Delay your game

 This one simple trick will solve 90% of broken games! Publishers hate it!

Is your game shaping up to be a bit of a disappointment, or even an outright humanitarian disaster the likes of which could sink the income of a third world country? Are you beyond the help of 6 or so months of touch ups, but are clutching to the vague promise of 'this does not represent the final game' as though it's a study chunk of flotsam you can ride out of any and all troubled waters? Has your fanbase taken a look at the work you've been doing, turned around and said "This looks bad, I don't want to play this."? What can one do in such a scenario, heading towards the lips of a waterfall with no embankment to save them? Well, you could grab ahold of that jousting rod of saviour that's constantly jabbed in your face at all times, and delay the game. That's right! Just take a critical assessment and say "This could use an extra year in the oven and we've evolved enough as a society that the public are going to be okay with that, and once I tell investors how much more they stand to gain with the release of a finished product; they'll be okay with it too. So what's actually stopping me?"

I think too many developers lock themselves in on a deathmatch to a disappointing release even when every sign on the walls, on the their palms, in the blinking and glittering of the Stars themselves, prophesises a catastrophe. It doesn't get much more blatant then uploading that all important 'first look' trailer less than half a year until launch and facing the resounding feedback of "This isn't good and you can't fix this by the release date you've offered". As a triple A studio, or at least a studio with triple A backing; there really shouldn't be a point where such a proclamation doesn't offer itself as a life line to get you out of bother. You can afford to delay the release, you can afford to get better talent to spruce up the wanting areas, you can afford to act upon criticism before the release of the game in order to shore up those chances of success; you just need to have the humility to recognise a brick thrown at your presentation as a clear indication that things aren't going to plan.

 

First I'll call to the stand 'Gotham Knights', to serve as a relevant witness that some games just aren't there yet. Gotham Knights had it's first extended gameplay trailer since the reveal just recently and the feedback was decently unanimous; widespread mocking and condemnation. Although this game itself isn't a direct sequel to the Arkham games and I don't even think the same team is working on it (That team is handling 'Suicide Squad Kills the Justice League') there's no doubt that this new team are trying to springboard off the Arkham success in order to launch their title. It's called 'Gotham Knights' for goodness sake, they knew what they were doing! But when you piggyback off another brand for recognition, that springboard becomes a static state for comparison, and if you end up looking wanting people are going to crucify you for it.

The Arkham games were triumphs of storytelling, of combat action gameplay, of exploration and of visual design. Gotham Knights looks good so far, and the story they're stealing from is said to be a good one, but everything else is up in the air. The combat and exploration doesn't hold up to a game from over half a decade prior, and that should be something you'd be ashamed of. The animations don't flow as well, the movement is clunky, certain characters have slow and wanting movement suites, the enemies don't have complimentary diversity to them, the world navigation is ugly and disconnected from the makeup of the world layout- it's just a unfocused jack of a few trades and master of absolutely nothing so far. It needs a delay to polish up the gameplay significantly, and we're past the point of saying 'Oh well they've already done the movement and general feel of combat so there's only so much the team can do.' No, that's not good enough anymore. There's way too much choice of games to play for a triple A title to rest on the 'this is the way things are, take it or leave it' bed it's made for itself. Delay, rework; rip out the animation framework and start from scratch if you have to; otherwise this coming downfall will be your fault alone.

Cyberpunk 2077 is apparently living rent-free in my head, but so it should when it exists as such a prime example of why delays can be helpful. Now Cyberpunk never had the possibility of living up to it's own embarrassingly high expectations. It set itself up to fail, that much is a given. But the product we got could have least have arrived with some polish if CDPR had gone the highroad and delivered the game 'when it was ready' like they posited all those years ago with all the gall of a proud pelican with crossed talons behind it's back. Fast forward all these months later and CDPR have just about managed to squeeze the thing into semi-working shape, and now it seems their extended DLC plans have had to be scrapped in favour of a single questline DLC which will be the last project on that engine before they switch to Unreal entirely. (unless they remake Cyberpunk entirely in Unreal, that means fans are only getting the one DLC.) Now perhaps the broken early launch was strategic in order to give CDPR a problem it could 'fix' whilst conveniently forgetting how the breadth of the game they promised isn't even possible with the tools at their disposal, but I'm no conspiracy theorist so I'm just going to chalk this up to bad management who don't know when to pull the breaks on the hype trains.

Sonic Frontiers presents itself as another very topical example of exactly what I'm talking about here. A game that very much is not even approaching it's ready state and yet is due to land before the end of the year. It shouldn't, it isn't ready. Everyone can see that. But does Sega acknowledge our scepticism? Hell no, they throw more fuel on the fire whilst the community stands there aghast waiting for someone to do something. This is an opportunity to totally rewrite the Sonic landscape and create a new era of the franchise. Now it's pretty obvious from what we've seen that Sonic Team lack a game director imaginative and/or competent enough to actually go that distance, but at the second place prize would be an alright enough game that we can waste some time with; and what we're seeing right now isn't even going to scratch at that. Sonic Frontiers needs a miracle, and miracles take time to conjure, time which can be earnt with a delay.

And it's not as though delays are unheard of in the modern triple A space. Halo Infinite was a game that looked rough as all heck when it was first revealed to the public in a congested gameplay snippet and you know what- the team actually acknowledged the roughness of the game and went back to the drawing board. What they came back with was a Halo good enough to be considered the best of the current era of Halo games, which maybe doesn't mean all that much since there really isn't that much stiff competition to the title; but it's an accolade nonetheless. And whatsmore it proves that delays do happen and they can work! Starfield is also getting delayed as it was apparently heading for a disaster, and we don't yet know the outcome of that push back but we can safely say that whatever we eventually get is going to be better than what we would have had.

There simply is just no sensible reason to zoom into a rush job in the modern age of game development, not when the market is as flush with competent alternatives to literally every genre of game in existence. Fumble up on your face and people won't stick around to see the trainwreck, they'll move onto the next game which stuck their landing. Timing a release is important, no doubt; but we're past the age when releasing a mess and nursing it to working condition is a viable avenue to success. It's time consuming, reputation destroying and isn't even a guaranteed success. (Remember Anthem's execution) So game companies need to normalise the practise of delaying their games when it's needed, taking the time where they can and dropping the best possible first day product they can muster. Just like how I delayed dropping that Miyamoto quote which is apparently misattributed. (I have the restraint of several saints.)