Tech over Game

So rumor has it The Division will not hit the shelves in 2014 after all. Last month, after the VGX awards, I mentioned the game and the “gameplay” trailer they showed, noting that it was an impressive tech demo but nothing more.

If this latest rumor turns out to be true (and it sounds very true to me as a developer), it goes to show that focusing tech alone, regardless of how awesome it is and how stunning it looks, is not the way to make a good game.

Developing tech is cool. Any studio using their own, in house developed engine and tools can focus that tech development to suit their needs. Lighting, destruction, rendering open worlds, real time editing, all these areas and features can be created to suit the needs of what the studio is after.

The drawback of course is, when you focus on tech so much (and often from scratch), your content creation team is sitting idly by. Of course artists will make assets, materials and characters. Of course designers will start on game design, perhaps even basic level design. Of course you can make music, VFX and sound effects. Of course you can design some GUI elements.

However the proof, as they say, lies in the pudding. Until you can see some of these elements come together in engine and play the game, you won’t know what works and what does not. You won’t know what you can actually make with that awesome tech you have available.

You can’t start full scale content production in earnest. And this is why I am not surprised about the rumor from Massive. They got some awesome tech running now (and hey, it only took them 4 years). So now they have a game to make. They probably don’t have much beyond demo they have shown. And creating a game, actually creating the content, creating the missions, creating the story elements, scripting the whole thing, testing it, bug fixing it, polishing it, all that takes time as well.

I would not be surprised if The Division would hit close to Christmas 2015 or perhaps even later. Of course Ubisoft can throw 600 people on a project in a pinch to help push content, so I might be wrong.

I have worked at a studio that once tried to create their own tool set and re-work an existing (in-house) engine to suit the needs of the project. We used an engine created for racing and tried to make a first person shooter. We failed miserably. It took well over a year before we actually had an editor worth using. Until then all our prototyping was done in CryEngine, all our levels designed and built in Sketchup. About a year after starting we had to switch to our own tools and engine simply because our timelines were too tight and we had to show something – it was not pretty. We had tons of throwaway work.

Creating your own tech is awesome, but it has to be planned for properly and (IMO), development of tech and tools has to sit outside of a project plan. I am taking a guess here of course, but (considering announce dates for the game) Massive did not plan to develop tools for 4 years and then develop a game. They probably planned for both to be done at the same time, perhaps allowing for a slightly longer dev cycle due to tech development. Some companies do this right, or primarily specialize in tech. But many studios still think it’s easy to do games and tech at the same time, or at the very least they underestimate the work involved.

Regardless of how awesome this game will end up being (and I really have very high hopes), I think it’ll be another good example of a project running too long and too expensive because of poor judgment and leadership calls and bad planning, focusing on the wrong things, underestimating time and effort in the process. I hope the game itself will be given enough time to develop, rather than forcing it out the door to try and keep slippage to a minimum. Gameplay and content takes time to do well, regardless of how empowering, real-time and fun a tool is to work with.