...ah! Hey all, Scott here, and I'm in the middle of some hot and heavy game development. I got contracted by a publisher to squirt out a game for 'em. Let me catch you up on the development cycle. Step 1: I do the work. Step 2: disaster strikes. Step 3: explaining myself. Hey boss, funny story. So, uh, the hard drive corrupted. And finally, step 1: I do the work. This happens every two weeks! I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M DOING WRONG!! Hell, two definitions: eternal damnation and developing Duke Nukem Forever. Video games don't get enough credit sometimes. They're basically an amalgamation of every other type of entertainment and the development process that comes with them. Behind most triple-A releases are designers, programmers, writers, artists, musicians, producers, caterers… It's like a film production gone wacko! To expect a new game to be fully developed in t-minus 10 minutes is a bit unrealistic. I'd say with most games after they're announced, it's fair to expect to play them in one to two years, three years max. But some games need more time in the oven. And buy "more time in the oven", I mean more time in the oven. Development hell, although a term not exclusive to video games, has been around the medium for as long as it's existed: development that just takes way too long due to any number of problems. These are games with a development history that, sometimes, is more interesting than the final product itself. Gran Turismo 5 had a stupid long development for a racing game, starting around 2005 and ending in 2010. The games Gran Turismo HD Concept and Gran Turismo 5 Prologue came out to alleviate the weight by giving consumers a taste of what the game had to offer. When it finally came out, I gotta hand it to them. They made a Gran Turismo game on the PlayStation 3, alright. L.A. Noire went through a large amount of delays after starting development in 2004 and finally releasing in 2011, which the long development was probably due to the tech behind the project and/or the terrible work conditions of the employees at Team Bondi. Team Fortress 2 took 9 years, Diablo 3 took 11. But one of the most well known games that just refused to come out was The Last Guardian. Notoriously in development hell for a while, The Last Guardian was the third title coming from Team ICO after ICO and Shadow of the Colossus, two of the most beloved games of all time. It was announced for the PlayStation 3 in 2009, but after numerous development problems, the title was noticeably absent from all E3s after '09. A Tokyo Game Show trailer appeared in 2010, but other than that... nothing. With rumors of a cancellation appearing every now and then. Thankfully the game was rerevealed at E3 2015 for the PlayStation 4 and eventually released in late 2016 to a general consensus of… Many agreed that the game felt a bit dated control-wise. Now, I haven't played Last Guardian yet, but I have been playing the recent remake of Shadow of the Colossus on PS4 and if it's anything like that game, it has some grade-A moments, but man, does it like to clunk out sometimes! Elongated development cycles can change a game drastically and what's initially revealed turns out to be almost indistinguishable to the final product. Easy example: Mother 3 goes from 3D N64 game in the mid 90s to 2D GBA game in 2006. Beyond Good and Evil 2 was originally supposed to be a straight-up sequel to the cult classic from 2003, with a reveal trailer debuting in 2008. Then we got a monkey saying "f*ck" in 2017 as a prequel and still no concrete release date. Final Fantasy XV started development as Final Fantasy Versus XIII back in 2006, a side game based on Final Fantasy XIII, but taking place in a different universe with completely original characters. At this point, I think many of us would look at that and say: "Why connect this to XIII when you can make it its own thing?" That's more like it. Doom 4 transformed into DOOM (2016) after 9 years, which definitely did that game a solid. Prey experienced a lot of changes from 1995 to 2006, which actually helped it in the long run allowing the game to take advantage of newer hardware. Sometimes, a long development cycle can be for the best. BUT of course, development hell can greatly affect a game's quality in a negative way and help contribute to why a game turns out like this. A lack of focus, constant shifts of management and goals, simple incompetence can all be key to producing a less than stellar experience that takes 40 years to make. Take for example, Devil's Third. I recently Scott the Woz'd an episode about this game. Yeah, I don't think it's as bad as others act like it is, but even I have to admit, hey, no Mario Party 6, that's for sure! This game is still pretty lame, and I think a lot of it is definitely due to it being worked on since 2008. Ride to Hell: Retribution is a fun spit can for chewing tobacco, but a pretty terrible game. This was announced all the way back in 2008 with a 2009 release date slated and this is just a different game. THIS was cancelled. And in 2013, we got THIS out of nowhere instead. For some reason, the original version was scrapped and then this guy was cobbled together after everybody already forgot it was ever announced. Too Human f*cking blew and this thing took nine years, hopping from console to console until it made its way onto the Xbox 360. The use of Unreal Engine 3 in the game caused a lawsuit between Silicon Knights and Epic Games, which Silicon Knights lost and thus bankrupted them. So hopefully Too Human was worth it- Oh God. But… what if there was a game that spent years in development where it changed drastically, quality was thrown out the window, but it somehow was completely faithful as a sequel? Easily the most famous game that took forever to actually come out. Duke Nukem Forever was a bit of a punchline in the gaming industry for years. Duke Nukem 3D was a pretty big success of the time critically and commercially, but even before the game wrapped up development, a new Duke game was being brainstormed. Really, the first thing to stem from the development of Duke Nukem Forever was the name. They legitimately just wanted to make the game simply to use the title "Duke Nukem Forever". Originating as a 2D game, similar to the first few Duke Nukem titles, it quickly turned into a sequel to 3D. 3D Realms kept teasing the game even after switching engines a few times, going from the Quake 1 engine to the Quake 2 engine, which was used in the game's 1998 reveal trailer, to the Unreal Engine, which was used in the game's 2001 trailer. All progress was scrapped and restarted again in 2003. And then again in 2006, which caused many 3D Realms employees to quit. The relaunched project was teased in 2007, and then publisher Take-Two sued 3D Realms for their incompetence at actually finishing the game, and the whole development team was let go. They form a new company, Triptych, to continue working on the project. Duke Nukem is bought by Gearbox Software and finally, things start to get finished. A new trailer is released showing tons of gameplay and the game is slated for a May 3rd, 2011 release. Before getting delayed one last time to June 10th. But hey, it actually released! Regardless of the reception of the game, It was amazing to see it come out at all. Now, let's rip the less out of regardless and actually tucked the reception of the game. Duke Nukem Forever didn't turn out to be the cutting edge magnum opus it was originally slated to be. In some ways, the 2001 trailer actually looks better than what came out 10 years later. I will give Duke Nukem Forever this: it was a very faithful sequel to Duke Nukem 3D, with the same style and humor in tow. If you wanted a new Duke Nukem game, Duke Nukem Forever did that and I think it did it pretty well. The problem is many of the original fans of Duke Nukem 3D's crude humor grew out of it by the time of Forever's release, and the only thing forever really had compared to other shooters was its crude humor. What we ended up with was a completely average game with pretty lame jokes that felt five years behind everything else. Duke Nukem Forever's only claim to fame when it launched was how long it took to launch. Why talk about games that survived development hell when we can talk about the games that are still lingering in it? These are games that have been announced a while ago yet still haven't surfaced. You can definitely refer to some of these as vaporware, which is a term that definitely goes hand in hand with development health. Vaporware is used to describe products that just never come out. They're never officially cancelled, but it's pretty obvious they were. Anybody remember Street Fighter × Tekken? Correct answer! Nobody does. It was in fact a Street Fighter and Tekken crossover, but with gameplay that was more so Street Fighter with its 2D fighting style compared to the Tekken's 3D style. But what if we got another Street Fighter and Tekken crossover that plays like Tekken? Well, we're in luck! Son of a bitch. And that was at the same time as Street Fighter × Tekken in summer of 2010. That game only took Capcom a year and a half to squirt onto store shelves. Tekken × Street Fighter really didn't get any development updates at all and as of 2016, the game has been put on hold. Being eight years since the announcement, I think it's fair to say the game in its original state… has been cancelled, If it released around the same time as Street Fighter × Tekken, that would have been a little weird to see both games on the shelf. You have Street Fighter × Tekken and Tekken × Street Fighter. That's the perfect opportunity for the worst Christmas ever for the Tekken × Street Fighter fan asking their mom for the game. Agent was supposed to be a huge PlayStation 3 exclusive developed by Rockstar Games. Well, the game has some development history dating all the way back to 2003. The title was initially teased in 2007 and officially announced in 2009 at Sony's E3, press conference. That's it. Really, a few screens were leaked from people who worked on it, but no true trailer ever released, and the only real concrete info we ever got on the title was the title. However, even when all odds are against it, ever being considered anything other than canceled, Take-Two Interactive keeps renewing the trademark and the game is still listed on Rockstar's website. Still coming to the PS3 with a release day of TBA. Of course, there's the Final Fantasy VII Remake, which taught me even a game that's already out can sometimes refuse to come out. Yeah, I know the remake is basically a completely different game, but... …come on, this is ridiculous... a remake of Final Fantasy VII has been requested for years and Square knew it. The game was officially confirmed via a teaser at E3 2015 and gameplay was officially revealed at the PlayStation Experience later that year. And now, nothing! They announced it was gonna be an episodic release, everybody barfed, we got some teaser images. That's it. It's definitely because Kingdom Hearts III was busy being developed which on its own took an extraordinary amount of time from 2013 to 2019. Dead Island 2 is the sequel to that one game I think we only remember because of my favorite depressing reveal trailer of all time. Like, man, everything's going backwards! 2 was a drastic shift in tone if we're going by its reveal trailer. It had a metric 12 times more Jack Black than Dead Island 1 even though the Jack Black voice in the trailer turned out to be Not Jack Black McGee. Anyways, yeah. This game still hasn't come out yet. It was announced in 2014, swapped developers. And yeah, that's about it. There's that Dreams game by Media Molecule for the PlayStation 4. Listen, this thing was announced alongside the PlayStation 4 in 2013. It's still not out and I still don't know what the hell it is. And of COURSE... Half-Life 3, or Half-Life 2: Episode 3. Alright, Half-Life 2, dunzo, followed by Half-Life 2: Episode 1. I know, kind of confusing title, but it's a follow up to Half-Life 2. Half-Life 2: Episode 2 follows Episode 1 and leaves things on a cliffhanger. 10 years, 10 months and 24 days later and that's all we got. And from what leaked concepts and former Valve employees imply, it's fair to say that plans for the next entry in the Half-Life series were canceled or put on hold indefinitely. However, I maintain that eventually, EVENTUALLY, it'll come out. Or just a straight-up reboot of the series will happen. But when it does… [Scott, buried] Aw hell yeah! Problems with development happen, it happens with every game. But when the entirety of development is a problem, that's when it's safe to assume we ain't getting the game initially promised. Development hell has proven to be beneficial for some games, but more often than not, it ends up confirming disappointment at the end of the day. It unfortunately makes the journey more interesting than the destination sometimes. Instead of a project being remembered as what everybody who worked on it wanted it to become, many are remembered as that one game that never came out… until it did. I think one of the most annoying aspects of a game in development hell is the lack of info to the consumers. I just wish companies were more transparent about what's actually going on. Instead of saying: "We have nothing to announce at this point." Why not say: "Oh, yeah Duke Nukem's still coming out. We're just f*cking morons who don't know how to make a game!" I kid, game development is tough stuff! I should know. I've been working on this unknown game for a while now. Really, I have no idea what it is. I've restarted so many times, I don't even know if I'm working on the game at this point. Yikes! Well, like, better give them what I have at this point. Damnit, they never asked me to make a game in the first place. They asked me to make a Snickers bar.
Scott the Woz is dope. Started watching his videos a few days ago. From the thumbnail, I thought he was another lame, run of the mill game reviewer, but the dude is actually talented, funny, and his videos are pretty well crafted.
Duke Nukem Forever: I was the biggest laughing stock of the industry when I released
Aliens Colonial Marines: Hold my beer