LogIn"Infuriating", "silly" production dates "burn out and demoralize the developers."
Obsidian Entertainment
By now, we are used to both game release delays and projects launching on time but in sorry states. We are not here to discuss who is to blame, but Obsidian's Design Director Josh Sawyer, known for Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity, and Pentiment, has some wisdom to share about the plausibility of game releases.
In a Twitter thread, he explained what helps him understand when a game won't be completed "with close to 100% accuracy." According to Sawyer, there are several indicators.
The first is when data shows that the completion is so far away from the scheduled day that cutting content will take more time than left of it.
"Cutting content does save development time, but there are also costs to cutting. It's not 'free.'"
Moreover, if "content is being developed while primary gameplay features are still being taken to MVP" (minimum viable product, a version of a game that has minimal features to be usable by early players), this is not a great sign: "If you don't know how gameplay works, your content can't be designed for it. This means that content will eventually be reworked or cut."
Additionally, if content pipelines are not fully done, no one can say when content will go through them.
So, Sawyer concluded, if the game has predictable and reliable content creation, all significant gameplay features are at MVP, and all pipelines are working, "the question becomes more about what quality I think it will ship at on a given date."
"What's infuriating about silly exec and production dates is that anyone with a decent amount of experience knows that if a, b, and c are not there, they can't reliable predict an end point, but they will try to do so with confidence and mash schedules to make it happen," he said. "All it does is burn out and demoralize the developers and (justifiably) erode confidence in management."
So here is how the RPG veteran predicts game launches and if they will be affected by crunch. Perhaps we could all try it with, let's say, GTA 6 or The Elder Scrolls 6 when the time comes?
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