Where is Development Hell?

 It lies in you and it lies in me!

We talk so often about this mythical space between land or sky, or perhaps land and that burning molten core of our earth, within which stunted development rules supreme. A place that game development slips into wherein no one escape unscathed, and where a simple genre game can balloon into hundreds and even thousands of hours more than it was originally supposed to take to make. You think that a game which takes around 10 years longer to make than you'd expect must be polished to a mirror gleam powerful enough to blind pilots in space, right? Not really, being stuck in Development Hell is typically an example of wayward management, iffy planning, shifting goalposts and/or fundamental concept shifts, all of which leads to crucial work being repeatedly chucked out, to devastating effect on everyone's personal progress. Development Hell is the death of efficiency and the death of ultimate fine tuned perfectionism. And it's becoming more prevalent as the industry grows.

I think back in the day the games industry was much more familiar with the basic idea of pitching a game concept, starting the work and then figuring out the whole process wasn't working and cancelling the thing. Heck, that's how we got famous vaporware stories like 'Starcraft Ghost', 'Battlefront 3', 'Agent' and 'Star Wars: 1313'. (Actually, that last one was cruelly killed by Disney after they gutted Lucas. The studio, not the man. They'd save him for seconds.) Whether it was due to the more prevalent presence of clueless venture capitalists driven by the 'young investor' motto of "Keep sinking money and you'll get returns one day." or simply how much cheaper it was to maintain development windows back before every studio was 400 bodies too large. Remember, nowadays you can somehow sink 100 million into creating something as milquetoast and drab as the Saints Row Reboot. How? God knows, but that ain't the sort of costs one shakes a stick at.

My theory is that as games have taken more and more resources to develop, both in manpower and funding, it's become harder and harder for the people pulling the purse strings to admit when it's all heading nowhere fast. With the typical sunk cost fallacy of any gambler settling in, they start to figure that if they pull out now then all that money which has already been spent has been totally wasted, but if only they put their head back on the tables and ride the dip that theoretical shot-caller can make it all the way back around, stick out the choppy waves and sail it to smooth waters and recovered losses. So the money keeps rolling on, the ugly development practises, bad teams, unproductive work cycles, just keep piling ontop one another and the resulting projects ultimately end up draining more and more life out of the studio, the staff and eventually the product on the other end. Usually proving more disastrous than it would have if a component leader had just stepped up and pulled the plug off rip.

Of course there can sometimes be other major factors in play. Anyone who's sat around scratching their heads as to why it is Ubisoft have been insisting on bringing out this 'Skull & Bones' for close to 10 years now; the answer is probably because they actually can't kill it off. The game was spurred on by a development grant from Singapore, and if I know Ubisoft I'm guessing that's a grant the company has already spent and aren't really in the financial position to refund. (Especially not after the recent couple of years they've had.) I'm going to be charitable and assume that all those development dollars went into the game they were supposed to. (And, in doing so, assume this isn't a 'Randy Pitchford funnelling funds meant for Colonial Marines into Borderlands' situation. Allegedly.) They have to bring out this game sooner or later, and take the reputational hit when it's dead in under a year just like their other similar titles because this game was built and geared for an industry that has evolved 10 years past where this project was when it started. Such is the toil and cost of the Development Hell.

I've found myself thinking of this most cursed of holes due simply to the situation surrounding a game that I was actually following for a time: Beyond Good and Evil 2. Wait- no, not that Beyond Good and Evil 2: the one which existed as nothing more than a CGI movie of Jade jumping through some desert buildings. I'm talking about the other Beyond Good and Evil 2. The one that existed purely as a CGI movie of a foul mouthed monkey... no, actually we did get some scant snippets of early alpha (or let's be honest, pre-alpha) gameplay over the many years since this second iteration of the game has been announced. But it seems that every year we ended up hearing less and less about the updates surrounding the game, until we reached the point we're at now where Ubisoft simply assures us that it hasn't been cancelled and tells us to go away.

It's actually quite an interesting little loop hole they're exploiting to get around fan disappointment, because Beyond Good and Evil 2 was, in fact, cancelled a very long time ago. That original version of the game not only changed in narrative drastically (from a sequel to a prequel) but in fundamental genre. (From a single-player action platformer to a Live-service style multiplayer hybrid thing.) By attempting to cajole the fans with the false promise that this current project is the same they were getting excited over back in 2008, Ubisoft have sacrificed their own dignity in technically making BGE2 the longest game in official development by a team of supposedly competent professionals. And if the habits established and reinforced by all the Development Hell denizens of times gone has taught us anything; it's to be more wary of a game the longer it languishes in that slip-space.

All the hallmarks of games developed long past a sensible timeframe are there in the pudding; the game is developing for a trend that has died down (live service titles are dropping like flies). The early game marketers went around boasting technology that sounded space age when we heard about it- an entire solar system rendered in-engine- but now we've got No Man's Sky which rendered about a dozen galaxies in it's game. Only really the genuinely gorgeous visual style of the world those initial trailers proposed remains, and that unique culture-smashing art style is inherent to the Beyond Good and Evil franchise as a whole, it's what made the first game's world so striking and memorable. But is that enough to ensure the game isn't going to be a stretched-out, uneven, years-too-late mess if it ever comes out? Who can say...

What makes the Development Hell so insidious, is that it's everywhere. Anyone who has ever sat down to pursue any sort of artistic endeavour has felt it's fingers creeping up their back as they work, slipping it's way around their throat. It's waits in every procrastination, every erased line, every break- threatening to curse those of us doomed to ever seek an untouchable 'perfection'. But try to run from it, never take your foot off the pedal, that in itself presents the cruel prospective of an inevitable crash at some point. It's a dance of mediation, managing a project or just managing yourself with that project- knowing when to start and most importantly, the thing the world seems to be somewhat forgetting, when to stop. Remember, even in the worst case scenario where everything has led off a bridge and the whole project needs to be scrapped- you are a better artist for having gone down that road to begin with, and can take those skills to the next empty page you work.