Currently playing a beta of an upcoming game and have no idea if/how much the developers can change things when there’s a month before release. When there is already so much work and detail put into creating a video game over years, how much can really be changed in a month or even a few and how?
In: Technology
There’s some differences in the types of changes that can be made.
There’s fundamental changes to something like the game engine or entire game mechanics in the game.
Taking an FPS and adding in a brand new vehicle and driving system is probably hard and couldn’t be done easily, it’s a fundamental shift in the game play and the objects and interface and physics etc…
But sometimes you could make a big change to the game play, balance or feel and look of the game that doesn’t actually require a huge change to the underlying mechanics of the game.
You could take the same fully developed team based FPS mode and add in a Battle Royale mode and its probably not that hard. You haven’t changed the characters, the guns, the physics, the damage, the movement or anything, you’ve just created a bigger map with more players and added some shrinking zone mechanic. A good example is Fortnite, originally a co-op building game turned into a Battle Royale and done pretty quickly
in a Strategy game like StarCraft 2, the unit statistics in the Beta were very different from the actual launch for both the original game and both expansions, in many cases a complete redesign, deletion and addition of units.
This vastly affects how the game plays, but it doesn’t change how the game ‘works’
In fact in many games like Warcraft 3, StarCraft and StarCraft 2, because of map design features in the game, you can see how its actually quite possible to take the base design of an RTS and within a few weeks of work of a single coder, turn that game into a Tower Defense, a Version of Mario Party, into DotA, into an RPG, into a Diablo-clone etc…
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