Shenmue with it's 3D open world and concept of fully immersing the player in the role Tomb Raider with it's 'even the scenery can be explored' Mario 64, Crash Bandicoot and others with their demonstration of how to translate a platformer to a 3D world Each breakthrough in technology has been followed by iconic 'first of it's era' games, eg: The issue these days isn't so much time nor money but rather the difficulty in standing out from the pack when so much of game mechanics has already been discovered. Without a far more rigid plan, you can go into a Duke Nukem Forever spiral (and DNF was a far smaller team!) But try that with the Red Dead Redemption 2 team, trying to be at the forefront of everything.

At those sizes, saying 'when it's done', and letting yourself change direction and scope is fine. You can also make a 2d game, and tweak your game to perfection, like Stardew Valley. You can make a beautiful, shorter game with a small team, like Outer Wilds. That said, we still have small teams that might work on a game for a very long time, but they have to aim far lower technically, or in scope. A linear increase in team size gets you a geometric increase in coordination costs. With teams being far larger than they were to meet a 3 year plan, marshaling a modern AAA game team to rework large parts of a game has little to do with managing to do the same with a team from the late 20th century. If you are predicting a 3 year release cycle(not unheard of to this day at large publishers), and you are delayed by 2 extra years, the hardware you are targeting is different, and the amount of art you have to upgrade or completely remake is crazy compared to Deus Ex. Sources say that the internal standards for a Half Life 3 are so high, it led to many restarts and a lot of work being thrown away.īut the real reason we don't have games that run as long as Deus Ex is that the cost of reworking what was already there have exploded since those days.

Work on Half Life 3 never really stopped, and we had a 13 year wait between Half Life Alyx and Half Life 2, episode 2. Money not being an issue can still happen: See Valve, which have a money printing machine in Steam, along with a few long living, lucrative games.

Deus ex too dark