Countdown to Mario Kart!

[Dark Jaguar]

You know, you seem to have forgotten your history. Shame on you two. Games tend to not have all the features originally wanted in them due to the very things LL speaks of.

This has happened with many talented groups, and is still happening, and to make it clear, happens in every single game. Let's not forget the great dirth of games that had to be completely retooled because they realized they couldn't realistically intigrate what they had in mind in the time frame they had. They are great, but not gods. Choices must be made. If memory serves you, Goldeneye didn't have everything they wanted in it. They had to remove a huge number of partially done features, and didn't even start adding others. Perfect Dark is the same, if you remember modes like tag the box that were originally intended to be in there. Final Fantasy 7 is one of the more infamous examples of programmers not adding everything they wanted to. Indeed, though they never once intened to revive... a certain someone... there was a lot of little quests they had wanted to add but didn't due to time.

They could have put that in there likely. AI race battles have been made before and they likely had the skill and the know-how. However, they would have had to delay the game for a while as they did it. That's not something that could have been "thrown together" over a weekend. Yea verily, even something like putting the classic guns in multiplayer would have taken longer than the 5 minutes people assume.

These are all top notch developers, but there will always be something here or there they "could have added" or "should have added" or "didn't add because they are lazy". There just wasn't enough time for: AI bots in battle mode, classic guns in multiplayer, a quest to unfreeze Zora's domain, a quest to speak with a certain someone one last time and get some extra items, let you ride Yoshi instead of just getting a new triple jump, 3 or 4 more dungeons to sail around to as Link, and so on. Indeed, Square makes a rather nasty habit out of rereleasing games with added features in Japan all the time. Generally, good companies release games when they feel they at least have all the CORE stuff they wanted to put in there.

One last thing. The Silmarillion was never finished by JRR Tolkien because he never thought it had everything he wanted in it. He kept adding and adding to it until time ran out, and his son was the one who finally finished it (though who knows if JRR would have found it complete). There's a lesson in that. That's to buy the new "wrap it up" box! No really, it's that one can never add EVERYTHING they want to and have to stop some time, and when you work for a company, they tend to tell you when you gotta wrap it up.

Now then, PC games (and XBox live games) have a small advantage. Programmers can keep on adding stuff even after they need to release the game. Of course, they still need to make money and time spent working here is time spent not working on a brand new game, so major stuff gets charged for (expansion paks, certain content).

Now, I'm a schizo, so on the gamer side of things, I totally get where you are coming from. As a gamer, I honestly don't care WHY the game feels incomplete to me, just that I'm not satisfied. From the perspective of a player, the behind-the-scenes don't matter. The result does.

Yeah, it's a big conflict of interests there. One side of me defending the attacks from the other side... Still, that's the thing. Programmers are always trying to find better, faster, and easier ways to get the job done. New languages and such for instance. Easy does NOT mean lazy. Easy means more gets done for you the gamer. Still, while langauges are easier and faster to use than ever before, there's also a LOT more stuff to do than ever before. Today's games are far more complicated in the code than ones in the past. Better graphics mean programmers have to take advantage of the better graphics, and that doesn't happen magically. I believe one of the main reasons games today may seem so incomplete is because they are being made in roughly the same amount of time, or shorter, but are far harder to make. If us gamers are willing to wait a few more years for games, that could help a lot. Adding programmers? Well, I can't imagine that helping too much. Having enough to seperate the various parts of a game up amongst different groups is one thing. But, add too many and you can't really cut down the work between them much more. One level down from what's "healthy" and you have people working on lots of small bits of code and they end up in meetings all the time trying (and failing) to coordinate everything. Two levels down and nothing's ever even planned because the programmers keep arguing over the best way to go about the bit of code they were all assigned to. Three levels down and the universe explodes. More doesn't equal good all the time. There's too little, and that's the only thing most people are aware of, but the other end of the scale is just as bad, if not worse (at least one person alone would get work DONE). It's finding the happy medium that's the goal. I think Nintendo has that done just fine.

Don't knock LL. He is ALWAYS right, always. :D