Microsoft says the 2-3 year development cycles of big-budget games are over

EfreetSK@lemmy.world to Gaming@beehaw.org – 167 points –
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I know, Tears of the Kingdom the most graphically intensive game of all time took 6 years to make. I bet they could have cranked out that bad boy out in like 3 years if they had just used the same graphics as Breath of the Wild

I suspect a lot of the development time was qa. A game that relies on physics takes a lot of work to get right, and an open world makes it way more open to things that go wrong.

The time sink was probably in prototyping for new ideas to serve as the core of the game, then in generating content that would be considered innovative and fun for people to use that core with. Games are often a moving target where they need to try things that don’t work before finding ideas that will last.

Meaning that graphics really are not the reason for why games have such long development cycles at all.

They took an entire year for just polishing up the game. I’m sure everything else took great time too lol.

I believe they also said they spent a year on final gameplay tweaks alone before releasing; TotK is a great example of why we shouldn't be mad when a game is delayed again in again