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Days Gone devs on the cost of delaying big-budget games might help us understand Cyberpunk and Battlefield 2042's unfinished nature

HTK

Banned
Battlefield 2042 doesn't have the problem that he's describing. Battlefield 2042 needed an additional year of development not a small delay.
 

bitbydeath

Member
I honestly do not understand why this game...why these people are the center of attention of the entire video games community today...

Days Gone? Really? Who cares? What was so special about the title? Better projects have failed to get sequels.

I am confused.
Game was a huge seller, and many peoples Game of the Generation, myself included.
Don’t be confused, play it and understand the hype.
 

Umbasaborne

Banned
If its taking 6, 7, 8 years, some times a decade to make these giant triple a games, and they are still launching broken or incomplete, then something needs to change
 

Croatoan

They/Them A-10 Warthog
Real easy fix for this. Don't start the marketing blitz until the game is finished! Problem is suits need to see shit on their quarterly reports or they feel like they are losing money. Fuck'em.
 

ManaByte

Member
People don't understand the power marketing holds, both in gaming and movies.

I know someone who runs a website who got a phone call from a big name director and the head of the studio's marketing asking him to not spoil their movie. Why? They knew this person had everything on the movie and they had just started the marketing campaign. It was fine for this person to post spoilers on their website up until this point, but as soon as the billboards and bus stop posters went up; the threats came down.
 

Sony

Nintendo
Difference is, BF2042 hype and marketing was nowhere near Cyberpunk. For the latter I can understand the cost of delay being higher than cost of fixing the game + missing some revenue. But Battlefield didn't have a lot of marketing going for it.
 

Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster
Why was the PS5 the target?

Just after the bit suggested in the OP, they talking about how they got their first PS5 devkits in August 2019 and started looking to see how the game ran on it. And at that point they were noticing points where it was crashing back to 30fps from 60, which showed them where there were stalls and bottlenecks that needed to be fixed.

Remember the key thing is that all these changes were being done by the technical design team, so it wasn't impacting the engine at all, it was all the event scripts and blueprints running on top that were causing issues. Basically thats a shitty thing to deal with because its a step removed from the core code in terms of who's responsibility it is. The designers are tasked with implementing events and debugging the "action", but performance issues (beyond obvious fuckups like spawning too many entities on a certain trigger) aren't typically their wheel-house.

Fortunately it seems like their technical designers had solid coding skills so were able to work back and fix stuff from their end, but that's not always the case, and when that happens it can result in a lot of discussion and finger-pointing as to who's exactly at fault!
 

Kerotan

Member
Well imagine the cost of not delaying it. Cyberpunk if it launched in a working state wouldn't have lost millions of sales.
 
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