game was extremely frustrating to play.
There were certainly moments where Trico's actions were obviously scripted (like for example when it bathed in the small pond or catched the boy with its tail) but in all the gameplay sequences that were in-between those scripted moments the way the AI moved inside those closed areas without glitching or getting stuck in the geometry has been unpreceded and i doubt we will see anything similar anytime soon. Its behavior was also very dynamic and it depended a lot in various points of interest like how the boy (player) was treating the animal (feeding,giving instructions and petting) as well as environmental points of interest that could grab Trico's attention.
In CEDEC 2017 one of the game's lead developers Masanobu Tanaka said some very interesting things about Trico's AI:
To illustrate the AI he played a movie showing Trico reacting to the boy 's call then finding, approaching and finally eating barrels. According to Tanaka, the structure was very simple. On deciding upon a point-of-interest → move to interest → action-decision. The purpose of AI is to convince players that Trico had a mind – so it was important for Trico to grasp the current situation THEN make decisions.
In order to determine a point-of-interest object, an object priority level is set for each object. Trico is interested in things with a high level first. When Trico takes action with the object, the priority or "level of interest" of the object changes, and the interest shifts to other things.

To decide upon an action-decision, the space around Trico is the key factor. For example, when there is a barrel, choose "eat". If there isn't enough space, choose "raking out with forefoot". When the head is caught, choose "cry".
This shows that Trico's actions were anything but scripted and it was quite the achievement when you also add how a creature that large could navigate the narrow environments of the game without getting stuck all the time.
And that's why so often you hear players having such different experiences with how Trico behaved.
 
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I wouldn't call The Last Guardian as "archaic" though. Maybe for textures,resolution and framerate yes it showed its age but in terms of the technology behind its AI that had a huge beast navigating narrow interiors while behaving and reacting as a real animal was really impressive and i think it was way ahead of its time.
Dude that game is archaic, from the camera to the boys animations. You cant even walk in that game! The camera sucks.
 
The Last of Us 2 aka another Naughty Dog walking simulator with the occasional hide in long grass stealth routine.

...

In all seriousness, Red Dead 2 is a real candidate, i.e. despite all the ultra-realism-super-duper-graphics-animationz & pretences at creating a living breathing world, underneath all the exterior polish it's just the same old "follow waypoint on minimap, do not deviate from mission waypoint objective" game design. That sort of handholding was already really, really old in GTA 5, ergo RDR2 was already archaic at its conception.

Wow, so controversial.

Halo 4 and Halo 5. The only other one I can think of is FF7.
 
Too Human. I think it was in development for like, 10 years or something. It used the right stick for attacking instead of camera control, which games had already realized was a stupid idea years prior.
 
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