How do video games with long development periods remain up to date with current tech?

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This is an extreme example but take Star Citizen for example. This game has been in development for over 10 years. How do they take what they’ve already accomplished and keep it up to date? Especially things like graphics.

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16 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

You develop the game so the core gameplay mechanics are separate from the graphic rendering part. Then the graphics part can be improved without you modifying the core mechanism.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Generally they don’t. There are some cases where development is incredibly long, where they will have to dedicate time and resources to doing that. Duke Nukem Forever was the joke because that happened until it actually came out.

For cases where a dev is using someone else’s engine (Unity, as an example) the updating process to a newer version is simpler.

Also, Star Citizen is just another case study in how developers are bad at running game companies. No amount of money is going to make that game come out. You’ve been scammed, unintentionally at best case.

Anonymous 0 Comments

They usually don’t, which is why games that get stuck in development hell are often a big disappointment when they eventually release. It’s also why games are pushed out the door as soon as they’re in a minimum viable state, even if it’s not quite fully finished. With how quickly graphics technology advances and how important graphics are to sales (as much as gamers hate to admit it), a game needs to be released as soon as possible if it’s to have a chance of making back its budget.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Part of what makes Star Citizen…. what it is, is that they BUILT their own thing. They knew it would have a 5, 8, 10 year dev cycle, and possibly a 20 year support cycle. Part of the reason they did what they did was to build something using their own software to support it. They aren’t making a game that was “built around 2013”, they made a platform first and are making a game around that platform.

TLDR Star Citizen is a poor example of ‘long dev time’ for a game because they did so intentionally.

Anonymous 0 Comments

They (mostly) don’t. 10 year old games will have 10 year old graphics. This is why Star Citizen doesn’t look like, say, Starfield.

Anonymous 0 Comments

What’s funny and I guess apparently pretty unknown is that this was actually a criticism of one of the other big games Chris Roberts was known for: Freelancer

The project scope was massive and after a few times of being delayed it ended up being forced to scale massively down by Microsoft, and eventually launched with pretty outdated tech and graphics. Mind you though it was still an amazing game and I think pretty well received.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Sometimes they just don’t. Sometimes they work with chip companies to get information or even hardware for upcoming products to build/test against. Sometimes they work hard to modularize (separate) their code well to make it easier to upgrade the bits they want to upgrade. Sometimes they do some combo of all of the above.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Depends on if the game is delayed for many years or not. Most modern AAA games have long development time. Let’s say Nintendo starts making the next Legend of Zelda game this year, they won’t be targeting current tech but rather tech available in the next 5 years. It’s the same with GTA 6, or any other AAA game.

Also current tech are generally backwards compatible and can be implemented even for older games. Tech like ray tracing, frame generation, and all that can be retro fitted to older games with little effort.

Anonymous 0 Comments

They use what they have at their disposal at the time, with components that can be upgraded later.
In its simplest terms, you make 4k 120fps assets from the start, (masters) and downscale them for the game. Sort of like turning the graphics settings to low. If new tech came out during development you can just keep them closer to the master. Remember how Crysis came out before pcs that could play it at full res cam out?

Anonymous 0 Comments

If they’re a good company with a planned out development cycle. They don’t.

They take what’s cutting edge when they start development and make sure to streamline the development cycle so that it doesn’t take too long.

If you want to make a game where the development cycle is long then you’d better make sure that the main selling point is either gameplay or some kind of unique feature that’s so far off mainstream that nobody got ahead of you and published the same game earlier by using newer tech from the start to do the same thing but with a much more streamlined and faster development process. Otherwise you’ll end up a failure (Either hilariously bad and outdated or vaporware, ie no real product)