Koki on 6/3/2009 at 08:34

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90% of all games ever released were made in under two years time. Are you fucking serious? Or do you just grossly overestimate how complicated STALKER is?

@New Horizon: Your post is so blindly fanboyish that it's almost painful to read. Yes, GSC didn't pull off it great plan, thank you for stating the obvious, that's actually what I'm talking about ITT. And yes, the world is cruel and unforgiving enough to treat failures as failures. Woe on us. Also, I really hope that by "advanced AI" you do not mean alife, because [If player enters map; check if there are any M at X; if yes, do nothing; if no, spawn M at X] I could probably code myself.

Ombrenuit on 6/3/2009 at 09:40

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* Half Life 2 - 5 Years
* Crysis - 3 Years
* Resident Evil 5 - 4 Years
* Killzone 2 - 4 Years


All blockbuster titles that took more than two years by veteran development houses with a pretty large budget.

Koki, I highly doubt you have any coding experience, nor can you fathom exactly how complex and difficult it is. When covering new (programming) territory, 90% of the process is trial and error, and a lot of backtracking. I really don't blame a newbie to the FPS genre with an inexperienced team and a small budget, in the old Soviet bloc to not exactly be efficient.

They obviously bit off a lot more than they could chew. But I can definitely sympathize. I've been trying to code a Roguelike text adventure on and off for a couple of years and progress is agonizingly slow. I'm self-taught, only learned from books. But attempting it never ceases to amaze me to exactly how many things are under the "hood" of a game.

I wish it was as easy as telling the computer, "When player pushes 'up arrow' move player up one."

JohnnyTheWolf on 6/3/2009 at 12:33

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STALKER is often referred as "Oblivion with guns". The later took about four years to make, yet I've been told it isn't worth shit without mods.



How many of them were as ambitious? Apart from RTS games, GSC did release two FPSs, Codename: Outbreak and Firestarter, but none of them were really inspired or memorable.



Modders work with already existing material. They don't have the same constraints.

Also, I've read somewhere that the russian modding community is actually getting help from GSC. If it's true, that would explain why they seem so much better in terms of modding and also how they managed to make mods such as AMK, when we were all thinking that STALKER could never be modded properly.

EDIT: Yes, I know about Codename: Outbreak.

Briareos H on 6/3/2009 at 12:58

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(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codename:_Outbreak) Rough, buggy but laid the basis for what STALKER would later be.

Koki on 6/3/2009 at 18:54

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And STALKER is?
When I was referring to more complicated games I thought mostly of RPGs like Fallout with ten cities, hundreds of NPCs, thousands of lines of dialogue and scripts, variables, and flags, stuff like having over nine intelligence and perception which allows you to unlock a hidden conversation piece in one location in the game with no effect whatseover.
Granted, it's a 2D game so you could say they had it easy with graphics, but how long could it take to make an FPP engine for Fallout? Year? Two? Still only 2/3 of the time GSC took with SoC.
(And we're coming back to the leaked pre-alpha, which was just that, entire FPP engine done ready to be filled with flavour)



None - none was also in production for six years. Finally, the argument was that GSC has enough coding experience. It's not their first game by any means.



Exactly - the modders basically just flip few switches and stuff appears out from nowhere. Which was exactly my argument, if modders, people with limited coding ability who just poke at the game with sticks and see what happens(as opposed to devs who know it inside out) can make so many things - emissions, global news network, improved alife fighting for locations - in such a short period of time, it was more than available to GSC in the first place. So it's not really case of having more than one can chew, isn't it?