this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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GTA vice city and Zelda Majora's mask were also developed in under a year
So was Fallout New Vegas.
Though I would hesitate to count Fallout or Majora's Mask here because they were based on existing games, so the breadth of the work on things like mechanics had already been done, and they had the ability to re-use a lot of assets.
I don't know the extent of asset or code reuse for Vice City, so I can't really say if that should be counted the same or not.
Literally every game mentioned here had massive asset and code reuse. Doom 2 was basically a modpack for Doom. Add a couple of weapons, a couple of enemies, some more levels, job done, call it a sequel. The fact that the weapons and enemies changed the gameplay so much was probably more of an accident than anything else.
GTA 3, VC, and SA are basically the same engine with some changes here and there. A lot of asset reuse. All were buggy as shit on launch. Sometimes with the same bug that was never fixed.
FNV was FO3 with different color filters and fewer buildings. It's why the game was mainly story-driven rather than action and had less in the way of exploration. You do the best with what you have.
It's always easier to follow up than it is to lead.
Also worth noting that fnv was developed under heavy crunch and it's a miracle the game is as good as it is. It's the exception, not the rule.
And it was broken and buggy as shit. In many ways it still is, with loading screens being an appropriate roll of the dice as to whether or not they'll crash to desktop.
It's far from an example of what can be done quickly and is, in reality, a total indictment of that kind of stupidly short turnaround time.
Fallout New Vegas is still considered to be one of the best Fallout games ever. I expect there was significant overlap in the development period with Fallout 3 though so just subtracting one release date from another doesn't represent the amount of time in development.
Vice City was more like 18 months of development, some of which overlapped with GTA III. I suppose it helps to have a working game engine and an experienced development team who can iterate on something they're already made.
This isn't a great take as the infrastructure from GTA3 and Ocarina of Time were already in place for those games.