Sequels are a bit of a different situation. (Gaming)

by Kahzgul, Thursday, April 13, 2017, 21:35 (2790 days ago) @ Xenos

To be clear, I'm sure there are people at Bungie who would love to have more time to work on Des2ny, but 3 years is not a totally unreasonable amount of time to create a sequel.

And, controversially, on the long side for the majority of mainstream franchises.

Yup. Most franchise games are in the 1-2 year cycle. 1 year if it's a sports type game where it's really just a small feature add and a roster update most years, and a major overhaul every 2-4 years. Call of Duty is a 2 year dev cycle where two different devs work on a staggered schedule so a game can still come out every year.

BUT these games are all being made on existing game engine code that someone else already developed. If you're in-house dev-ing the engine (a'la bungie), you're adding a huge amount of work to your dev cycle well before most of the other team members ever get started. I think 3 years for Destiny 2 is pretty reasonable given where they're jumping off from. Destiny 1 had enough time, too, but because of mistakes made early on in the design of the engine (really the backend toolkit design) and disagreements with/lack of coherent direction, they backslid a lot. That aside, it sounds like they know where they're going with Des2ny and I expect it will far outshine the initial offering.

Back to the topic at hand, the 6 years for HZD could be a very long time if they used someone else's engine, or a very quick time if they made it all from scratch. I didn't watch the interview so I can't really say.