Content vs. Gameplay. With such Long Dev Cycles, Who Wins?

Games used to be (almost) throwaway things: a few hours of content recorded to a cassette tape and sold for a few pounds at a local store. This short shelf-life was possible due to the equally brief development time, which, in 1982, ran for about six to eight months. As an example of how things still went awry back then, the now-legendary flop E.T. was made by one person – Howard Scott Warshaw – in five weeks.

Ambitions

Considering that Grand Theft Auto has only just been announced to be in active development, almost a decade after GTAV launched, and Bethesda Game Studios has done barely a thing since 2015, it’s clear that development cycles have lengthened almost to the point of impossibility. This approach is unusual in entertainment, though, especially in modern casino gaming. 

For example, Betfair deliberately creates its casino offers so that more games can be played at little to no extra cost. The operator gives out no deposit bonuses that increase a player’s usable credits. This, the site claims, allows a visitor to “master” a tricky live casino game by virtue of the fact that they have more funds to play it with. Betfair, like many other entertainment companies, wants to keep people busy.

So, where has gaming gone wrong? Better graphics and new engines take time – of course – but there’s a feeling that each new title is exponentially longer and more featureful, a trait that has caused more negative feelings than positive ones. Just about every game ever made by Bethesda has been riddled with bugs due to the scope of their ambitions. Much the same can now be said about recent efforts from CDProjekt Red.

Gameplay Loop

Still, there’s a gulf in how games should treat the length of titles because not everybody plays their new purchase the same way. The website Medium notes that developers need to find a balance between providing an interesting gaming loop, which describes every new thing the player can do, and the length of a story. In many cases, the former tends to reach its conclusion much sooner than the latter.

Vastly increasing the amount of content in a game seems to conflict with this idea, though. Side quests are the bane of many players’ experience in front of the TV yet developers seem to live and die by the amount they can include. Exhausting the gameplay loop thirty hours before the game runs out of fetch quests is anathema to good game design. Some games do love this model, though. 

RPGs tend to place content and story above gameplay in many cases – but that’s because their audience demands it. Increasingly, even games that purport to contain some RPG systems, like the Fallout and Resident Evil franchises, have lost much of the need or desire to do so by adopting elements from modern shooters. Do you want to shoot monsters or read these lengthy in-game books and solve that puzzle?

Inevitably, any game that opts for a mass-market approach to gaming is going to shed its niche elements once they stop providing a salable quirk. Sadly, for fans of a world’s lore and history, it’s worth getting rid of the excess content if it reduces development cycles. We’ll be here forever, otherwise.

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