Over 10 Years After It Was Announced, Star Citizen’s Single-Player Squadron 42 Is ‘Feature Complete’ - IGN::Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games has said Squadron 42, the single-player portion of its controversial space sim, is finally “feature complete”, over a decade after it was announced.
GTA2 to GTA3, two years. GTAIV to GTAV, five years, GTAV to GTAVI 10 years and still waiting. See a pattern?
When you want to accurately simulate and animate every doorknob in the game it just takes a hell of a lot longer than putting a few pixel on a texture and calling it a day. And yes, there is in argument to be made that that level of detail doesn’t actually add to the gaming experience in a meaningful way, but that’s something a whole lot of AAA games struggle with and why we are seeing so many sequels and so little new things. StarCitizen just happens to be a new thing developed from scratch, including the studio itself.
The time between games is not the development time.
GTA III was only in development for one year. It wasn’t in development for 2 years. Same with GTA IV. Rockstar do other things between releasing GTA games. In between developing GTA V and GTA VI Rockstar made two Red Dead Redemption games plus DLC for GTA V, you don’t think they were working on GTA VI at the same time do you?
Also they did an engine update in there as well so they couldn’t have been working on GTA VI until that was done. The absolute earliest date for the beginning development of VI is 5 - 6 years ago, and that’s not to say that was the start date.