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  • This was due to something that happened between (roughly, very roughly) 2005 and 2015. Games went from being made by a bunch of nerds who really wanted to make games, to a more corporate setting, to a marketing setting.

    Fifteen years ago QA would declare Alpha, Beta, etc, in that the build fit the criteria for each state. Then, marketing would set a date, and on that date, Alpha, Beta, etc would be 'ready.'

    This lead to huge problems. There was a time where Alpha meant Feature Complete, and that there were only a few major crashes. Beta meant you had no, or virtually no, reproable crashes, game ending bugs, etc. (Then later) once marketing took over, it didn't matter. Instead of Beta being a checklist, it was just 'March 10th.'

    In addition to this, innovative and cool game design ideas are harder to sell visually than 'we doubled the poly's!' So more and more focus was put on visuals to the point where marketing would assign things to the design team, IE. "It has to have battlefield COD tarkov CSGO TF2 Popular Game-like mechanics, gameplay, etc."

    So now you get games shipped with incredible graphics and garbage stability. I've been on projects where crashes later in the campaign were changed from P1 to P2 because reviewers likely wouldn't make it to the point where those would come up. (This is called 'punting'.) In addition, having arbitrary dates decide major milestones means that builds are constantly broken, all through the process of creating them. You know how people get that 'beta' build of a game and ask why it's so crash happy, why it runs like shit, etc? It's because the game has literally never been stable. It's been assigned Alpha and Beta based on a calendar, and time is never allowed to delay to fix issues. Add to that that the owners of game companies will give publishers absolutely asinine claims about how long a game will take. Most franchise games, 'AAA'-wise, are made in 18 months. However, they often also had six months of pre-production before that. Marketing took that out, and focused on a game every 12 months. They used a secondary studio for the 'B-Team' and thus every second game in the series was made by said 'B-Team'. B-Teams were given even less time, and often no pre-production, so the entire game would effectively be made in 12 months.

    Then they lay off 50-70% of the staff, and start all over.

    So if I may end this way, do not go into games. If you like them make them in your free time. You will be treated like an animal and be unemployed about 1/4 of the time if you choose the industry. Of all the people who I worked with in my first company, maybe six are still in games.

    Stay away.

  • Also 90% of the development time went into making this feature, so a few cuts had to be made in less important areas like gameplay and story.

  • I like playing minecraft to relax a lot of the time.

    One game mod I was always interested in was a game character with a life span.

    Normally, you can play a game like minecraft in hard core mode .... basically one life and when you die the game is lost completely. I see many hard core mode players who can make their game last months or years and in some instances, they've carefully crafted everything to the point where they are more or less protected from everything. They could play it indefinitely, at least within an actual human lifetime.

    One Mod I'd like to see is to have a hardcore mode ... but with a built in lifespan and an aging character. Give the character a lifespan of about 80 human years ... a day in minecraft is 10 minutes I think ... so here is my calculation ....

    Roughly 82 years can be broken down to 300,000 days ... so if a minecraft day cycle is ten minutes of day and ten minutes of night - we multiply 20 with 300,000 and you get 6 million minutes, which adds up to a maximum of about 11.4 years of real human years of active game playing.

    So an entire hard core mode game cycle would be programmed for a maximum lifespan of 6 million minutes or 11.4 years of playing time ... but there is a catch.

    Of course you could die by the usual ways of accidental death. But your player is spawned as a weak child character for the first 750,000 minutes (37,500 minecraft day/night cycles) - (which corresponds to the first ten years of human life) ... don't worry, you are born into a village that protects you, or at least tries to and you have to figure out how to survive by not being able to hold tools, weapons or use basically anything other than to eat whatever you can find and shelter in place.

    A teenaged period could be programmed in for the next ten year cycle but we'll just skip to full adult for now.

    So starting at 37,500 minecraft day/night cycles ... you automatically become an adult and now the game can start as usual. However a clock starts working in the background. For the next 3,000,000 minutes (150,000 minecraft day / night cycles) - this corresponds to the human ages from 10 to 50 - you are more or less a healthy normal adult.

    After this point, your character requires more food and food doesn't last as long in your system. You are also 30% slower, 30% weaker and you incur 30% more damage when hit (regardless of what equipment you carry)

    The next stage is started after this period ends (this corresponds to human ages 50 to 70) ... now for the next 1,500,000 minutes (75,000 minecraft day / night cycles) ... your character ages again .. you are now 30% more slower, 30% more weaker and you incur 30% more damage with every hit (regardless of what equipment you carry) ... at this point your character is moving around 60% slower and can't do much any more.

    The last segment is the last ten years of life (from age 70 to 80) ... 750,000 minutes (37,500 minecraft day/night cycles) ... if you survived this long, you can now barely move and everything is dangerous to you again ... like the first ten years of life. At this point, no matter what you do, if you achieve everything and stay safe to the end of the clock, your player just dies and the game is over without any choice.

    I don't know if anyone would enjoy that game or not ... I'm not sure if I would either ... but I would probably by excited about it at the same time.

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