12th June 2006, 7:55 PM
My point. :)
... okay, DNF might not be Half-Life 2 level. But it certainly should be a good, fun game... as for length though, FPSes these days usually seem to end up at 10-15 hours. Not long by most genres' standpoints, but it's what most of them seem to end up at... Duke 3D was longer, but that was an older title, so who knows... and as for 'it's nine years into development', well... Half-Life 2 took six years. With a team two or three times larger than Apogee/3DR has, I believe. And it's not like they're still working on that same version, they've basically had to restart the thing several times... I'd say that as much as anything it shows how ridiculous development cycles are getting -- Elder Scrolls IV took like five years too (four?), for instance... the big titles keep taking longer and longer. That's why Valve has decided to make "Half-Life 3" be three episodic installments, instead of another five-year project -- so "Half-Life 2: Episode I" (which Valve has said could kind of be considered Half-Life 3, Episode I) is out now, not in three or four years. It's an interesting business model... yeah, it does seem like it'd be frusterating (getting like 5 hours into a game and then having it say "wait six months for the next part"...), but... is that worse than waiting three or four years for the whole thing at once? :) (Note that Sin Episodes and Bone are also working on this model, and the new Sam & Max game will be too)
... okay, DNF might not be Half-Life 2 level. But it certainly should be a good, fun game... as for length though, FPSes these days usually seem to end up at 10-15 hours. Not long by most genres' standpoints, but it's what most of them seem to end up at... Duke 3D was longer, but that was an older title, so who knows... and as for 'it's nine years into development', well... Half-Life 2 took six years. With a team two or three times larger than Apogee/3DR has, I believe. And it's not like they're still working on that same version, they've basically had to restart the thing several times... I'd say that as much as anything it shows how ridiculous development cycles are getting -- Elder Scrolls IV took like five years too (four?), for instance... the big titles keep taking longer and longer. That's why Valve has decided to make "Half-Life 3" be three episodic installments, instead of another five-year project -- so "Half-Life 2: Episode I" (which Valve has said could kind of be considered Half-Life 3, Episode I) is out now, not in three or four years. It's an interesting business model... yeah, it does seem like it'd be frusterating (getting like 5 hours into a game and then having it say "wait six months for the next part"...), but... is that worse than waiting three or four years for the whole thing at once? :) (Note that Sin Episodes and Bone are also working on this model, and the new Sam & Max game will be too)