does are deeply like expanded and there has been both not much tooling to accommodate that or make that easier it's just more stuff people have to do and not much acknowledgement of it so I love going back to the PS2 era in particular the sixth gen I think is like the sweet spot of game design and aesthetics for a variety of reasons.

01:22
And I noticed that a lot of those games don't have subtitles. Mmm. As far as I know, at least, I think subtitles might have been a mandatory requirement when you started to hit the Xbox 360 era. Or at the very least, it was such a massive trend in the industry that everyone started to follow that with that multimedia high-definition push. Which means... Subtitles...

01:50
one of the core tenets of how we experience things and our Netflix using world just weren't a thing standard yeah games and I didn't realize that growing up because I just in an RPG they'd usually have the the text on screen right Knights of the Old Republic or uh I've just dealt with it and I didn't realize going back over time oh subtitles just became a thing and

02:20
Unity doesn't provide subtitles out of the box. You have to build your own subtitle system. You have to hook that into your localization. Unreal, to a degree, does provide localization and subtitles built in, but you still have to display that. Sometimes in the more characterful the way you display it, the more custom your solution has to be, which is more development work. So.

02:47
As opposed to when I was coming up both as a kid as well as as a game developer, cross-play multiplayer. I love cross-play multiplayer. I'm so glad that that's a thing that it's so widespread. Yeah. But also we as a medium do not tend to acknowledge the cost of the massive innovations and amount of work and so-called standards that now form so much of our experience when you're making say a two week long video game.

03:15
and you're making sure you have Steam achievements in, that's additional dev time. And the more of those little things that you've got, a two week game becomes a one month game, becomes a three month game. At that point, why not make it nine months for additional polish? And pretty soon you've spent three years on a magnum opus about clicking for the distressing masked man sitting in the corner of your hotel room. This is the common arc of game development.

03:44
Yeah, and it's interesting to think about that in the context of the fact that DevCycles just seem to be coming longer, you know, especially on the AAA front. And, you know, I think a lot of people chalk it up just to, well, like, oh, the graphics are so much better. Like, it just takes so much more time to polish or there are these gameplay systems that need to feel more detailed. But then there's simple. I remember when the same game wouldn't come out even on the same, like, PS2 would have a different game. Yeah. A straight up different game than GameCube or Xbox. Yeah.

04:14
And now we have multi-platform release day ships. I remember waiting several years for a Yakuza game to come from Japan. We live in an age of miracles. And we don't call it an age of miracles. And I think that's creating an increasingly large disconnect between developers and their audience. Well, that information, I think, is something that will be news to a lot of people and hopefully will kind of give people a lot more context as to why these games

04:45
you know, ultimately we'll get delays or, you know, just kind of no one wants to talk about that game X is just not ready to be talked about.