For instance, Masahiro Sakurai, from Smash Bros, initially explained how Rex, from Xenoblade Chronicles 2, was cut from the roster in Smash Bros Ultimate due to time constraints. At first, this was taken a bit… awkwardly, because later he added Byleth from Fire Emblem Three Houses, when that game was in development.
However, when Pyra and Mythra were added, also from Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Sakurai explained how it wasn’t possible to have Rex playable with a swappable Blade, due to the Switch’s hardware limitations.
Here’s what I understood later on: if Sakurai stated that “Rex wasn’t added due to hardware limitations”, when Smash Bros Ultimate was released in late 2018, less than 2 years in the Switch’s lifespan, that… wouldn’t have been good publicity ^^;
So yeah, was there a developer’s excuse/justification that you only understood later?
As someone who makes games as a hobby, I 100% side with the devs in these situations because I’ve experienced, first hand, the time consumption of game development. I used to be much less understanding and more critical (typical on Reddit). But after thousands of hours of game dev, being on multiple failed projects, and with nothing to show for it – the only real excuse is that they didn’t work 24/7 on it. That’s the hypocrisy of Reddit in a nutshell: no excuse for failure, work harder. Also, crunch is ruining the industry…
In my experience game design was nothing but crunch. 16 hour days of debugging, refactoring, learning from mistakes, etc.
Console hardware limitations were always a big problem. I can remember releasing a game for the ps3 and xb360 during their regular lifecycle, and it was extremely difficult to get everything to fit in 512mb of ram… Ram was always the hard one with those two.
Consoles are always extremely underpowered. Games made for them just have exact requirements to meet, so they seem “fine”. Working with consoles made me never want another one, heh. Giving up too much from ports because of arbitrary hardware limitations.
Rareware had a LOT of games delayed on N64. That and Mother 3 getting canceled on there made a lot of sense when I got older and learned what shitshow it was to develop for it.
It’s pretty easy to understand. Ultimate’s roster was finalized in 2016. Sakurai didn’t play Xenoblade 2 until 2017 or after - it was too late to add him to the base game.
Nintendo decided the DLC for Smash, not Sakurai. Nintendo must have felt they wanted to promote an upcoming Fire Emblem game when the DLC was decided on.
Maybe Nintendo suggest Rex as well but Sakurai said movement wise it wasn’t possible, but Pyra/Mythra were.
About Sakurai not deciding the DLC… I don’t think that’s entirely true. Most weren’t his choice, but a few -like Joker and Terry- were.
Here Sakurai said the list of possible DLC characters was made entirely by Nintendo. Sakurai just told them whether a character was possible as a fighter. Beyond that who knows how much input he had.
Mercenaries 2 having so much cut content. It was later on that the company folded due to severe fucking by EA, after canceling mercs 3.
I’m not sure if it’s ever been justified per se, but being booted out of levels in Super Mario 64 (and Sunshine) has always been a point of contempt for modern standards, but when you look at it through the lens of the time, the levels are actually tiny, and I’m sure that both from a development and marketing standpoint, everyone knew, and as such made the conscientious decision of milking every bit of resources, and it’s probably why the mission structure was implemented in the first place.
Most people really overlook that prior to this game, everyone and their mothers were just beginning to figure out how 3D works both from a development and game design standpoint.
Yes I recently finished the PC port of Mario 64 and it has an option to not exit the level after collecting a Star. With this turned on, you can complete the game in half the time. The levels are incredibly short.
One that I continuously understand is developers not optimizing games properly.
From optimizing for consoles which is significantly underpowered compared to the PCs devs use, to optimizing for every PC GPU and CPU.
Recent example is Larian saying they couldn’t launch Baldur’s Gate 3 on Xbox day one because of the Series S.