Games that were delayed but still graphically up to par on release *spin-off*

[Shifty Geezer]

I think many of us look at it (Crackdown 3) as yet another example of how too long in development results in a graphically inferior game. Are there any examples of where a game that overspent years in development came out the visual equal of its contemporary peers?

 

[iroboto]

I think many of us look at it as yet another example of how too long in development results in a graphically inferior game. Are there any examples of where a game that overspent years in development came out the visual equal of its contemporary peers?

RDR2 ?Cause that's pretty big time on the right track.
Arkham Knight?

 

[BRiT]

Are there any examples of where a game that overspent years in development came out the visual equal of its contemporary peers?

Dreams is coming up on 7 years.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Were they delayed though? I'm thinking of games that kept being pushed back. Perhaps Dreams, although as they were effectively inventing a new rendering method, that can be excused. RDR2 was announced 2016 and released 2018, so however long it was in development, it wasn't (apparently) going through development hell.

Googling gives examples like Alien's Colonial Marines and Duke Nukem Forever and of course The Last Guardian. Apparently Diablo III got a major postponement and that turned out well, and incredibly lucrative.

 

[AlNom]

Would be a neat spin-off thread.

Max Payne 3?
Doom 3 kept getting pushed back. HL2.
Prey 2017 (what was supposed to be Prey 2, then things happened).
Doom 2016 had its own issues as well.

Alan Wake was faced with delays as well.
Too Human? :0
Fable
Ryse had a very troubled development/delay/reboot.


I suppose South Park: The Fractured But Whole doesn't really count.
*ahem*
>_>
<_<
>_>

 

[Silent_Buddha]

The new Prey also had a long and rocky development path.

Regards,
SB

 

[Pixel]

The original Prey also had lengthy development. Switched engines at least 3 times. I remember when it was announced not long after Duke Nukem 3D launched.

 

[Sigfried1977]

The new Prey looks pretty damn good to me though. Heck, most of thes titles mentioned here do. Probably because they were being in development for a while, then scrapped entirely, and then basically re-developed from scratch. Sometimes many times over. Happened with the new God of War as well. I think the last game I played that spent ages in development until it got released as an honest-to-god mess that still resembled early screen-shots was TR: The Angel of Darkness.

In general modern games just look so damn good that being a year (or more) behind the curve really doesn't seem like a huge deal when it comes to visual quality. Kingdom Hearts 3 is such a game. As much as some people may bitch about the game's iq or uneven frame pacing or what have you, 99% of gamers will take a look at the thing and say it looks stunning.

 

[Garrett Weaving]

I'll go a little retro, since I find the subject fascinating and most of the time the delays meant the game came out very different than originally intended.

Legacy of Kain : Soul Reaver (August 1999)

Was originally supposed to come out around late 1998, got delayed and design changed massively. Technical masterpiece for PS1, not only did it pull off a big world by streaming all the data constantly, it also ran at a higher res

The Dig (November 1995)

Development began in 1989(!), game changed engines and design philosophies multiple times. One of those games that tried to do away with SCUMM and eventually ended up using it. By the time it came out it was still really beautiful, marred only by the fact that it did not offer an SVGA mode.

Thief (late 1998)

Originally an Action/RPG title where you had to fight Merlin's forces, was to come out some time in 1997. When it came out it was not the most graphically advanced game, however it did offer Software and Hardware Acceleration, looked the part and most importantly hit the nail in the head with the sound design. Thief pioneered a lot of positional audio tricks without any hardware assistance (although I believe it supported A3D?) that to this day a lot of games struggle with.

Dungeon Keeper (June 1997)

Famously late to the party, was initially supposed to come out in 1995. By 1997 it still looked really good though, Bullfrog got a lot of mileage out of that Magic Carpet engine.

Half-Life (November 1998)

Was initially supposed to come out in 1997, but they ended up reworking it massively. A look at footage or media from 1997 reveals that the game was very, very different. Graphically, there were arguably far more advanced games by the time it came out, such as Unreal of course, however Half-Life pulled off normal environments instead of medieval fantasy settings or futuristic bases, so it was really appealing.

Ultima IX (late 1999)

Another famously delayed title. Initially started life as a software rendered isometric game in 1995-1996, but eventually ended up being a 3rd person game with hardware acceleration mandatory. Notoriously buggy, insanely demanding, but it looked pretty damn good back then.

Outcast (Summer 1999)

This is an odd one. Outcast began life around 1995 as a grand action/adventure game, but at the time the fastest CPU was a Pentium 133 and 3D acceleration was not a thing just yet. As such, devs developed an engine that made heavy usage of voxels to render vast distances. This was phenomenal at the time, but by the time it came out Outcast was both amazingly impressive and also somewhat underwhelming. Because it was a CPU rendered only affair, it had to run at low resolutions (maximum 512x384 !) to keep performance steady, but software rendering allowed them to pull off some amazing feats such as vast landscapes and water ripples and reflections among many other things (Anti-Aliasing, convincing DoF effects, beautiful particle system etc).
If anyone's interested to learn more, I wrote a lengthy review on this game's remake that came out last year since I adore it so much and I went to some length to explain the technical matters as well:
https://ragequit.gr/reviews/item/outcast-second-contact-pc-review-english/

I'll be sure to post more as they come to mind.

 

[ultragpu]

FFXV, 10 years in the making (2006-2016), transitioned from last gen to current gen and god knows how many "Please understand" from Square Enix we have endured in the course of duration. Now bar from true juggernaut like Uncharted 4 in 2016, it stacked up pretty decently against everything else, although some parts of it did look last gen ish still.

 

[Sigfried1977]

You can almost put any major Square Enix inhouse production in here. both FFXII and FFXIII were delayed time and time again as well. FFXII in particular was one hell of an accomplishment given the aging PS2 hardware it was developed for.
But yeah, FFXV was something else entirely. It suffered more from a decade's worth of somewhat incongruous game design choices than it did from a lack of visual splendor.

 

[Garrett Weaving]

Indeed. I had a friend that was waiting anxiously for FF Versus XIII back in 2010 lol

 

[Deleted member 13524]

FFXV, 10 years in the making (2006-2016), transitioned from last gen to current gen and god knows how many "Please understand" from Square Enix we have endured in the course of duration. Now bar from true juggernaut like Uncharted 4 in 2016, it stacked up pretty decently against everything else, although some parts of it did look last gen ish still.

Over 2 years after release, FFXV is still the undisputed leader of food rendering in videogames.
By far.

I'll go a little retro, since I find the subject fascinating and most of the time the delays meant the game came out very different than originally intended.

Remember when a significant delay in a videogame meant releasing 1 year later?
Pepperidge Farm does.

 

[Garrett Weaving]

Haha, that's true. But you have to consider the fact that back then the resources, budgets and team sizes were far far smaller and as such projects were easier to manage and took far less time to churn out.

I just remembered Stonekeep, another ridiculously delayed title which started development around 1988 and eventually shipped by 1995 after a clusterfuck of dev issues. It's actually kind of hilarious, the most funny bit I remember reading that I hope isn't true was that they took photos of people and models from the waist up and they had done quite a bit of work when they realized that enemies won't always be in your face, sometimes they'd be at some distance, so they had to scrap everything. I don't even...
Final game was pretty impressive though still.

There's also Severance : Blade of Darkness, which was released in early 2001, despite originally being projected to be out by late 1997/early 1998. Couple of years ago I stumbled on some very early screenshots on some magazine from July 1997 or so, needless to say I was really excited with that find.
Anyway, Severance looked alright by the time it came out, with character and object models, as well as level geometry being somewhat unimpressive by then, however it had one trick up its sleeve and that was stencil shadows. It blew my mind at the time, you could light up a torch, carry it on your hand, move across a room and most objects would cast a beautiful, hard edge shadow.
It was quite expensive performance wise, but man it looked amazing at the time and I still think all those games that came out on PC back in 2001-2005 that featured stencil shadows look great to this day.

 

[milk]

How about that N64 third person shooter that later became an RTS for (then) next gen consoles and finally shipped as an exclusive Xbox FPS. I think it's name was something something Combat Evolved. Something about light, like Aura, Hazy, Bloom...
Humm, hard to remember.

 

[Sigfried1977]

Over 2 years after release, FFXV is still the undisputed leader of food rendering in videogames.
By far.

The burger from the Resident Evil 2 remake would probably disagree with that statement. It's that juicy looking.

 

[Sigfried1977]

How about that N64 third person shooter that later became an RTS for (then) next gen consoles and finally shipped as an exclusive Xbox FPS. I think it's name was something something Combat Evolved. Something about light, like Aura, Hazy, Bloom...
Humm, hard to remember.

Wasn't it an Apple Macintosh exclusive at some point as well?

 

[Nesh]

Wasn't it an Apple Macintosh exclusive at some point as well?

I remember the Mac exclusivity, which pissed off Jobs when Gates grabbed it.
I also remember that Bungie was considering a PS release
But I cant find anything about it starting on N64

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Wasn't it an Apple Macintosh exclusive at some point as well?

Never at any point. Bungle were a Mac house (i.e. they only made Mac games) but their earlier games like the Marathon trilogy, Myth and Oni were all ported to Windows.

Halo was originally announced as a third-person shooter for Mac and PC. They switched to FPS before Microsoft acquired them.