As game development timelines stretch into decade-long faffs, The Last of Us and Uncharted designer Benson Russell is working to help games snip years off their unhinged schedules.
Alongside increased game scope, enhancements in graphical fidelity, and larger teams, game development has become a haven for waste. In the next episode of our FRVR Podcast, Russell explains why games are taking so long, and how game studios can drastically slim down development timelines.
The issue with long timelines is that it’s simply not sustainable. While games are more popular than they’ve ever been and the highest-selling games are selling higher than ever before, the risk is immense. Furthermore, for a studio like Naughty Dog, the flagship studio of a main console platform, the risk is even higher as those games are the reasons why players attach themselves to the platform in the first place.
When asked if Naughty Dog’s current release structure is sustainable for the studio, Russell responded promptly: “No. Absolutely not,” he said. “They’re one of the key stakeholders that get PlayStation[s] sold, right? So, when you think about it, they have not put an original IP out on this platform. The only thing they’ve done is The Last of Us [Remake].”
Naughty Dog’s next game, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, started active development in some form in 2020, the start of the PlayStation 5’s lifecycle. With PlayStation 6 seemingly scheduled for a 2028 launch, that means Naughty Dog will release a single new game in the PS5 generation, and that title has a non-zero chance of being a cross-gen release.
As for why Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet might be taking so long, Russell only has theories. “My immediate hunch is that it might be another Last of Us 2 situation where you made this decision to put this 10-hour side quest in and it didn’t really fit the story, right?” The designer, who worked on pre-production for Naughty Dog’s second Last of Us title, believes the game’s scope was too large for the tale it was telling, and this issue could crop up in the studio’s next game.
“It might need to be edited in that regard,” he said, while also adding that the sci-fi setting and hack-and-slash combat aren’t things that Naughty Dog has done before. In fact, when the studio was pumping out Uncharted games back-to-back, melee combat suffered as a result. “We wanted brawling and all that kind of stuff, but it was a massive investment,” he recalled, with the team instead focusing on polished gunplay while offering a barebones fighting system.
Since leaving Naughty Dog after working on The Last of Us 2 and Uncharted 4, Russell has been working in consultancy, with his main work focusing on slimming down production schedules. With his work at Unhandled Exceptions, the designer has seen teams work on titles for over half a decade and still struggle to know where their games are going due to the way in which huge teams are now structured.
“Some of these studios, I can’t say which one it is, but one that I worked on worked on a game that’s still not out yet. They’ve been spinning their wheels for seven years… they restarted their game three times, and their internal structure promotes massive siloing, as in here’s a group of people that have no idea why they’re working on what they’re working on.”
At another studio, Russell noticed severe “animosity between departments”, with sections of the studio split off into what the developer called “little ponds”. This isn’t too dissimilar to how game designer Clint Hocking described his time working on Watch Dogs Legion, where meetings saw feedback on work given when the developer behind that work wasn’t even present.
While team structure is a major issue, Russell’s biggest belief is that AAA development is simply greenlighting games that have no idea what they want to be. “The flaw in game development has always been, and what I’ve come to realise and believe in, is that the flaw in game development is that we’ve approached it from the wrong perspective,” he said. “The way I’ve seen most games happen is like: ‘I want this game’s jumping mechanics; I want this game’s adventure mechanics.”
The Uncharted designer believes that waste is one of the biggest issues with game development timelines right now. For example, Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League took a generation to release due to multiple developmental resets and poor management. While forever games, like GTA 6, can afford to spend a generation in development, the majority of games can’t.
The Last of Us designer explained that, in prior generations, games were usually made with a clearly defined North Star that told developers where they wanted to go. For Naughty Dog, that North Star was always the story: the team knew the story they wanted to tell and the format in which they wanted to tell it. Today, teams are simply starting games with vague ideas, and it’s causing major issues.
“I genuinely think these seven-year projects… you can get them back down to five,” he said. “I think you could at least cut two years off of them, if not maybe a little more, just by defining yourself, getting that North Star solid right in the beginning. And it’s not a difficult thing to do.
“If you have this idea, if you’re like, I saw a rollercoaster ride, and it gave me this feeling, and I’m like, ‘how do I put that feeling into a video game? You can very much look at it and say, ‘Okay, not only how do I have to capture that feeling, but what’s it going to let me do?” he said. “You don’t need to start experimenting and prototyping in a thousand different directions to figure out what is so cool about this feeling on this rollercoaster and how do I get it.”
Russell explained that many games today are becoming like Duke Nukem Forever, a game that was announced in 1997 and didn’t release until 2011. The infamous FPS game exhibited many of the same issues Russell sees today: horrendous team structures, multiple engine changes, scope creep, and a severe addiction to restarting development. While most games today don’t suffer to that degree, it’s eerily familiar. Duke Nukem Forever didn’t have a North Star, it didn’t know what it wanted to be, and look what happened.
For the designer, it’s clear that many studios are searching for their “aha moment” in pre-production, a moment which likely will not arrive. “Every game I’ve worked on, there’s always the aha moment, right? Because what you’re doing from start to that aha moment is you’re trying to figure out what the hell it is you’re going to make, right? What is it you’re trying to deliver?”
He continued: “The problem is that aha moment usually comes in the last [stretch] when there’s technically only like a year, year-and-a-half left, right? Now you’ve got to adapt the rest of the game to it. Hence, these games slip, or they take six to seven years now, because it takes a long time to find that… I always talk about the player fantasy. You need to define that first.”
“I genuinely think these seven-year projects… you can get them back down to five.”
The Last of Us and Uncharted designer Benson Russell on modern development timelines.
When it comes to slimming down production, there’s also the ever-present topic of AI. Artificial Intelligence has been a huge point of contention in the industry, with Unreal Engine 6 now jumping headfirst into the technology. Russell is clear where his boundaries lie. “I don’t want generated actual assets,” he says, but admits that AI tools for tagging thousands of objects or arranging a random room filled with human-made assets in, say, an open world game could save time.
For Russell, AI should only be used to cut down on the ugly jobs no one wants to do, like blanket retagging of existing human-made objects. While games are a creative medium, there are thousands of little things that pop up that take away from that—” death by a thousand cuts”, as the designer puts it.
While there could be some minor savings from AI, though, team structure and poor project planning will always be the main problem facing games. You can use AI to its fullest, generate a million assets and face the backlash, but if you don’t know why those assets are needed and what the point of their existence is, it’s not going to help you ship a game of any size.
