The relationship between total transparency, and wanting to make the best possible first impressions on potential players, is a complex one that can vary dramatically between studios, or even between different titles produced by the same studio. What other challenges of the development process did you find yourself seeing in a different light once you started working on your own game projects?
Do what I did, Find a QA job in the games industry. can't wait to play games? join in the development process and get to work with the flaming piles of cobbled code. bonus points for working with devs in a different time zone who need builds checked ASAP.
Extra Credits I feel this video is incomplete, you pretty much completely overlooked trailers showcased as demos. Especially the ones where there is no actual gameplay. Was disappointed as I was looking for your take on this industry phenomenon from a developers viewpoint.
I work in QA. A lot of my work is pretty much helping the build engineers fix the builds all week long. Everything said here is so accurate to my practical experience.
It hurts my soul that so many don't understand the realities of production on this scale. Everyone just assumes that "being an artist is so easy and all you do is put stuff on the computer and you should be done". It's INSANE what goes into it.
Working in QA too. It's getting even worth when a release day is near. Sometimes the product looks like it is in early stage near the release. I really appreciate companies that take there time and don't rush. Sure, they may have the same problems but you can solve them better if you take time to think and don't hack your way thru entire code sections.
And a problem with having early access is that if you offer too much to the player before the game is released, the playerbase will burn themselves out on the incomplete game and by the time it's released nobody will care about the game anymore since the hype machine is fueled by absence and anticipation.
It can also be detrimental as the audience will have time to play the game and build unrealistic expectations or they might request for things that are never added . This causes that when the game releases people are turned off by the game since it wasn't what they expected example We Happy Few
Yeah, I thought EC had done an episode (a while ago) about why demos kinda sucked - and touched on the same issues that this video did, albiet in more depth. And that was the crux: it takes a lot of work, and you don't really get a lot out of them.
But if you offer to little, then the people lose hype anyway, and you get buried with the piles of new games releasing. Early access is a very hard to pull off.
That's why I don't play Early Access games. I follow them and look at the vids / screenshots and whatnot but I don't actually download and play them until they reach that 1.0. But the dumbest thing is - some companies are releasing incomplete 1.0 versions. I'm fine if there's some extra, DLC type expansions you want to add or bugfixes after you "release" your game but there's some essential stuff missing. For example - TWO 1.0 games I played recently were missing voice acting. Not all games need voice acting but it's super obvious that these games are supposed to have voice acting (the cutscenes are EERILY quiet in one and in the other voice acting is an arguably essential element to the gameplay experience). And even if you did put music there or whatever, am I really going to replay the whole game after they finally record and add all the voice acting in? I mean - we're talking about a game that some people have poured over 300 hours into. It's kind of disheartening to think, "great, that game I thought was cool is finally out of EA" only to purchase it and find a message that voice acting will come later. I just think - so, like, it's not done yet then? And refund it. xD If you're going to have voice acting in the game, I'd like to experience it with voice acting in it - not replay it (I rarely replay games anyway since there's too many games and not enough time) after I've already played the hell out of it. Ofcourse, both of these games were indie. It's like - are you really that eager to call your game "finished" or "released" or did you run out of money to pay the voice actors or something??? (Honestly, I'm putting my money on the latter). I can't imagine a AAA title releasing without voice acting with a note, "yeah we'll add that later fams".
@@FrancoSciaraffia And we all love that mindset of "release now, patch later" amiright? You are right that it is no longer really true, but I still agree with the sentiment because I am getting tired of games being rushed to meet a deadline and patched later. And I understand that a lot of deadlines are put in place pretty early on, but I'd rather consistently have a game that's good on launch than a game that might be good in a year after enough patches.
@@FrancoSciaraffia I feel like the long term consequence of this trend will be that people won't buy games on launch and wait for those issues to be patched, which will damage early sales and defeats the point of rushing it out.
@@FrancoSciaraffia I would go as far to say those games are still bad personally... Specially compared to some quality experiences coming-out soon, not to mention recent titles.. think destiny was super repetitive and overpriced
@@inurokuwarz That's a common misconception but in reality Bannerlord is "the bombs". Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord will necessarily drop exactly when "the bombs" do, because we know that the game's release will be the end of civilization.
They announced in 2012, and probably started development before then. I'm pretty sure they'll have to release soon-ish or risk running out of money. If you graph the increase in developer diaries, you can also see that what they're willing to show and talk about is increasing, and less is about the engine or core mechanics, and more is either fluff or details. The level of ingame detail is also increasing, such as clear statements about what an ingame feature will look like visually, or behave like to the player. It _looks_ like a game nearing the end of development. Of course I'm only saying that because I don't know that the next DD will be another total engine rework, so I'll look dumb in 2 weeks time.
Probably because it would be so much more fun and enjoyable to work with those tools instead of Visual Studio, Blender or whatever program you're using.
Thank you I have spent months explaining this to my family and younger cousins. After they learn that I am a game designer I get bombarded with why aren't games out earlier, how come they aren't done faster and the best one DO YOU WORK ON FORTNITE.
Personally I've always thought this was really obvious. But I think a lot of the "why don't they just release the game now because it's clearly finished" is a leftover from the late 80s early 90s market when it took forever to localize anything, 2-4 months to print the chips, and let's not forget the rumors surrounding the chip shortage that caused people to break out in conspiracy theories about deliberately straining the market with hype. It's all stupid, honestly, because hype doesn't work like that. When you're at maximum hype the ideal situation is and always has been to get the game in as many hands of players as quickly as possible; drawing it out doesn't help any more than that, and in fact has often been a detriment as over-hype can force a game to not live up to expectations and sour the reception. But you know, some people are more susceptible to hype than others. And those are probably the people who have a ridiculous tendency to take delays personally, like the company CEO themselves dropped the build in the toilet to offend them specifically.
That still happens to an extent though, just not 2-4 months, more like 1-2 to print discs. But yeah, it 'looks' finished, and especially with digital distribution people don't realize why they can't just have it available tomorrow. At best, even if the game were done, they can't give brick and mortar retailers the shaft by releasing early.
Great video! We've taken the "vertical slice" approach mentioned at 2:06 with our development of Forsaken Castle since day one using the intro area of the game as the staging ground and are close to getting things to the level of polish we're looking for to call it "complete". From there, we are creating additional skills/abilities and sections of the castle as we expand from that baseline of functionality. Our development team may only consist of my brother and I, but we're dedicated to making a game we can be proud of and have long enjoyed watching Extra Credits as a source of knowledge and guidance for good design. Keep up the great work Extra Credits team! EDIT: Extra thanks to Matt (and Zoey) for quite successfully picking up the reigns after Dan's departure from EC. Looking forward to many more videos in the future!
Patience is one of the hardest virtues to adhere to, especially when you see That Game that you just wanna dive into and explore. But once it finally arrives, the wait is (almost always!) worth it. Good video!
While I agree with many points of this video, my experience is that many developers forget that while they might throw away the prototype - they don't throw away the knowledge gained from it. Furthermore, many developers fall into the trap of saying their game just needs to be polished or 'just one more iteration and it will be fun'. The only way to figure this out is to make an actual cohesive experience and put it in the hands on the players.
When I started working at a game company a few years back, they told me they release their games 70% finished and add new content and fixes later. It does seem to be true to most games today. Risky business releasing unfinished games but it worked for them. Great video:)
2:43 I personally love seeing earlier builds of games when I can play them to see the differences between them and the final product. So yes. It is something I'd want to see.
I really love this video in particular!! I feel like it's the one where I've learned the most out of the last few ones. Kudos to the guy who helped making it!
Probably very far, especially considering that it was completely canceled over Kojima leaving. Konami probably would've pressed onward to release something out of it, hoping to bank on whatever he had left regardless of the quality of their work without him. The actual game itself might not even have existed at all.
Actually, Norman Reedus admitted the game wasn't even being worked on yet. PT was literally Silent Hills in its entirety. The main game was nothing but the trailers and some pre production art.
my guess is pretty much nothing outside of maybe a generalized script on Kojima's scrapbook Usually Vertical Slices are a full product meant to entice people into putting the money for making "that but bigger & profitable"
"""Working""" It wasn't until Tiny Build started helping that he had a class system for characters. Like holy god damn make a class system almost as part of preproduction! It's the skeleton, the foundation, of every kind of iterated script in every game! D:
Man I'm already so bored of Yandere Sim I'm probably not going to play it IF it's ever released. IMO going around murdering school girls in stupid ways was the most interesting thing about the idea - which I've already done to death with what he's already released. Sneaking around and throwing a book into a fountain without anyone noticing to make one dude angry at one chick sounds boring AF.
I will always stand by my position that demos are awesome and necessary to keep a healthy gaming industry, I think for the best examples of a demo having a positive effect on the game and players i will have to point at the Nioh demo/s, in May 2016 Team Ninja released an alpha demo, after playing the demo they asked for feedback and pointed players to a survey site, i filled the survey and added all the feedback i could covering many aspects of the game, the UI, the items system, etc etc), i checked what other players in the emerging Nioh community are saying on online forums and i found out that many of my points are shared by many other players (not enough items slots, weapon durability is too annoying, .. etc). Few months later in August they 2016 released a 2nd demo, and to my surprise they started to apply some of the community feedback into the game, i finished the 2nd demo and gave more feedback, and by the time the game came out February 7th, 2017 i was shocked to find almost 90% of the feedback i gave (and many others did too) was actually applied to the game, i never felt so positive about a game like this before, to feel that the dev team valued our feedback so much was really a great feeling, and all those changes clearly improved the game experience compared to the demo ... I think this should be the standard for demos in the gaming industry, the one all other demos and devs are compared to (Blizzard used to do that too but at a much slower pace) It's also the reason why i'm excited for the upcoming Anthem demo in 1st of Feb 2019, i have little faith in EA but i respect Bioware (they still have some talent and passion but not sure that will be the case for long), i hope the demo won't just be to generate hype and will actually be used to collect feedback (directly and indirectly) to improve the game before it's final release date in 22nd of Feb.
I'm starting to remember the first Kingdom Hearts 3 teaser. They try to make the fully-rendered scene LOOK like actual gameplay (with KH2 Sora bobbing left and right a bit to look like player movement.)
The whole "Ubisoft downgrades" thing is a great example. I imagine a good portion of the development time goes into making the E3 demos and such look as good as possible to build up hype. I see it as, "This is the best we can do, but we can't because making the entire game look like this ridiculously unfeasible."
Reminds me of a college play I once saw about game development. The whole plot revolved around what a huge wrench creating a demo product threw into actually finishing the real thing. Everyone was falling over each other, going "How are we going to make this thing look good, when it's not even finished?"
I feel like games get hyped up way too early. Often by the time a new game comes out I've lost all excitement for it. I don't know how practical it is, but I feel like if they released teasers and trailers later in the development cycle that it would help alleviate some of these issues.
0:58 That's honestly a really big point. It's often said you only get one chance at a good release and for all the love for early access, this is one major problem that always dogs early access games. Publishers and studios really only get one chance to make a good impression on potential buyers, and that is when the first playable thing (no matter what state it is in) reaches the hands of gamers and general public. We try to reserve judgement, but the first impression is being seeded in our mind and that seed is from a product the developers openly admit is not complete yet. That image of "incomplete" will never fully go away, and the developers now have to recon with the fact that their player base will always have that idea tucked away in some dark corner of their mind. This is not even getting into the fact that early access tends to stretch hype thin, making the public disinterested (along with investors potentially) and leading to the danger that gamers will have had their fun (or frustration) and move on before the game is "properly" released. Hype may be rather annoying at times to be quite frank, but it's often necessary for games to get noticed and therefore, for developers to get paid for their work. Early access opens up the danger of a game to be dogged with a not so positive reputation before it's even properly out the door, only for it to ignored or sidelined by the time the newest thing has rolled around.
The economics of video games are changing. As frustrating as some releases have been it's natural for the industry to go through some growing pains as it adapts to things like digital delivery and never ending DLC. I think all those who love video games, developers and fans, need to keep in mind that patience is a virtue. Cheers!
Explained most parts that are mentioned in the video multiple times to the same person, but it didn't click. I show them this and huzzah, they understand my points. Thank you for making life (or at least explaining part of it) easier!
This goes the other way too. I'm working in web development and some snarky game dev told me about how unessesary certain things are (avoidance of global mutable state in this case), not being able to understand that the projects I'm working on will need to work and be updated over 10+ of years and half the team might have been swapped out by that time. Game development is hard but has the luxury of allowing rewrites you get fired for in other industries. Your favourite service can't just tell you "sorry u won't be able to use this the next 6 months, but please keep paying!"
This feels like a great time for this video me personally. Wargrove finally had it release date announced even though the game was teased nearly two years ago. And I thought that it was original supposed to have come out over a year ago. So this really puts that into perspective for me
This made me think about Bioshock: Infinite and the enormous differences between the early promotional material and the final product. In the first trailer, Elizabeth had fairly generic psychic powers. In the first gameplay demo, she had gained weather manipulation to the mix and was much more active in combat. In the final game, her powerset had undergone a complete rewrite, and she had zero combat ability (aside from keeping herself from getting kidnapped). This was the first game I'd ever noticed something like this, and it's really stuck with me.
Same along with the 2016 launch of that game. So glad they really turned that around. Two years might not seem like a long time, but it really is for development. Still love playing it, they are constantly adding new content and other things that keep the game alive.
Today nintendo announced that they will completely restart development on metroid prime 4, which delays the release to around 2021, because they thought it wasn't up to standards. Well, as Myamoto always said, "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad."
"We hate waiting for something, especially entertainment." Boy, is THAT true, especially with big games, lately. All of them I can think of being Japanese, for some reason. 4 Pokemon games, Final Fantasy XV and Dissidia NT, Super Smash Bros: Ultimate, and now Kingdom Hearts 3, among others. Man, we really ARE impatient!
My biggest takeaway is that "build engineer" is an actual role that people spend full time on. I've been working 15 years on boring enterprise client-server systems and I always take up that responsability on top of regurarly scheduled code-monkeying and yeah, it's often pretty frustrating, but that just make my victories all the more exhilarating!!! I'll definitely look into that.
I honestly didn't realize people actually expected finished products soon after teasers. I always figure the teaser is "We have the barest concept of what this product is going to be, and want you to know that it's coming... eventually."
It's supposed to be a debug build, which tanks the performance significantly because it's doing a bunch of extra checks and outputting information to a console, helping the developers fix bugs in the code. ^_^
really glad you came back to this topic to discuss more in depth cause for people like us who have been playing since we were kids 15-20 years ago this is very apparent but for more new gamers or casuals all this just doesn't register having to take so much time to built trailers, demos, and early access takes away from being able to release complete game sooner I mean just look at pubg and fortnite if I am not mistaken aren't those both still in early access and have been for years? yeah you can play them but will anyone care by the time they are complete?
I would argue that an exception to the "we don't use the same stuff" would be the Shadowrun trilogy, by Harebrained Schemes. However, in reading up on their release, it seems that it was originally just 2 games (Returns and Hong Kong), with the middle one (Dragonfall) being an expansion that was later released separately. That being said, I also seem to recall that some of the critiques of the 3rd (Hong Kong) was that the engine was getting a bit long in the tooth. So, it seems that there may be a bit of a semantic definition going on - that most studios don't do the whole "use the assets in the sequel" - because if they do use the assets, they don't call it a sequel. They call it an expansion, instead. Which I don't have a real problem with, IMO - there have been some mighty fine expansions released. Mainly this is just an observation.
I work as a build engineer for a non-games company and can confirm. Any opportunity to massively refactor things is very very welcome. "Oh wait, we need to do this small tweak that's going to break things? Might as well replace half the core tech that we've wanted to ditch while we're at it! **follows 2 weeks of the CI server screaming constantly**" There's a term we use called "Technical Debt" which basically means the price we're paying today for the shortcuts taken yesterday when we needed to get things out the door and there's always this constant effort to try and mitigate it. Better scripts, newer versions of things, unravelling hacks into code that actually makes sense, fixing 4000 warnings so that the build output is actually useful again... And the constant fight is that none of these things are ever high priority because things are working now and there's actual functionality to be implemented, so really we jump at the opportunity to chip away at these whenever we can. Which is to explain a bit more in depth as to what not-Dan means by how making a demo for an event can incur in tons of lingering problems. All that was done was work and people have other stuff to work on so it remains baked in
You know i really wish devs would make temporary assets that don't make it into the game opensource or release it later as "extras" (some of them do end up into the game as "disabled" though) so that later modders can actually finish them or use them and make them work later when the game is complete. I'm still salty about the fact that one of the devs of skyrim actually managed to make spears working for a gamejam but never put it in the game itself...
Thanks for making me feel a little better that pikmin 4 hasn’t shown up anywhere for years. Im still hoping for it to show up at all at this years E3 at the latest though.
That is true, as it is with just about any medium of entertainment. However, there is a line between wanting to make the best game possible, and just jerking us around. Tetsuya Nomura is notorious for this.
Although the situation’s not exactly the same, I feel that the timing of this video makes a good fit with the recent Metroid Prime 4 development update. It’s good to remember as a player that game development is tough, and some transparency from the devs/publishers should be appreciated.
Honestly, I try my best to not get hyped anymore. With all these Tubers saying "get hyped" when any piece of info on a new game comes out, I just kind of worry they will over-hype something. My rule is: be glad its coming out, but don't expect anything until its in your hands...
god i just wanna try cube world i only discovered it last year and already feel i waited so long i cant even begin to think how long the older fans have waited
This feels like a re-write of concepts which are present in previous extra credit videos. There has been a phase shift in this channel's MO from mew and thoughtful content to more perpetual content.
The weirdest thing is that I'm currently halfway through making the demo for my game. Then this uploaded. It was a little uncanny hearing about making hollow mock-up experiences representing the final work. Thumbs.
I know, right? I love it when an announcement trailer comes out that only shows a logo and people immediately start proclaiming it as good/bad. It's like watching blind people discuss colour composition of art works like they have an art degree yet except the art gallery's empty and and the art gallery is actually a disused warehouse at the docks.
_Demos are experimentals for a game in making. It's like a first look. XD Waiting for the moment the creators say it is finished is better._ _That's why do NOT leak the unreleased games._
As someone who plays a lot of EA games, (thats Early access, not Electronic Arts), the key for small team or single devs is to release a unfinished copy with key details from the final build missing. Why? To build hype. With exactly zero marketing budget, they send out unfinished copies to YTers who do their marketing fro the devs. These builds will simply show the basics of the game. Take Ravenfield. The first playable public version, Beta 1, had a ton of bugs, only 10 weapons, very basic AI, and only one map. But YTers, caught on, liked the idea of a cheap Battlefield with AI that had ragdoll physics, and got the beta (most found it at Beta 4, which had 2 maps, 15 weapons and 4 vehicles, instead of 3. Now the game has an avid following on Steam, is in WIP for Early Access 13 (After beta 5, the next build was Early Access 1), and is doing great Get it on steam.
Also, it's worth noting that the last step in almost every programming project is debugging, and debugging is also one of the most frustrating and time consuming aspects of development. So cut the development house some slack, they're probably crying while they try to find which line of code in their 10,000 line code base has a misplaced bracket.
The relationship between total transparency, and wanting to make the best possible first impressions on potential players, is a complex one that can vary dramatically between studios, or even between different titles produced by the same studio. What other challenges of the development process did you find yourself seeing in a different light once you started working on your own game projects?
Hello bro
Love your vids
Notice me pls
Hoiiii
Do what I did, Find a QA job in the games industry. can't wait to play games? join in the development process and get to work with the flaming piles of cobbled code. bonus points for working with devs in a different time zone who need builds checked ASAP.
1:26 hahahaah
Extra Credits I feel this video is incomplete, you pretty much completely overlooked trailers showcased as demos. Especially the ones where there is no actual gameplay. Was disappointed as I was looking for your take on this industry phenomenon from a developers viewpoint.
Everyone hates waiting, but waiting is better then an unfinished product.
Sonic 06
It's not the consumers whom can't wait, it's the investors, ceo , etc
incomplete* :P
Try telling that to the Bannerlord crowd. It hurts.
Cyberpunk is an example!
I work in QA. A lot of my work is pretty much helping the build engineers fix the builds all week long. Everything said here is so accurate to my practical experience.
QA Lead is amongst my many responsibilities where I work and oh boy can I vouch for every single second of this video too!
I used to work QA in a shipyard. The exact same sentence applies.
It hurts my soul that so many don't understand the realities of production on this scale. Everyone just assumes that "being an artist is so easy and all you do is put stuff on the computer and you should be done". It's INSANE what goes into it.
@@swishfish8858 People STILL think like that?! O_O
Working in QA too. It's getting even worth when a release day is near. Sometimes the product looks like it is in early stage near the release.
I really appreciate companies that take there time and don't rush. Sure, they may have the same problems but you can solve them better if you take time to think and don't hack your way thru entire code sections.
And by "get to work on your Steam backlog" you mean "Play some more Enter the Gungeon", right?
dang it you know Matt's weakness...
That's just an Enter The Gungeon backlog
@@extrahistory No worries, it's mine as well, lol
I thought that was innuendo for "hurry up and poop".
And a problem with having early access is that if you offer too much to the player before the game is released, the playerbase will burn themselves out on the incomplete game and by the time it's released nobody will care about the game anymore since the hype machine is fueled by absence and anticipation.
It can also be detrimental as the audience will have time to play the game and build unrealistic expectations or they might request for things that are never added . This causes that when the game releases people are turned off by the game since it wasn't what they expected example We Happy Few
Yeah, I thought EC had done an episode (a while ago) about why demos kinda sucked - and touched on the same issues that this video did, albiet in more depth. And that was the crux: it takes a lot of work, and you don't really get a lot out of them.
But if you offer to little, then the people lose hype anyway, and you get buried with the piles of new games releasing. Early access is a very hard to pull off.
That's why I don't play Early Access games. I follow them and look at the vids / screenshots and whatnot but I don't actually download and play them until they reach that 1.0. But the dumbest thing is - some companies are releasing incomplete 1.0 versions. I'm fine if there's some extra, DLC type expansions you want to add or bugfixes after you "release" your game but there's some essential stuff missing. For example - TWO 1.0 games I played recently were missing voice acting. Not all games need voice acting but it's super obvious that these games are supposed to have voice acting (the cutscenes are EERILY quiet in one and in the other voice acting is an arguably essential element to the gameplay experience). And even if you did put music there or whatever, am I really going to replay the whole game after they finally record and add all the voice acting in? I mean - we're talking about a game that some people have poured over 300 hours into. It's kind of disheartening to think, "great, that game I thought was cool is finally out of EA" only to purchase it and find a message that voice acting will come later. I just think - so, like, it's not done yet then? And refund it. xD
If you're going to have voice acting in the game, I'd like to experience it with voice acting in it - not replay it (I rarely replay games anyway since there's too many games and not enough time) after I've already played the hell out of it. Ofcourse, both of these games were indie. It's like - are you really that eager to call your game "finished" or "released" or did you run out of money to pay the voice actors or something??? (Honestly, I'm putting my money on the latter). I can't imagine a AAA title releasing without voice acting with a note, "yeah we'll add that later fams".
I've been giving much thought to *exactly* that lately, Timothy. Glad I'm not the only one.
Why do I feel like Zoey has the biggest steam backlog out of anyone else here
I have a backlog of about 490 Games at the moment. So yeah...
@@digitized_fyre pfft... amateur I waste more money than you
All aboard the steam train
She’s a cat, I bet as soon as you buy her a new game her interest dies off and she wants something different
@@YondaMoegi Pretty sure that's how non-cats interact with steam also though
To quote a certain someone, "a delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is bad forever".
@@FrancoSciaraffia And we all love that mindset of "release now, patch later" amiright? You are right that it is no longer really true, but I still agree with the sentiment because I am getting tired of games being rushed to meet a deadline and patched later. And I understand that a lot of deadlines are put in place pretty early on, but I'd rather consistently have a game that's good on launch than a game that might be good in a year after enough patches.
@@FrancoSciaraffia It retains some relevance today though. No Man's Sky still has its reputation significantly tarnished by its launch condition.
@@FrancoSciaraffia I feel like the long term consequence of this trend will be that people won't buy games on launch and wait for those issues to be patched, which will damage early sales and defeats the point of rushing it out.
@@FrancoSciaraffia I would go as far to say those games are still bad personally...
Specially compared to some quality experiences coming-out soon, not to mention recent titles.. think destiny was super repetitive and overpriced
I mean praise them all you like
But I STILL won't touch no man's sky so I do t think that's true.
Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord will be an excellent game for my grandchildren. Well worth the wait.
I feel like Bannerlord won't drop until after the bombs do.
and then their grandchildren will enjoy Half Life 3
@@inurokuwarz That's a common misconception but in reality Bannerlord is "the bombs". Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord will necessarily drop exactly when "the bombs" do, because we know that the game's release will be the end of civilization.
I just put it there:
Star Citizen
They announced in 2012, and probably started development before then. I'm pretty sure they'll have to release soon-ish or risk running out of money. If you graph the increase in developer diaries, you can also see that what they're willing to show and talk about is increasing, and less is about the engine or core mechanics, and more is either fluff or details. The level of ingame detail is also increasing, such as clear statements about what an ingame feature will look like visually, or behave like to the player. It _looks_ like a game nearing the end of development.
Of course I'm only saying that because I don't know that the next DD will be another total engine rework, so I'll look dumb in 2 weeks time.
Those drawings of devs working with mechanical tools are very sastisfying for me and I don't know why
Probably because it would be so much more fun and enjoyable to work with those tools instead of Visual Studio, Blender or whatever program you're using.
@@Luxalpa Haha, so true!
The Nameless A lot of the art, particularly in the facial expressions, reminds me a lot of Calvin and Hobbes, which makes it very satisfying for me.
@@Luxalpa Sick burn. :D
Thank you I have spent months explaining this to my family and younger cousins. After they learn that I am a game designer I get bombarded with why aren't games out earlier, how come they aren't done faster and the best one DO YOU WORK ON FORTNITE.
But... do you?
@@KaeKalaeleo no I don't it would be cool to work for epic but I don't work with them.
xxrobodragonxx Well that last one sounds like hell
@@liam-ethanwallis4924 nothing wrong with epic games just love how fortnite is the go to for games lately.
So now you're "my uncle at Nintendo" for your cousins?
Personally I've always thought this was really obvious. But I think a lot of the "why don't they just release the game now because it's clearly finished" is a leftover from the late 80s early 90s market when it took forever to localize anything, 2-4 months to print the chips, and let's not forget the rumors surrounding the chip shortage that caused people to break out in conspiracy theories about deliberately straining the market with hype.
It's all stupid, honestly, because hype doesn't work like that. When you're at maximum hype the ideal situation is and always has been to get the game in as many hands of players as quickly as possible; drawing it out doesn't help any more than that, and in fact has often been a detriment as over-hype can force a game to not live up to expectations and sour the reception.
But you know, some people are more susceptible to hype than others. And those are probably the people who have a ridiculous tendency to take delays personally, like the company CEO themselves dropped the build in the toilet to offend them specifically.
That still happens to an extent though, just not 2-4 months, more like 1-2 to print discs.
But yeah, it 'looks' finished, and especially with digital distribution people don't realize why they can't just have it available tomorrow. At best, even if the game were done, they can't give brick and mortar retailers the shaft by releasing early.
What i love most about this channel is it stand up for developer industry as a whole not just game. Thank you for being our voice.
Great video! We've taken the "vertical slice" approach mentioned at 2:06 with our development of Forsaken Castle since day one using the intro area of the game as the staging ground and are close to getting things to the level of polish we're looking for to call it "complete". From there, we are creating additional skills/abilities and sections of the castle as we expand from that baseline of functionality.
Our development team may only consist of my brother and I, but we're dedicated to making a game we can be proud of and have long enjoyed watching Extra Credits as a source of knowledge and guidance for good design. Keep up the great work Extra Credits team!
EDIT: Extra thanks to Matt (and Zoey) for quite successfully picking up the reigns after Dan's departure from EC. Looking forward to many more videos in the future!
Patience is one of the hardest virtues to adhere to, especially when you see That Game that you just wanna dive into and explore. But once it finally arrives, the wait is (almost always!) worth it. Good video!
While I agree with many points of this video, my experience is that many developers forget that while they might throw away the prototype - they don't throw away the knowledge gained from it. Furthermore, many developers fall into the trap of saying their game just needs to be polished or 'just one more iteration and it will be fun'. The only way to figure this out is to make an actual cohesive experience and put it in the hands on the players.
When I started working at a game company a few years back, they told me they release their games 70% finished and add new content and fixes later. It does seem to be true to most games today. Risky business releasing unfinished games but it worked for them. Great video:)
2:43 I personally love seeing earlier builds of games when I can play them to see the differences between them and the final product. So yes. It is something I'd want to see.
"Hecknomancer II: The Heckening" confirmed!
With all due respect to Matt, Dan, Scott, and anyone who has ever voiced an Extra Credits episode, Zoe might be my favourite VO actor on this show.
I really love this video in particular!! I feel like it's the one where I've learned the most out of the last few ones. Kudos to the guy who helped making it!
Makes me wonder how far away Silent Hills was from completion when they released PT...
We'll never know :(
Probably very far, especially considering that it was completely canceled over Kojima leaving. Konami probably would've pressed onward to release something out of it, hoping to bank on whatever he had left regardless of the quality of their work without him. The actual game itself might not even have existed at all.
I suspect PT was more like the vertical slice.
Actually, Norman Reedus admitted the game wasn't even being worked on yet. PT was literally Silent Hills in its entirety. The main game was nothing but the trailers and some pre production art.
my guess is pretty much nothing outside of maybe a generalized script on Kojima's scrapbook
Usually Vertical Slices are a full product meant to entice people into putting the money for making "that but bigger & profitable"
I suspect PT was how far they got in development
Or just be yanderedev and try to have a working game the entire development process
That people tend to ignore by the time it's completed, as with most early access games.
"""Working"""
It wasn't until Tiny Build started helping that he had a class system for characters.
Like holy god damn make a class system almost as part of preproduction! It's the skeleton, the foundation, of every kind of iterated script in every game! D:
Man I'm already so bored of Yandere Sim I'm probably not going to play it IF it's ever released. IMO going around murdering school girls in stupid ways was the most interesting thing about the idea - which I've already done to death with what he's already released. Sneaking around and throwing a book into a fountain without anyone noticing to make one dude angry at one chick sounds boring AF.
"Let's talk about E3 and how other similar trade show demos work...because...in some ways...
*they're kinda the the worst!* "
Yeah, when he said that, I thought about one of the Aliens video games and their E3 trailer that had much better graphics than the game released with.
I will always stand by my position that demos are awesome and necessary to keep a healthy gaming industry, I think for the best examples of a demo having a positive effect on the game and players i will have to point at the Nioh demo/s, in May 2016 Team Ninja released an alpha demo, after playing the demo they asked for feedback and pointed players to a survey site, i filled the survey and added all the feedback i could covering many aspects of the game, the UI, the items system, etc etc), i checked what other players in the emerging Nioh community are saying on online forums and i found out that many of my points are shared by many other players (not enough items slots, weapon durability is too annoying, .. etc).
Few months later in August they 2016 released a 2nd demo, and to my surprise they started to apply some of the community feedback into the game, i finished the 2nd demo and gave more feedback, and by the time the game came out February 7th, 2017 i was shocked to find almost 90% of the feedback i gave (and many others did too) was actually applied to the game, i never felt so positive about a game like this before, to feel that the dev team valued our feedback so much was really a great feeling, and all those changes clearly improved the game experience compared to the demo ... I think this should be the standard for demos in the gaming industry, the one all other demos and devs are compared to (Blizzard used to do that too but at a much slower pace)
It's also the reason why i'm excited for the upcoming Anthem demo in 1st of Feb 2019, i have little faith in EA but i respect Bioware (they still have some talent and passion but not sure that will be the case for long), i hope the demo won't just be to generate hype and will actually be used to collect feedback (directly and indirectly) to improve the game before it's final release date in 22nd of Feb.
I'm starting to remember the first Kingdom Hearts 3 teaser.
They try to make the fully-rendered scene LOOK like actual gameplay (with KH2 Sora bobbing left and right a bit to look like player movement.)
The whole "Ubisoft downgrades" thing is a great example. I imagine a good portion of the development time goes into making the E3 demos and such look as good as possible to build up hype. I see it as, "This is the best we can do, but we can't because making the entire game look like this ridiculously unfeasible."
That reference at 0:21 to the accidentally leaked Mummy trailer was perfection.
You guys are the only thing that can keep me alive after a whole day at the university. Thanks a LOT!
*Slow eye shift to deltarune.*
Can anyone else name 76 exceptions to this video?
I hope the fallout from this comment isn't as bad as the reference.
Nope!
Everyone is chill :-)
Memes are jokes in development
Damn thats cold ahaha
I'm so glad someone you made this so clear! Now when I get complaints from the community on my games I can just post them a link to this! Thank you!
Reminds me of a college play I once saw about game development. The whole plot revolved around what a huge wrench creating a demo product threw into actually finishing the real thing. Everyone was falling over each other, going "How are we going to make this thing look good, when it's not even finished?"
I liked the “26 FPS” detail in one of the images, before optimization that fps counter kills me
My secret technique for waiting for a game release is forgeting it exists bypassing the pain of waiting all together
Yep! :-)
I feel like games get hyped up way too early. Often by the time a new game comes out I've lost all excitement for it. I don't know how practical it is, but I feel like if they released teasers and trailers later in the development cycle that it would help alleviate some of these issues.
As a producer and designer on a handful of projects that have gone to conventions, this video hits home hard.
0:58 That's honestly a really big point. It's often said you only get one chance at a good release and for all the love for early access, this is one major problem that always dogs early access games.
Publishers and studios really only get one chance to make a good impression on potential buyers, and that is when the first playable thing (no matter what state it is in) reaches the hands of gamers and general public. We try to reserve judgement, but the first impression is being seeded in our mind and that seed is from a product the developers openly admit is not complete yet. That image of "incomplete" will never fully go away, and the developers now have to recon with the fact that their player base will always have that idea tucked away in some dark corner of their mind.
This is not even getting into the fact that early access tends to stretch hype thin, making the public disinterested (along with investors potentially) and leading to the danger that gamers will have had their fun (or frustration) and move on before the game is "properly" released. Hype may be rather annoying at times to be quite frank, but it's often necessary for games to get noticed and therefore, for developers to get paid for their work. Early access opens up the danger of a game to be dogged with a not so positive reputation before it's even properly out the door, only for it to ignored or sidelined by the time the newest thing has rolled around.
*”Patience is a virtue”*
+5 Personal Combat Skill
+20% Defense
+10 Rationality
*The hero's resolve is tested..*
The economics of video games are changing. As frustrating as some releases have been it's natural for the industry to go through some growing pains as it adapts to things like digital delivery and never ending DLC. I think all those who love video games, developers and fans, need to keep in mind that patience is a virtue. Cheers!
Explained most parts that are mentioned in the video multiple times to the same person, but it didn't click. I show them this and huzzah, they understand my points.
Thank you for making life (or at least explaining part of it) easier!
This goes the other way too. I'm working in web development and some snarky game dev told me about how unessesary certain things are (avoidance of global mutable state in this case), not being able to understand that the projects I'm working on will need to work and be updated over 10+ of years and half the team might have been swapped out by that time. Game development is hard but has the luxury of allowing rewrites you get fired for in other industries. Your favourite service can't just tell you "sorry u won't be able to use this the next 6 months, but please keep paying!"
This feels like a great time for this video me personally. Wargrove finally had it release date announced even though the game was teased nearly two years ago. And I thought that it was original supposed to have come out over a year ago. So this really puts that into perspective for me
The video froze at exactly at 0:05 and I thought it was a part of the video.
I wish your Extra Credits channel would count towards my school greats
This is perfectly timed with the Anthem Demo lmao
This made me think about Bioshock: Infinite and the enormous differences between the early promotional material and the final product. In the first trailer, Elizabeth had fairly generic psychic powers. In the first gameplay demo, she had gained weather manipulation to the mix and was much more active in combat. In the final game, her powerset had undergone a complete rewrite, and she had zero combat ability (aside from keeping herself from getting kidnapped). This was the first game I'd ever noticed something like this, and it's really stuck with me.
That's so funny; sampling every single game that's currently sitting in my Steam Library is actually my cleanup goal for 2019! Imma do it, too.
4:35-4:38 *AMAZING* *GAME* *THE* *SEQUEL* that part was the best
I was thinking of no mans sky trailer the whole time
Same along with the 2016 launch of that game. So glad they really turned that around. Two years might not seem like a long time, but it really is for development. Still love playing it, they are constantly adding new content and other things that keep the game alive.
Today nintendo announced that they will completely restart development on metroid prime 4, which delays the release to around 2021, because they thought it wasn't up to standards.
Well, as Myamoto always said,
"A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad."
"We hate waiting for something, especially entertainment." Boy, is THAT true, especially with big games, lately. All of them I can think of being Japanese, for some reason. 4 Pokemon games, Final Fantasy XV and Dissidia NT, Super Smash Bros: Ultimate, and now Kingdom Hearts 3, among others. Man, we really ARE impatient!
Please let guild 3 be good
Please let guild 3 be good
Please let guild 3 be good
Please let guild 3 be good
I'll be patient I promise
Ironically I wasn't notified for this video I wanted to see immediately.
Still love your videos and their illustrations. Funny and informative. 👍👍
Ok! Time to work on my Steam Backlog... Ooo! A new Extra Credits episode just came out!
Yep, it might seem obvious to anyone who have ever worked on a game, but thanks for saying it out loud. Great video as always :)
this kind of content is why i at first started follow u guys ( i do like the historical ones to)
My biggest takeaway is that "build engineer" is an actual role that people spend full time on. I've been working 15 years on boring enterprise client-server systems and I always take up that responsability on top of regurarly scheduled code-monkeying and yeah, it's often pretty frustrating, but that just make my victories all the more exhilarating!!! I'll definitely look into that.
I honestly didn't realize people actually expected finished products soon after teasers. I always figure the teaser is "We have the barest concept of what this product is going to be, and want you to know that it's coming... eventually."
Perfect video right around the corner of the Metroid Prime announcement.
1:28 nice parade of that quote. I am pretty sure you mentioned that quote in the Bismarck serious
2:06 damn, ya should optimize your game, look at that fps. geez.
Man there are tons of games I'd like to get a nice stable 26 fps in...
It's supposed to be a debug build, which tanks the performance significantly because it's doing a bunch of extra checks and outputting information to a console, helping the developers fix bugs in the code. ^_^
the bugfixing is more important than fps
In addition to everything said above, optimizing very early build is pointless.
yes, sometimes 27 FPS is great, but it's still worse than it could be.
to me, low fps means that something is wrong with the game. so i fix it.
really glad you came back to this topic to discuss more in depth cause for people like us who have been playing since we were kids 15-20 years ago this is very apparent but for more new gamers or casuals all this just doesn't register having to take so much time to built trailers, demos, and early access takes away from being able to release complete game sooner I mean just look at pubg and fortnite if I am not mistaken aren't those both still in early access and have been for years? yeah you can play them but will anyone care by the time they are complete?
Treat your build engineers nicely, folks.
I would argue that an exception to the "we don't use the same stuff" would be the Shadowrun trilogy, by Harebrained Schemes. However, in reading up on their release, it seems that it was originally just 2 games (Returns and Hong Kong), with the middle one (Dragonfall) being an expansion that was later released separately.
That being said, I also seem to recall that some of the critiques of the 3rd (Hong Kong) was that the engine was getting a bit long in the tooth.
So, it seems that there may be a bit of a semantic definition going on - that most studios don't do the whole "use the assets in the sequel" - because if they do use the assets, they don't call it a sequel. They call it an expansion, instead.
Which I don't have a real problem with, IMO - there have been some mighty fine expansions released. Mainly this is just an observation.
“The plan never survives contact with the development team.” Genius.
I work as a build engineer for a non-games company and can confirm. Any opportunity to massively refactor things is very very welcome. "Oh wait, we need to do this small tweak that's going to break things? Might as well replace half the core tech that we've wanted to ditch while we're at it! **follows 2 weeks of the CI server screaming constantly**"
There's a term we use called "Technical Debt" which basically means the price we're paying today for the shortcuts taken yesterday when we needed to get things out the door and there's always this constant effort to try and mitigate it. Better scripts, newer versions of things, unravelling hacks into code that actually makes sense, fixing 4000 warnings so that the build output is actually useful again... And the constant fight is that none of these things are ever high priority because things are working now and there's actual functionality to be implemented, so really we jump at the opportunity to chip away at these whenever we can.
Which is to explain a bit more in depth as to what not-Dan means by how making a demo for an event can incur in tons of lingering problems. All that was done was work and people have other stuff to work on so it remains baked in
That was fun to read!
I'm sorry :-)
5:32 Where did you find that photograph of Cloud Imperium's office?
You know i really wish devs would make temporary assets that don't make it into the game opensource or release it later as "extras" (some of them do end up into the game as "disabled" though) so that later modders can actually finish them or use them and make them work later when the game is complete. I'm still salty about the fact that one of the devs of skyrim actually managed to make spears working for a gamejam but never put it in the game itself...
0:34 Curtis, with one awsome bragging right and a bunch of experience that's much more relevent now but not as cool.
Thanks for making me feel a little better that pikmin 4 hasn’t shown up anywhere for years. Im still hoping for it to show up at all at this years E3 at the latest though.
Damn the art in this episode is better than usual!
Say this to Dreams that's been teasing the exact same completed creation tools for almost four years in their streaming
"Evenutary" Possibly the best bit of this video
"You probably have a solid Idea and a plan, but it never survives contact with the development team" Bismark Chuckles in the background
This is such an important lesson. People need to keep in mind that just because a trailer is ready doesn't mean the game itself is ready.
That is true, as it is with just about any medium of entertainment. However, there is a line between wanting to make the best game possible, and just jerking us around. Tetsuya Nomura is notorious for this.
Funny. This video showed up next to the VIP anthem demo trailer in my subscription feed.
Although the situation’s not exactly the same, I feel that the timing of this video makes a good fit with the recent Metroid Prime 4 development update. It’s good to remember as a player that game development is tough, and some transparency from the devs/publishers should be appreciated.
I am surprised that there was no reference to sonic 2006 for an example. Good job by the way
If they started listing examples the video would be hours long. xD
Honestly, I try my best to not get hyped anymore.
With all these Tubers saying "get hyped" when any piece of info on a new game comes out, I just kind of worry they will over-hype something.
My rule is: be glad its coming out, but don't expect anything until its in your hands...
god i just wanna try cube world i only discovered it last year and already feel i waited so long i cant even begin to think how long the older fans have waited
Yandev you watching this?
This feels like a re-write of concepts which are present in previous extra credit videos. There has been a phase shift in this channel's MO from mew and thoughtful content to more perpetual content.
Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong
West Virginia, ....
Mountain mamas
This is somewhat timely, given the news about Metroid Prime 4
Well, what about PT? It was not even a demo and it blew our minds, you can have amazing demos that will keep the hype going
The weirdest thing is that I'm currently halfway through making the demo for my game. Then this uploaded. It was a little uncanny hearing about making hollow mock-up experiences representing the final work. Thumbs.
Says no body likes waiting:
Shows picture of Sonic the hedgehog
Maybe some times we should wait...
1:41 When you've been trying to beat a puzzle in The Witness for the past 7 hours
Or try Curbing your enthusiasm for a trailer/demo.
I know, right? I love it when an announcement trailer comes out that only shows a logo and people immediately start proclaiming it as good/bad. It's like watching blind people discuss colour composition of art works like they have an art degree yet except the art gallery's empty and and the art gallery is actually a disused warehouse at the docks.
_Demos are experimentals for a game in making. It's like a first look. XD Waiting for the moment the creators say it is finished is better._
_That's why do NOT leak the unreleased games._
4:38 Unless you are Bethesda...
fallout 76 still has problems the modding community fixed for fallout 4!
As someone who plays a lot of EA games, (thats Early access, not Electronic Arts), the key for small team or single devs is to release a unfinished copy with key details from the final build missing. Why? To build hype. With exactly zero marketing budget, they send out unfinished copies to YTers who do their marketing fro the devs. These builds will simply show the basics of the game. Take Ravenfield. The first playable public version, Beta 1, had a ton of bugs, only 10 weapons, very basic AI, and only one map. But YTers, caught on, liked the idea of a cheap Battlefield with AI that had ragdoll physics, and got the beta (most found it at Beta 4, which had 2 maps, 15 weapons and 4 vehicles, instead of 3. Now the game has an avid following on Steam, is in WIP for Early Access 13 (After beta 5, the next build was Early Access 1), and is doing great Get it on steam.
.. Get it on Steam.
Please! :-)
Sequelitis reference is awesome.
Also, it's worth noting that the last step in almost every programming project is debugging, and debugging is also one of the most frustrating and time consuming aspects of development. So cut the development house some slack, they're probably crying while they try to find which line of code in their 10,000 line code base has a misplaced bracket.
343 industries had gained my respect, they haven’t given a specific date for MCC on pc or Infinite, they say it’ll be released when it’s ready
Educational as always. Thank you
Too soon, Executus! You've realeased the demo too soon!