I read this on Twitter this morning. While I appreciate the effort that goes into details like this, I do think that spending engineering time on details that really don't make any difference to the game (subjective on my part) is possibly part of the reason Naughty Dog only shipped two new games this generation compared to four on PS3.
Between this and the video listing all the other details that if not pointed out, 99% of people would never have noticed, I idly wonder whether it is really worth spending time on this stuff compared to focussing that engineering effort on getting the game out quicker
I definetely agree with you that big AAA studios spend too much time on stuff that adds little value to the game (comparatively to their development cost) while gamers, the industry and the studio itself would probably benefit from them releasing more games more often with better focus on time spent where ir matters.
I don't think though, that this kind of detail is what I'd call time badly spent. This probably tool relatively little time, created a system that is usefull throughout the whole game, advances research in ways futire games will benefit, and arguably SAVES time in audio/voice acting/animation by subtly conveying character's physical and emotional state proceduraly without requiring hand-made one-off chatter/animations to achieve the same effect.
What I think is the real time waster in these big projects is menial art production work. And I blame a culture of complecency with brute forcing art. How do we get hours of cutscene animation done? Hire more animators, outsource, do over time! How are we gonna make this scene with a huge crowd of people with different faces and clothes? Hire more modelers, outsorce do overtime!
TLoU2 is full of examples of that. It is indeed kind of cool that they actually made individual animations for Ellie upgrading her weapons at the bench, but honestly, it is not nearly as cool as if the game had been released 6 months earlier by ND choosing their battles batter and they had started their next project already.
I sit here thinking of the cutscene featured in one of their early trailers, with dozens of npcs dancing, and a damn kiss (must be hell to animate properly) and in the final game, it plays in the very end, after we as players had already heard about everything thar happened that night half a dozen diffent times. It was absolutely not needed, and must have taken months of man-hours, if not a years.
I imagine devs are doing this in part "because they can". Most devs have had to carefully choose what problems to tackle for ages, and I feel some are trying to to strech their legs and see how far they can push themselves through sheer numbers. But I hope most have gotten that out of their system and feel more inclined to pursue clever ways to "work smarter, not harder" going foward.
