Indeed. I’ve used that many times throughout my career as a developer, but it’s pretty much universal to any kind of product - in most cases you can only pick two. It goes with another saying, “shipping is a feature.”
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So, the reason this isn’t done more often is that it’s actually really really really hard. There’s a reason that games historically have one of two formats- on rails with heavy story or open sandbox with no story. Those are both formats which lend themselves well to what’s possible technically and production-wise in games.
Games that try to exist somewhere in the middle rarely do either one well, because making branching story lines or allowing player agency to alter story events is extremely difficult to execute well, test/debug properly, and allocate art resources for. The budget is a big one- if you have 3 branches in your story, you are paying hundreds of 3D modelers and texture artists to generate content that 2/3rds of players will never see. That’s a massive waste of resources.
On the production side, doing QA on branching/modifiable stories is very difficult because the possible situations explode combinatorially. This is why, for example, Bethesda games are all so buggy.
Most games are fundamentally linear or fundamentally sandbox for this reason, and just dip their toe in the other pool a little bit. Games like Deus Ex that execute well on a heavy blend are the work of rare genius and a great team. Every game tries to do that to some degree. Like you, game developers want that experience too. But it’s a moonshot every time and mostly we blow up on the launchpad trying.
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I always wondered why GTA didn’t make a futuristic Blade Runner-esque cyberpunk version with flying cars, as well as a Prohibition-era gangster version. They both seemed like absolute no-brainers.
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This is one thing I’ve admired about the studio behind the Yakuza titles. The story is very much on rails and there’s only ever one outcome, but the overall game design and its many side quests and other activities make it feel like a big open world game.
If you just rush through the critical path you can be done with most of the Yakuza games in like 20 hours each (and miss nearly everything great in the process). If you take your time and really explore what the games have to offer you can easily put in 60-80 hours per game and have a blast in the process.
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One of my favorite JPRG tactic games, Ogre Tactics, did a great job with this. The remaster allowed players to play with time in the game and you could jump into any of the branching nodes in the game to allow someone to easily experience all of the story beats without having to rely on spreadsheets, multiple saves, etc. And anything you unlocked at any point carried forward, i’m sure executing that was very complex but made going back to get things you missed or playing story beats you didn’t pick such a low effort thing.
These days i’ve relied for on Rogue-likes to give me more of a varied experience than story driven games with multiple endings/choices, because as you say making those choices actually have an impact is resource heavy and really complex to execute.
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The irony is that Obsidian Entertainment did this for Fallout New Vegas and did it all in 18 months plus they had to cut Freeside’s content to meet the deadline. Now CDPR had about 8 years but haven’t really much for show for their efforts. That’s kind of sad to be honest which makes me wonder what in that time were they doing? i wonder if some of the executives didn’t want to shell out for a game engine or worse they didn’t want to hire an expert with a given game engine to get their production up to speed on it. In any instance, it shows there were MAJOR problems with the production.
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qa is a really good point. especially because off the shelf stuff doesn’t really support story or even testing all that well. most of the focus for tools is on making stuff look pretty and run fast. ( ex. things like unreal’s blueprints are great for hacking around, but don’t scale well )
and people also have to fit everything on disk – so every ending you don’t see eats away at the endings you do see.
i think maybe in game development you only get to choose one 
part of that is marketing. publishing and marketing tends to set the schedule because they need a huge ramp up time to get the buzz out. ( as a random example destiny apparently spent six million just on tv ads. ) to make that work you’ve got to hit your dates, and deliver ( or attempt to ) what you’ve promised to sell.
… someday hopefully it’ll be a bit more like movie making, and games can be built more in pieces which would give everyone some breathing room.
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It’s my hope that now that Microsoft owns both Obsidian and Bethesda that we can finally get a proper sequel to New Vegas.
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That’s the dream for me. A FNV2 or something set in Texas or even overseas like in the UK or mainland China would be something wild.
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Poor Obsidian, Bethesda did a lot to try to sabotage them from finishing New Vegas but i delight in knowing that their game is one of the best versions of the Bethesda published Fallout series. On the plus side Microsoft owns Obsidian and Bethesda now so i hope some cool stuff is in store for games in the future.
For Cyberpunk i think the extended development time might’ve been a mix of factors. They under estimated the scope of making the game and they were cocky in showing their hand in regards to how things were coming along and hoping that crunch would fix things in the end. They may have been better served making something far less ambitious and more story driven as the first title to get their underlying tech right and then do something more open for a follow up. Though its easy to criticize after-the-fact, and i’m not a developer so i don’t want to come across as “this is what they should’ve done for success” but i’m merely commenting that perhaps they should’ve focused their efforts more on this new IP instead of trying to do too much.
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I’ve long wondered what’s going on in the rest of the world as I play Fallout. You never really hear anything about what goes on elsewhere. Clearly radio still works so there’s capacity for worldwide communication by using shortwave but there’s never any news on happenings from elsewhere.
There are also people with “foreign” accents but where did they come from? How did they get to America? Fallout 4 had a DLC with what appeared to be an issei Japanese family that had settled in Massachusetts. How did they arrive there? Fallout 4 takes place hundreds of years after the war, so it’s not like they were survivors. There’s no usable infrastructure like roads or airports. The only aircraft you see are helicopters and the like with limited range. You never see any functioning ships on the water.
So many questions…
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They hint a lot at this type of lore but it’s not spelled out for players, it’s scattered around in logs or descriptions in the game, art books, developer interviews, etc. But i also have wanted to see other settings in the Fallout world. Canada, China, Mexico, or hell even outer space as there was tech at the time for humans to go to space and there are also aliens. Would be fascinating to have a story like Bioshock’s Rapture but about a stranded moon colony with hapless vault dwellers trying to survive after the world blows itself up.
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That sounds good, like just delay it more or the other one solution answers to the problem.
But that’s basically what happened to No Man’s Sky. It got de-scoped till there was very little game there. And there are plenty of examples famous or not of that particular mistake. Like Spore which came out and was almost like a collection of very limited minigames stripped out of something larger. What was there was pretty fun for a bit. But there were already browser games out that handled similar ideas with more polish.
There’s got to be some balance of all these factors. And that’s a bit of what surprises here. CDProject on their previous games seemed to find a pretty decent balance point by shipping complete, playable and mostly stable games than using the typical post release cycle to polish and improve things.
Aside from the bugs and the complete fuckup when it comes Trans folks. The big short falling here seems to be the big but vacant more is better nature of the game. Witcher 3 wasn’t what it was because it was huge (even though it was huge), but because the depth that was there. And a lot of the pitch here was all about how much bigger and just more it was going to be.
So I definitely think you’re in to something with this one. Most open world games could stand to take a step back and fill out the core with worthwhile things instead of throwing in another 12 empty fields for us to pick flowers in.
The latter always seems like a lot of wasted effort and time.
The restaurant business it’s “slow is smooth, smooth is fast”. The more you rush, the worse things go which only results in you getting things done both more slowly and worse. It’s how you end up in the weeds.
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IOW, lazy storytelling.
The actually had this in Fallout 3:
Granted it was pretty light on the story and it was more just “run around and shoot aliens” so there’s definitely room to grow here.
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Well also remember that they had two other Witcher games that allowed them to refine their ideas and mechanics vs Cyberpunk where they tried to go balls-to-the-wall all in one go which could’ve paid off but the risk of doing so clearly wasn’t worth it.
i do remember but i’d like to see it as the setting for a whole game rather than DLC.
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It could have used 7 or 8 years of development, but it didn’t get it. Apparently they didn’t really start in on pre-production in a serious way until they had finished the Witcher 3 expansions, which was several years after they announced Cyberpunk. So the game represents more like 4 years of work, when it was a much more ambitious game than anything they had done before. They figured it could be done on a similar time schedule as their previous games, using their existing in-house engine, but by doubling the number of developers. That… doesn’t work. Especially considering they took the engine they developed for Witcher and had to add a bunch of entirely new features and completely different types of assets to make Cyberpunk. (Unlike Fallout New Vegas, say, that wasn’t adding any significant new features and could make use of existing assets. Though 18 months was still impressive, for what they made.)
A lot of the issues with the release of No Man’s Sky had to do with what they were perceived as having “promised” for the game. (The developers making the common mistake of talking about what they were working on, and player’s imaginations running away with them.) My recollection is something similar happened with Spore. In the case of No Man’s Sky it worked for and against them - they got so much attention for what was essentially an imaginary game (as with Cyberpunk), that they got substantial pre-orders but also the backlash when the reality was something else. With NMS those pre-orders funded continued development of the game until it was everything people thought it would be (and more), and the backlash reversed itself when people saw what it became. Even the negative press of the backlash became a positive. I suspect something similar will happen with Cyberpunk - they sold something like 8 million copies, sight unseen, which is a big success. Some of those will be returns, but all they need to do is make it more functional and the tide of public opinion will probably change, and it will end up a huge hit.
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For sure- once that marketing train starts rolling, it’s unstoppable and there needs to be a game at the end. The flip-side argument is that marketing shouldn’t start that process until confidence in the ship date is 99%, even if that means you undershoot a bit and the game sits in the can for a month. Instead they start the hype when confidence is 50% and lock the whole team into an impossible task.
There’s basically nothing I miss about that industry. My only regret is not getting out sooner.
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I agree with your larger point that ship date should be movable when need be (descoping is not always the answer) but I actually disagree with your examples.
Spore shipped the way it did because they never knew what they were building. They hired a bunch of scene demo coders and graphics engine nerds and put them in a room, expecting a game to fall out. What happened is entirely predictable- a cool tech demo of a bunch of neat ideas. There wasn’t a game design adult in that room to make an actual game out of all their pet project toys that they got paid for five years to tinker with. EA got seduced by the myth of the “rockstar engineer” and put a bunch of them on the same project with no supervision.
No Man’s Sky was more a case of the scope of what they wanted wasn’t possible. They imagined Elite at 10x the scale and with a story on top of that, and that was never possible in any human time project time frame. They’re lucky they built the coolest parts first and ended up with something shippable, at least.
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I’m an avid video game player but only very rarely a video game commentator. I’m sure there is a fancy name for it, but I call it “the illusion of choice”(IOC). In consensus reality the IOC is one of the foundations of consumerism and some consumers apparently mistake IOC for free will. Coke or Pepsi? Is a choice of no real consequence really a choice? I suggest to you that US politics now operates as binary IOC. Are you Us or are you Them? Pick yer team and buy the approved color-coded t-shirts and flags. I digress. My relationship with video games began with Pong and it’s been a great ride ever since. Despite the amazing advances in technology and increasingly sophisticated storytelling, I still often remind myself while gaming that “it’s still just a fancier, prettier version of Pong” and “the only true objective is mastering the control schema”. That said, in RPG video games, the IOC is what can make a game emotionally satisfying and memorable. What I value most in an RPG experience is the moments when I am engaged enough to imagine that my decisions “actually matter”. I cherish the times when I will pause the game and step away in order to mull a game path decision… As though it actually matters. Doesn’t happen a lot, but it does happen, and it has already happened a couple times as I’ve been playing through C2077. As games go, it doesn’t get any better than that. Playing C2077 I sense many echoes of other RPGs I have played and appreciated, but C2077 feels like a unique and fresh experience, not a just a new coat of paint
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And those two other Witcher games really play like prologues or prep for Witcher 3.
But part of what they were developing there was that release cycle that won so many people over and let them avoid the exact problems they’re having now.
I dunno that the source material they had on this one was as big a help as on Witcher. Pen and paper RPGs don’t exactly have a firm base of character and plot to build from. And what familiarity I have with Cyberpunk 2020 it’s just as goofballs as what I’m hearing about 2077.
But just thinking about what tipped them over the edge the throw more at it aspect seems like a pretty big part.
There are aapects of that here as well, and were with Witcher 3 with that graphics down grade nonsense.
No Man’s sky did have a lot of features that never made it and aspects that weren’t in the launch.
That said it was a Kickstartered indy game, and for all the noise I’m pretty sure it launch as an early access, explicitly unfinished game.
I think it did work out for them in the end. And it might have gone differently had it been more of a narrative game or a different genre.
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