In the modern age of gaming, there are a lot of cases where your favourite upcoming title will push its release date back. Sometimes, there’s one big push, moving a release from one year to the next, while at other times we’ll see games get shoved back month by month until they’re finally in our hands.
BioWare and Dragon Age veteran Mark Darrah believes the former is much more preferable. Speaking in a new video on his YouTube channel (via GamesRadar), Darrah explains how a big delay can allow developers to reassess where they are with a game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfqC0YPX_KI/
“If your game ends up being two years late, but you know it’s going to be two years late, that opens up your probability space massively, because you know, ‘OK, right, we’re not shipping in a month, we’re gonna ship in 25 months. Then let’s take a step back and re-examine what we’ve got and potentially undo some of the decisions that we made earlier when we thought we were making a different game, and take a different path,'” he said.
On the other hand, constantly pushing a game back for a similar amount of time means that a developer can’t take a step back and gather some perspective. “You are laying band-aid on top of band-aid on top of band-aid, and not only do you not feel like you have the ability to back up because you don’t have time, you’re actually making it harder and harder to back up, because with each extra band-aid, with each patch, with each thing you do in order to try to make what you have work, you’re making it harder to take a different path,” he explained.
Would you rather see longer delays or lots of shorter ones?