Times Where Not Delaying a Game Hurt It?

[Moonface]

With delays being commonplace for games for... I don't actually know how long it became a common practice actually but it's a long time at least, I thought it could be interesting to look at times where a game wasn't delayed and it suffered for it. It doesn't necessarily have to be that the game was clearly unfinished or something, because there are games that feel fine but once you look into the development of it you learn that it could've still benefitted from more time in the oven.


One such example that I always think of is Uncharted 3. The game was announced officially in December 2010, and Naughty Dog came right out with the release date of November 1, 2011. At the time, Naughty Dog had never delayed a game, and were adamant in continuing that trend with this game, even when it started to become increasingly challenging for the developers to meet that deadline.

Announcing your ship date the day that you announce your game is not a great idea! Our reveal trailer included our release date and sticking to that was extraordinarily difficult. We had to pull most of the (already very limited) resources from early development on The Last of Us, and it was still a challenging development process for us.

There was one critical moment in particular when by pure luck the Vice President at the time Christian Gyrling discovered the game didn't run on OG PS3 models just days before the game was set to be manufactured.

The game was almost done. We had sent most of the team home to play the game as we were only a few days away from submitting the final build to Sony for manufacturing. I myself brought the game home and started playing the game from the beginning. After a few hours of playing, the game started having glitches. The glitches got worse and worse until enemies would be invisible, the ocean became blood red, and levels would be outright missing. I freaked out, and the next morning, I walked into Evan's office saying, “We can't ship the game like this.” Playing the game for a few hours on older PS3s would in almost all cases result in a broken game experience. I had, however, come up with a hypothesis about what was going on with the game. I sat down with the senior programmers and discussed the issue and my proposed solution. They agreed that we should make the fix, but we needed to know if it really did fix the issue. I made 2 versions of the game. One was the current “broken” version of the game but with some debug text printing on the screen. The second version was the “fixed” version, and it also had debug text printing on the screen. If our hunch was right, we would be able to see that from the numbers printing on screen for the two versions. We had two of our QA staff play through the two versions of the game side-by-side. We all stood there watching them play, and lo and behold, the numbers started confirming the hypothesis. After an hour, the one tester that was running the “broken” version of the game started seeing glitching, the other one did not. We ended up putting the fix in and shipping Uncharted 3 with this critical bug fix just 2 days later.

Source: https://www.naughtydog.com/blog/uncharte...nniversary

Naughty Dog would drop their trend of never delaying a game after Uncharted 3, and I'm glad because even though the game is fine I wonder if some of the issues with the story or missing details (I discovered recently that enemies in Uncharted 3 never react to being shot, but do react in every other Uncharted game) could have been ironed out if there hadn't been such a push to stick to that original release date come hell or high water.

[Maniakkid25]

Name an Obsidian Entertainment game pre-Pillars of Eternity. It probably needed more time in development. And that's through no fault of Obsidian Entertainment's.

See, the problem was that Obsidian used to have a more mercenary approach to development. They were hired by a company, they were given a contractual deadline to make the game, and the game would be shipped in that state, come hell or high water. The first time they had freedom from that was Pillars of Eternity, given that game was crowdfunded.

But yeah, before then. Oh, god, the stories I could tell. KotOR 2's cutting room floor, Fallout New Vegas, Alpha Protocol -- the list seriously goes on for days.

[Moonface]

See, the problem was that Obsidian used to have a more mercenary approach to development. They were hired by a company, they were given a contractual deadline to make the game, and the game would be shipped in that state, come hell or high water. The first time they had freedom from that was Pillars of Eternity, given that game was crowdfunded.

I wonder how many publishers back in the day had this approach of "this is the deadline, end of story" only because I never really saw games getting delayed until at least the PS3/X360/Wii gen, even when it was something like Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex where development had to restart from scratch and the developers were only given twelve months to do it.

[Maniakkid25]

Back before the PSX era or so, this was actually not that uncommon. NES Metal Gear was rather infamously developed in 3 months. It used to be that games either made their deadline (for better or worse), or they were outright cancelled. This, of course, assumed that games had a hard and fast deadline in the first place. It isn't until the mid-90's that are held back for whatever reason, the most famous ones being Duke Nukem Forever and Daikatana. I'm certain if I went digging for it, I'd find the odd SNES game or something that was delayed for whatever reason, but that was the general trend as far as I'm aware.

[Moonface]

Back before the PSX era or so, this was actually not that uncommon. NES Metal Gear was rather infamously developed in 3 months. It used to be that games either made their deadline (for better or worse), or they were outright cancelled. This, of course, assumed that games had a hard and fast deadline in the first place. It isn't until the mid-90's that are held back for whatever reason, the most famous ones being Duke Nukem Forever and Daikatana. I'm certain if I went digging for it, I'd find the odd SNES game or something that was delayed for whatever reason, but that was the general trend as far as I'm aware.

It's crazy then how delays became more prominent as we got closer to and ultimately into the era where games can be patched post-launch, rather than being the other way around where delays would be more prominent when nothing could be done to a game once it shipped and then gradually became less of a thing in favor of post-launch patches to fix things that would usually be done through a delayed release date.
But I guess since games were simpler to make back in the day and nowhere near as complex as they are now that nothing that major could happen for most games to even need a delay at that time. Like as stupid as it was for games like the two we've mentioned already to be crunched out in such a short time, you could never make a game that quickly today unless it was some small indie title or itch.io game.

[Maniakkid25]

Pretty much, yeah. But even back then, there was such a thing as post-launch updates. It just meant a revision, rather than a patch. As an example, Super Mario Bros. 3 has a revision that materially changed the code, Metroid Prime famously removed several speedrun exploits in its Greatest Hits version, Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic Adventure 2 (specifically the Dreamcast version of SA2) had to be re-released to fix game-breaking glitches, and Ocarina of Time has not 2, but 3 different versions of its cartridge, each with little tweaks that make them all slightly different (the most glaring change being changing Ganondorf's blood from red to green). So, the idea of post-launch support is not a new thing, believe it or not. It's just we live in an era now that makes it so much easier to "fix" games after they are released.

Edit: pretty sure it was Sonic Adventure 2, not Sonic Adventure, now that I think about it.