Comment on Xbox Drops Work on ‘Contraband’ Video Game After Four Years
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 4 days agoWell since there has been absolutely nothing revealed since, I can only guess and speculate. But I would say the most likely scenario is it was in active development hell.
Like, developers were working on it, but there were probably major problems that were holding them up. Perhaps they restarted development due to some factor. If the game was originally going to be a PvEvP looter shooter, for example, that plan may have changed after seeing the severe negative public reception to that genre (except for streamers). It may have been planned as a live service game but then Concord happened and developers decided to change everything because they were worried the same could happen to their game. Maybe some of the developers wanted a “realistic” depiction of the 1970s and other developers wanted a “sanitized” depiction and there was infighting preventing the game from progressing.
My point is, there are a lot of way that there could have been active development with no actual progress. But since nothing has been shown since the announcement trailer ( a render, not gameplay), I can say with some level of confidence that it likely had no meaningful progress in terms of gameplay development. Otherwise, we would have seen it. 4 years is a long time to spend with no updates just to be cancelled. If there was progress, the game should have been finished by 4 years.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
Why would we have seen it? You normally don’t see anything until they’re gearing up for launch.
I think it’s more likely MS looked at their portfolio, looked at how much this was costing, and decided it didn’t fit what they were looking for for how much it was costing.
This is not to say it’s a good call, just that MS executives are pretty shit at game development analysis.
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 4 days ago
4 years of development and they didnt have anything to show except for a CG render? That is absolutely troubled development.
Are there any examples of games which have had 4 straight years of radios silence that have not had major development problems? I mean, Metroid Prime 4 had major issues and was restarted twice. Halo Infinite had major problems and that took 6 years. Scalebound was in development for 4 years before it was cancelled, and it obviously had very troubled development. At least Scalebound had some gameplay to show after it was in development for 2 years (it was cancelled 2 years later), Contraband didn’t even have that for all 4 years. That would indicate to me that the gameplay was not in a state that could be shown to the public. The developers could have been actively working on the game, but no meaningful progress was being made.
This was probably the right call from Microsoft. Though depending on the problems being had, they probably should have cancelled it sooner. It sucks for me to say that because I was interested in this game, but thats the reality of game development. Sometimes an impassable roadblock comes up and its not feasible to continue to fund the sinkhole for 10 years, sometimes its better to pack up and go around.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
Anything to show you. They aren’t beholden to you.
The vast majority! Game dev cycles are often 8+ years now, and you don’t hear anything from them until about a year before launch. You think about the canceled ones, but most of them that launch you just don’t consider, which is good. No news is good news, as the saying goes.