Obsidian’s Josh Sawyer is usually one to speak his mind, and he proved it again recently with a series of posts on X explaining why imposing impossible release dates or timelines can be destructive for developers.
Despite his team now being part of a large corporation like Microsoft, the director of Pentiment and Fallout: New Vegas has remained very direct in expressing his ideas, and in this recent thread on X he wanted to explain, in rather harsh terms, some mistakes that are commonly made in the field of video game development recently.
Essentially, Sawyer lays out some indicators that can suggest when a game is still too far from completion compared to what executives have stated about release dates or development milestones.
Feature cutting is not free
A major issue during development is that publishers often ask for feature reductions, which can be a major headache for the staff. Although the idea is to reduce development time and costs, these revisions can have the opposite effect and are not “free”, they have significant costs if they are done while the content is already in progress, because many of the content may have to be cut or heavily revised, increasing work and lowering morale.
In essence, a key element to take into consideration is whether the game’s features (and how many of them) are in “MVP”, which as Sawyer explained means “minimum viable product”, or a preliminary version of the game with fundamental features that can be proposed for testing.
If the core gameplay features are still up for debate about whether or not to make it into MVP, that’s not a good sign, because it means a lot of the content is uncertain, which leads to a general uncertainty about the work being done by the developers. “If you don’t know how the gameplay is going to work yet, it’s definitely hard to design content for that, and it could get cut or reworked a lot,” Sawyer explains.
Furthermore, if the content creation processes are not fully established through certain pipelines, no one can yet know what will have to go through them. In essence, if a game has a creative process already planned and reliable and all the most significant features are in MVP and all the pipelines work, then the problem shifts only to the actual quality, but the project can meet the established dates.
“What’s infuriating about stupid deadlines set by executives and production is that anyone with even a modicum of experience knows that if a, b, and c aren’t set yet, they can’t effectively predict goals, but they’ll still confidently try to do so, messing up schedules to hit them,” Sawyer explained. “All this does is lead to burnout and demoralization for developers, and understandably erodes trust in management.”
