LucasArts: inflating budgets and delays are "inexcusable"

So what he's saying is he's throwing his name in the hat to finish DN:F and snag a peice of that sweet sweet development bounty?

hehehe score.

"some of the best works of art...have spawned from situations where budget was tight and time was short. The earliest video games shared these constraints"

Great games like ET for the Atari####

So maybe there IS some truth to that rumor going around that Lucasarts is ditching PS3 development for Wii...

...or maybe this is what that rumor was based on.

Either way, I'm sure we'll be getting a wii-saber Star Wars title soon after launch.

Following the Lucas Arts montra and the delay themes:

Obi-Wan, Indiana Jones Sequels, Monkey Island Sequels.

Long delayed. Big busts.

This is the same kind of thing that Gabe Newell has been saying. Although he actually proposes a solution (Episodic content to reduce development time and cost) instead of just pointing out a problem.

I'd say more than the budgetary and time constraints most bad games suffer from "too many hands in the cookie jar" syndrome. Which is again usually the fault of the publisher.

So what have we learned? Publishers are EVIL

This is troubling to me. I think the problem isn't with delays and budget increases it's with how all involved in the development work together. A company like Blizzard hardly ever releases on time but their titles are polished and put out huge numbers. I say there's nothing wrong with releasing a game untill it's the best it can be. The problem is the people in charge more often than not don't know how to get it there.

What I wonder about is how something like Duke Nukem Forever can be produced over such a long period of time. It would seem to me that they would have to keep switching engines to keep up with the latest technology. This will only push the date back further.

Tbe problem with big budgets, publishers are less likely to take risks on expensive properties, unless there's a built in audience for the product or it's a sequel of some sort.

How many completely original games have huge budgets?

"Ward warns that the current mentality -- that making great games takes "whatever time it takes and ... whatever money it takes" -- is bad business."

not according to the US government.

he is wrong in saying that time and money for "good" games is wrong.... being at lucasarts maybe if they delayed some more of their recent games and put more time in them to be good, they may have been good.

Hmm, let's think of some example cases to test LucasArt's hypothesis.

Halo: took 4-5 years.
World of Warcraft: took 4.5 years.
Half-Life 2: took 4-5 years, at least.

Man, those were disasters.

Oh, wait, you're talking about games that continue to milk 20 year old franchises? Nevermind, then. Shovel it out.

Wait, how has this thread gone on for 11 posts (as of when I write this comment) and nobody has mentioned Daikatana? Among the bad practices that game was guilty of were excessive development costs and excessive time in development.

One thing I wonder, would money and time budgets be as high if developers weren't constantly obsessed with making the games use as many resources as possible? There's a relative cap on such things for console games, but it's absurd for PC games. It's like developers are more interested in trying to push the limits of technology rather than use what they have to entertaining ends.

Yeah, because all that extra time they spend on those Zelda games after delaying them totally made Nintendo lose money. And delaying Halo 2 by a year completely hooped Microsoft.

Sarcasm aside, he does have a point, but only with certain types of games. Games that are mid-level, something that will be hot for six months and then mostly forgotten about (think a Tomb Raider game or a Star Wars RTS) needs to be pushed through quickly. On the other hand, something that people will be playing for years on end (a Civ game, Zelda, WOW) probably benefit finically by having more time to be better. I think devs just need to make the choice of what they're selling: steak or hamburger.

Stiil HL2 actually took 6 years, but it would have been 3 if it weren't for the leak. Halo? World Of Warcraft? Great games? Hahaha, you're just asking for a flaming. Just because a game makes alot of money dosen't mean it's particulary good.

This is from the publisher that forced Obsidian to cut KOTOR 2 short so it ended up with a terrible ending and an entire planet removed from the game. While his comments make sense on a per-game basis, buggy and unfinished games will not win any consumers in the long term.

"What I wonder about is how something like Duke Nukem Forever can be produced over such a long period of time."

It's called "poor project management."

I mean look. The bottom line is there is presumably a goal here, an end-result, a product of some sort. Everything you do has to be working towards that goal. Video games are not about the "art of the process".

Given that, there has to be competent management guiding the process along towards completion. That means timelines, that means milestones. Even individual artists project manage themselves informally - a sculptor might say to themselves "I really want to finish that character's hands tonight", a painter might say "I really want to finish this painting before my friends come over next week to look at it". All "project management" means is organizing what we all do almost instinctively into an actual organized process that can be followed by everybody on a team. But this should not be a foreign concept to anybody.

When projects meander along without any actual hint of being finished, it can only mean one of a few things:

a) Fear of actually releasing a finished product (and there can be several reasons for that alone)
b) Piss-poor management skills
c) Outright malicious intent - in the case of a business like 3DR, they're keeping themselves funded right now by the promise of eventually completing DNF. If they ever actually shipped DNF, where would they be? They have not actually *developed* anything other than DNF in years. So they could be consciously milking this cash cow for as long as they can, intending to delay as long as possible.

The actual amount of time a game takes to develop is not the issue. If someone said "our deadline is to ship this game in 2016", that's fine. But the fact is the deadline exists, and everything you do is then working towards that deadline. You can't have these open-ended "we'll ship it when it's done" things, where you end up not actually working towards anything, and just wander around aimlessly constantly looking for upgrades to your engine, your physics, your modeling software or whatever. It becomes process for the sake of the process, not for the sake of the product.

Wait, someone saying Halo 2 and WOW are great games is asking to be flamed? Umm, okay ... I guess.

I think i big problem with game design is that it isn't a convential software development process. your goals are always changing. someone needs to be there to say enough is enough. but then again if that happened we would have never had some great games like GTA which ended up being a completely different game during it's development.

Yeah, look at all those flames comin'...

Now, on the other hand, you have games like Knights of the Old Republic II, which was FORCED out the door before it was finished, in order to meet a LucasArts deadline, and ended up being a disaster. The end is cruddy, unfinished, and buggy. Everybody felt cheated, and they never bothered to go back and repair the game for later releases. Now, what's on record for KOTOR2 is an awful game that doesn't deserve to bear the title it holds.

So there's something to be said for releasing a game when it's finished and not pushing deadlines.

True. I too felt cheated by KOTOR 2's weak ending.

But there's a reason even big budget movies (can) come in on time and on budget -- they plan well, they work to the plan, and when things go off, they make sacrifices elsewhere. And these days, blockbuster films employ way more person-hours than games.

Of course, they also spend more time in preproduction than most game dev houses do, possibly because that's how the movie biz is set up to work (contracts) while the game studios employ people full-time.

Was that a subtle way to tell George why the prequels sucked?