On the night that the sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wilderness was announced to be postponed to spring 2023, several game exchange groups came alive over the same thing.
Some people speculate that the sequel will come with switch enhancements; some people think that this year's best game of the year will be "Eldon's Ring of Law"; some people look for details of the new work in the new shots of the postponed video for a few seconds; some people look at the apologetic Eiji Aonuma: Hey, the new hairstyle is good.
What, you say there is still a game that is not postponed?
As gamers, it is natural not to be happy to see the postponement of the release of the beloved game, but the game ticket jump itself, we have long seen the strange. After all, the game masterpiece is always postponed, far from it, the most famous in the past two years should be the "yellow map" postponement of "Cyberpunk 2077" again and again.
Whenever cyberpunk 2077 is approaching the scheduled release date, players wake up in the morning, afraid to see the picture of black characters on a yellow background, so that the original confused self can not sleep horizontally, and then after careful reading, the words are seen in the cracks: "postponed" is written all over the picture.
▲ The pressure plate will still be postponed
From April to September to November and December, Cyberpunk 2077 was repeatedly postponed, making the "yellow map" used to issue official statements synonymous with bad news, and even not writing a word would make players feel uncomfortable.
On November 18, 2021, Capcom released a video announcing that Pragmata, which was originally scheduled to launch in 2022, will be postponed to 2023, compared to the one-sided scolding of Cyberpunk 2077, Capcom is peaceful, as for the reason, it is because of the way it announced the extension:
In the video, a little Lori with a vivid facial expression, with apologetic eyes, holds up a sign that crosses out "2022" and changes it to "2023" and "sorry". Players' lower expectations for the game, combined with the previous Cyberpunk 2077 "Yellow Map Critical Hit", made this unpleasant postponement event tender.
Moreover, this 4K quality video, with its delicate skin, slightly moving hair, shiny eyes, and nose flanks that are closed by breath, pierces the heart of every player who is expecting or not looking forward to this game - where this is postponement, it is obviously a showmanship.
▲ Yes... Let her come out and apologize again?
Back to the sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wilderness, in fact, when the first promotional video said that it would be released in 2022, everyone defaulted to pushing the release time to the last month of 2022. When it was announced that the ticket jump to 2023, players did not regret it too much, but ridiculed the producer's new hairstyle and the few seconds of game screen announced in the video.
▲ A 2.5-minute parsing video created by enthusiasts for a new 8-second scene
The postponement means that the game requires higher development costs and longer project cycles, as well as raising player expectations and even finding ways to cope with investors' grumpy tempers. With the announcement of the postponement of the sequel to Zelda Legend: Breath of the Wilderness, Nintendo's share price on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in Japan fell 6% on the same day, and the bad reviews of Cyberpunk 2077 also caused developer CDPR to suffer a very big blow.
Postponing a release is not a good thing, so why doesn't a game company reserve development time for the game at the beginning, or wait for the upcoming release before starting the publicity cycle, reducing the risk of postponement?
possible...... They can't do it.
So, what is the total delay of the big as?
Eldon's Ring of Law, God of War: Twilight of the Gods, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time Reset... It may be the impact of the epidemic, and the game works in recent years seem to have been postponed more frequently. But in fact, even if there is no impact of the epidemic, the game is still postponed.
▲ "Collection! Animal Forest Friends Association), the first release date is 2019
Since the recent announcement of the postponement is the "Legend of Zelda" series, let's first see if the previous generation of "The Legend of Zelda" was released on time. The first is our closest, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wilderness, which was originally scheduled to be released in 2015 and landed on the Wii U console, and as a result, it was released in 2017, landing on the Wii U and the new console Switch.
As a commemorative of the 25th anniversary of the Zelda Legends series, The Legend of Zelda: Sword of Heaven had to be released in 2011, but even so, it was postponed from the first half of the year to November 18, 2011.
The first 3D version of the Zelda Legends series, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, was expected to be released in early 1997, but was eventually postponed for nearly two years until November 21, 1998.
After coming to the 3D era, the postponement of the release has become a tradition of almost every generation of Zelda Legends, but also as a façade for Nintendo, the Mario series of games rarely jumped tickets. What is the difference between a ticket-hopping game and a game that does not jump a ticket?
The first is the game type, although the game plot of the Legend of Cerda and Mario series can be summed up with the phrase "Defeat the Demon King and Save the Princess", but compared to the "Mario" series of games about the card chapter, Zelda Legend is more like Cyberpunk 2077: once developed, it is difficult to stop the pace, and once a new setting is added, it needs to be modified throughout.
▲ Mario series game level map
If a Mario game is scheduled to design 10 large levels, but only completes 8 near the release, then it can completely delete two levels, connect the beginning and end, and become a new Mario game with 8 levels.
If a Zelda Legend game is 80% complete and is close to release, it can't always leave a large blank space in the scene, or abandon the design of certain values and package it for sale - it can only be met by postponement.
▲ The Wii U would have been the Rock of the Linkers
Then there's the cliché of project management, where we all say "deadlines are the first productivity," and the same is true in the game industry. Game developers are a bunch of imaginative people, and if there's no time limit, the game really can't be finished. For example, "Hollow Knight: Song of Silk", which has not been released for sale, has been publicized for 3 years, and the release date is still a mystery.
▲ Breaking news that "Silk Song", released in January 2022, is still in the "pigeon"
However, a long publicity cycle will lead to various accidents. Even without black swans like the pandemic, the ever-expanding scale of game production today has also made game production take longer than ever.
▲ Suicide Squad: Kill justice league announced that it will be postponed to 2023
At the 2017 E3 Electronic Entertainment Exhibition, Nintendo unveiled "Mitterrod Prime 4", although there is only one logo, it has also caused players from all walks of life to go crazy.
However, in January 2019, Nintendo officially announced that the game was ready to be overturned due to the poor development results and poor quality. This is the third reason for the game's postponement: major issues during the development cycle. Today, Mitterrod: Fear of Survival has been released, but Mitterrod Prime 4 is still far away.
▲ The canonical sequel Mitterrod: Fear of Survival was released in October 2021
Similar to the delay in the development cycle, there are also cases where the test game has bugs near the time of release. In 2018, Bethesda Studios announced an extension of beta testing due to the discovery of a serious bug that would cause PC players to delete the game by mistake; in 2020, Watch Dogs: Legion announced that the network mode was postponed because of the priority of fixing game bugs; in 2022, the season of Call of Duty: Warzone was also postponed by several weeks, also because of the need to fix the game bug...
Whether it's a game type, project management, or problems encountered during development, these are forced postponements, and the resulting losses are not wanted by developers. But there is also a deliberate delay in order to avoid the release of blockbusters in the same period in order to guarantee the commercial success of the game – a reason that, of course, will not be publicly acknowledged.
In 2011, Runic Games announced the postponement of its torchlight 2 to 2012, and in addition to expressing a desire to spend more time perfecting the game, the developers also said something very interesting: "Everyone should be playing The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim or Battlefield 3... When Torchlight 2 is released, we're going to make it one of those masterpieces."
Although it is not explicitly stated, the behavior of "Torchlight 2" to avoid the big game and choose to postpone it has become a consensus of everyone.
Actually, the extension is quite good
No matter what game we expect, players don't want to play on time with countless bugs and unfinished games, and postponements will always bring us a better game experience. Of course, this refers to the game developed after the postponement, a game that cannot achieve publicity effects after the postponement of the launch, has a large number of bugs, and has been updated many times to play normally, such as Cyberpunk 2077, which is still full of rush traces of the delay many times.
Longer development cycles lead to greater development costs, but they also give developers more time to polish the game, and postponed games often mean better quality and less pressure to work.
High intensity and high stress are almost everyone's stereotype of the game industry, and the producers of Red Dead Redemption 2 have complained that their team worked 100 hours a week several times in 2018 (7 days a week, an average of 14 hours a day). But there are exceptions, in the Nintendo 2020 new employee recruitment program, we can see Nintendo's working hours: 7 hours and 45 minutes a day, 125 days of vacation per year.
Lower work pressure will naturally give developers more time to think about how to improve their work.
In 1983, Warner asked Atari's game designer Howard Scott Warshaw to spend 6 weeks developing E.T.'s game of the same name, E.T. Alien, and although Howard completed the mission, the huge gap between the shoddy game and the classic movie became the last straw that overwhelmed Atari.
A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.
This quote comes from Japanese video game designer and "father of Super Mario" Shigeru Miyamoto, although the game developers come from different countries, but in terms of wanting players to experience the perfect work, everyone is the same.
The rushed E.T. Alien "destroyed" the North American game industry, postponing it to 2020's Collection! Animal Forest Friends made players feel the warmth of the game world; the rushed "Anthem" caused a round of scolding from domestic and foreign players; "Death Return", which was released for 1 month, won the title of the best action game of the year.
Release time is never the criterion for judging a game, and if I can, I'd like to meet the long-awaited game sooner rather than later, and if not, I hope it's good enough when it does.