COVID And Working From Home Made Starfield Development "Very, Very Slow," Todd Howard Says

nanoUFO@sh.itjust.worksmod to Games@sh.itjust.works – 88 points –
COVID And Working From Home Made Starfield Development "Very, Very Slow," Todd Howard Says
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scope of modern AAA video games is unsustainable

Helpful hint, it's not just video game programming. Those hijacked gas pipelines in the US, unsecured SCADA systems weren't because every sysadmin was falling asleep, it's because nobody pulling the trigger wanted to listen to the sysadmins screaming that blindly deploying shit without audits, was a bad idea.

In pretty much every single technological failure, there's usually a common thread. Someone did (or forgot to do something) in the name of profit.

Sysadmin - can confirm.

Have a VP wanting to ram a newly acquired Europe entity through a migration and I am just yelling in every meeting about regulations. No one gives a shit so I’m just making them sign everything they say. CYA in full deployment.

On the acquired side, currently going through integration. We had a looking date to cutover a major portion of our systems and it was absolutely only a fail forward situation if it went south. Surprisingly, they recognized and listened to us saying it wasn’t ready and needed more time…got us six more months but definitely a rare moment from my experience in IT. Hopefully a sign that the new company knows what they are doing.

I can side with what you're saying, but I don't understand how forgetting something in the name of profit in other industries has anything to do with the pace of game development.

It fails downwards. And I know that doesn’t make sense but when you push something through as fast as possible everything below it falters.

QA is garbage, QC is garbage, development becomes garbage because of those fast timelines because something has to be cut. You can’t do everything you need to do with shorter timelines - and that’s where it becomes “in the name of profit”.

You're describing the state of application/game development, yes.

But again, what was that rant involving other industries about?

Just that it’s fairly similar across other industries. It’s a pretty common thread in most industries when people try to force things through without planning properly.

Also I wasn’t ranting about other industries, just making a note that it occurs everywhere. Profit for profit sake has made a lot of industries worse, including the gaming industry.

Edit: do you think QA/QC and development work only occurs in the gaming industry?