Or are games like Cyberpunk or Red Dead just made with early-mid 2010’s tech?
Edit: to clarify, development didn’t actually start 8 years ago, but rather the game was announced 8 years ago. Thanks to the commenters for letting me know!
In: Technology
Interfaces/APIs or abstraction layers.
Everything talks to the engine via an interface or api. A layer between what you need for the game: textures, movement, physics calculations etc
You want to draw a circle so you call drawCircle() method in your code. Now you don’t care how the engine draws the circle but even more importantly all the code that the team uses is written so that they don’t have to.
The layer that actually does the drawing of the circle can be totally rewritten if need be but everyone else who uses it wouldn’t even know. Just update their dependencies.
Of course there are the bugs you have to deal with and the occasional deprecated call but other than that you start and finish doing the same work.
I actually asked my friend who works in game dev this same question the other day! She told me that for a big-budget AAA game like Cyberpunk that’s developed on a proprietary engine, the engine and they code they write for it are specifically designed in such a way that they can continue to do rolling updates throughout the development process without needing to re-write too much code. Game devs also get the specs for new hardware before it’s announced to the public, so the Cyberpunk devs were able to build their engine for the PS5 before the PS5 even officially “existed.”
She also told me that for smaller or indie games that are developed on non-proprietary engines like Unity, it’s more common that the game *is* technologically behind the times, just like you said here; but apparently it’s not too difficult to update your code to keep up with rolling tech updates if that’s something that’s important to you, so some studios do put in the extra effort to keep their games as up to date as possible throughout development.
In general games are done ahead of their time and when all the content is done it’s optimized to work on current generation of technology. For example almost all 3d models in the game are done in very high quality and then details are lowered and/or faked for version used in the game. If during the development there is a significant leap in technology you only need to make new version of in-game model not totally new model.
Like others have said CP2077 was probably done on in 4-5 years and before that it was mostly on paper. It’s worth mentioning that sometimes when game takes more than 3-4 years it means that initial stuff went to trash or at least most of it. So you can say that game was in production for 8 years, and it’s somewhat true, but the thing you are playing was actually made in 3-4.
Graphics are usually one of the last things done. Look at early builds of modern games and they’ll look like something from the PS1 era.
In my experience, a game our team was working on had to be either scrapped or rebuilt from the ground up when a major version of Unity came out. We had already spent a couple years on it and it wasn’t completely ready. Every day we fixed 2 bugs, 5 more showed up.
It seems like everyone working on Cyberpunk knew it wouldn’t be ready but they had a deadline and it needed to be met.
To answer your question, what developers do is they start over with new software or scrap the project if they can.
In many cases a framework like Unity or Unreal is used. In general the frameworks keep up with the changes so the game developers don’t need to focus as much on that. They may need to implement new features to take advantage of some of the advancements, though.
From experience of working in it, they will either tackle it by building on an engine that is extensible and can grow, worry about that problem when it happens, build on an engine where assets are easily portable to newer versions or in extreme cases entirely start over. I’ve personally seen the last one happen.
Maintaining any piece of software over a longer period of time can be like owning a car. Imagine if your car was all one piece, and any time something went wrong, you had to replace your entire vehicle. It would quickly be unsustainable.
Instead, car manufacturers have learned they can split the car into many pieces (engine, battery, tires, etc.). If one of the parts required fixing or becomes out of date, it is hopefully simple and less expensive to replace it with the latest version of that part.
i dunno how it works in game development but in industrial production series you have a preset of requirments it needs to get
so i guess you plan beforehand on which system you want to release so you have the lowest bar you need to hit but yea they should have kicked out xbone and ps4 and refund these preorders in the worst case via credit
Cyberpunk wasn’t in development for 8 years. It was maybe announced 8 or so years ago but development didn’t actually start until after The Witcher 3 blood and wine DLC so the game was only in development for the better part of 4 years, but to answer your question: Compared to the leap in changes from the early 2000s to now, the leap from say 2012-now is very small in terms of any new groundbreaking technologies. Apart from perhaps VR and Nvidias RTX technology there are very little significant changes been made in the past 8 years, sure lighting, shadows, textures, AI, environments are all better now because modern hardware can handle it but overall not a lot has changed in the past decade. Anything new or different that has to be implemented will be implemented via the game code or engine tools as development continues and most changes are of little significance that game code or tools can be updated as needed and do not pose any real hindrance to the development of the game. There are so many people working on AAA titles that there are always people on hand to make any changes that need to be implemented so development can continue as normal and not cause any delays.
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