Cliff Notes – I have an idea for how they can make games like Wolverine much quicker
- The lengthy development time for video games, exemplified by Marvel’s Wolverine, is exacerbated by increasing expectations and the impending release of new console generations.
- The proposal suggests creating shared gaming universes, allowing developers to reuse settings and assets across different titles, potentially reducing production costs and time.
- By leveraging established environments, such as those from existing Marvel games, developers could focus on unique characters and narratives while maintaining high-quality gameplay experiences.
I have an idea for how they can make games like Wolverine much quicker – Reader’s Feature
Marvel’s Wolverine is taking a very long time (Sony Interactive Entertainment)
A reader has a suggestion for speeding up the development of video games and it involves mimicking the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
So, like everyone, I was very excited to see the Wolverine reveal this week, which looked exactly like what I hoped it would. But it sure has taken a long time to get here, especially as it won’t be out until this time next year.
Everyone knows video games take a long time to make nowadays but that’s a thing that gets worse every generation, and with talk of a PlayStation 6 in the next couple of years the problem is only going to sting harder over time. Especially when nobody seems to be doing anything about it.
I’ve seen ordinary fans suggest cutting budgets or making games shorter, but I’ve never seen publishers even talk about the possibility, let alone actually make a move towards doing it. They’re clearly never going to, so I have one alternative solution: shared universes.
I know everyone’s just about sick of shared universes in movies by now, but it’s never really happened in games (because games are too slow to make, probably). You’d think an obvious thing to do would be set all the Marvel games in the same gaming universe, but I don’t think any of them are connected.
That’s partly because a lot of them are made by different publishers, but even the ones that are the same, like Avengers and Guardians Of The Galaxy don’t have any connection. But what I’m suggesting is not so much connected to the story but the tech and the setting which, for a game, seems much more important to share.
So, one of the problems with games, as I understand, is that every time you make a new one you have to create the world and models and everything new each time. Maybe if it’s a sequel you reuse some of it but even just updating it is a lot of work and there’s nothing fans (you know the sort) love more than to accuse developers of being lazy.
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But what if all these Marvel games reused the same settings and it was the characters and stories that were different? Tons of Marvel stories take place in New York City so why not reuse the one from the Spider-Man games?
This Wolverine game has at least three settings: Canada, Japan, and Madripoor. I’m not sure how often the first two places crop up in Marvel comics (although I imagine Canada is mostly just forests in the game) but Madripoor is definitely a place that lots of stories are based in, so why not purposefully reuse it?
For a superhero game it’s perfect too, because different people have different powers, so you might be running around as Wolverine but flying around as Storm, or whoever. People will probably complain that it’s not new, but I don’t think they will if the game is good. At the end of the day it’s just a backdrop and spending half your budget on just making the buildings look different seems like a waste to me.
Marvel seems an easy way to experiment with this sort of thing, especially as Miles Morales kind of did exactly what I’m talking about, and everyone seemed to like that. Maybe you’d just make a bunch of cities at the start of a generation and all your games would take part in that, but they’d all be cheaper, smaller games like Miles Morales.
Something’s got to change and I really feel this could be a good idea that could be applied to lots of other games. I mean, it’s basically what Nintendo did with Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom and I don’t exactly remember that embarrassing itself on Metacritic.
Maybe I’m crazy but if my idea is bad then someone needs to come up with a better one, because the problem is not going to go away.
By reader Rollo
There’s not enough sharing in gaming (Sony Interactive Entertainment)
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