this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2026
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It's honestly kinda crazy how long some games spend in development. The Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy is a perfect example of something that should've been quick but ended up being so bloated and took forever to make.

FF7Remake was announced in 2015, got stuck in development hell for a bit, released 2020. The sequel released 2024. The third one still hasn't been teased yet. How many people are attached to a franchise if it takes 10 years to get the full story? I loved the first remake but dropped the second one, I just didn't care about the story as much as I did ~5 years ago.

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[–] xep@discuss.online 1 points 1 minute ago

Maybe because other games are more fun?

[–] Sharkticon@lemmy.zip 5 points 50 minutes ago (1 children)

I cant even tell you the last original FF that came out.

[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 points 23 minutes ago* (last edited 23 minutes ago)

it came out so many times in the remakes lol. plus they keep adding new lore every time.

[–] pressanykeynow@lemmy.world 9 points 3 hours ago

Isn't it true for the developers as well? If the game development lasts 5 years, you have quite a different team and ideas by the end compared to when you started.

[–] Horsey@lemmy.world 6 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

In the age of no-new-IP, why does it take so long for new games to come out…

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 6 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

AAA expectations are astronomical, AAs take some extra time to keep up, and indies that actually make it take the time to do their own thing, otherwise they’re almost certainly part of the vas, unseen sea of failed indies.

Also, oldschool game dev was toxic. It had some serious crunch culture, just to start. But I think it also attracted talented devs into “sweet spot” dev team sizes; not too big or too small.

And now, if you do software and want to make any money or provide for a family… well, you don’t do game dev. And that phenomenon has gotten worse and worse.

[–] Gust@piefed.social 8 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I thought ff7re (the second part of the remake) sucked ass compared to ff7r (the first part.) The first one felt like a cool modernization of ff7 that still felt like the same game at its core, but the second one felt like complete focus-grouped buzzword filled nonsense. And the most annoying fucking element ive ever seen in a video game, birds that would constantly fly around your screen squawking and generally just being a nuisance until you went and completed their little meaningless side objective. Even the combat aspect felt like a bad monster hunter clone rather than a final fantasy game

[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 6 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

i also loved the first one, despite being cut way too short.

i'm playing through the second one, and it feels like a ubisoft game with the climbing tower bullshit and pointless collectible kinda stuff scattered around.

i get that they needed to fill up the open world since the old one was empty as fuck but what a shitty way to endlessly stretch just a little bit of gameplay. might as well have given us the full story already.

if i wanted assassin's creed i would be playing assassin's creed instead.

[–] Gust@piefed.social 3 points 13 minutes ago

Big agree on the ubisoft and assasins creed points. I'm also "playing through the second one" right now, though I've been on the Junon area for a month or two now, and I also haven't opened up the game in a month or two. I just don't think I'm ever finishing that game, which feels wild to me given the absurd amount of time I've spent playing and replaying the ps1 original. I'm just about as much of a simp for that story/those characters as a person can be

[–] tiredofsametab@fedia.io 17 points 7 hours ago (3 children)

I'd be fine with Square Enix going away. In my opinion, they got greedy and way too full of themselves. Nintendo as well, for that matter.

[–] GladiusB@lemmy.world 4 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

FFXIV funds everything else and now everything sucks. They don't make fun games anymore. Remake took so long I don't even care to play anymore. First one had me hyped. Second one I haven't even touched.

[–] RamRabbit@lemmy.world 3 points 2 hours ago

Remake took so long I don’t even care to play anymore.

I was going to buy the remake until I found out it was only partly done. Now that it has been six years and it still isn't out, I'm pretty sure I'm just not going to bother.

[–] Rooster326@programming.dev 2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Are the FF7 remakes really considered that bad?

I thought they were pretty good.

[–] tiredofsametab@fedia.io 2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I personally was not interested in them at all. I was much more a fan of 6 than 7. As such, no idea on the quality.

[–] Rooster326@programming.dev 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Because you can suplex a train?

[–] tiredofsametab@fedia.io 2 points 2 hours ago

The real reason is probably more that I was not a fan of early 3d stuff in general. The camera was kinda crap, the controls didn't feel great when walking around, etc. Not just an FF thing, either; this was for games as a whole except for racing games. I hated Starfox as well (coming from the Amiga world, some stuff felt like going backwards).

Being able to suplex a train, though, was a nice bonus.

[–] IEatDaFeesh@lemmy.world 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I actually wanted to play one of their games but you had to create a wholeass account with authentication (I think a phone number). Yeah, too much effort to entertain so this decline is a positive for me.

[–] Rooster326@programming.dev 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Which one required an account?

Only one I know are mobile garbage or the literal MMO

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 4 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

How many people are attached to a franchise if it takes 10 years to get the full story?

You can just play the original, though.

Same with any of these franchises. The newer titles are hit or miss, but the old games have aged like wine.

[–] rafoix@lemmy.zip 4 points 3 hours ago

We can but it generally looks and controls like crap on modern screens. It has aged worse than many tank control games like Resident Evil.

Lots of people just wanted a nice graphical update with some quality of life improvements. I'm sure that shouldn't take a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars to complete.

[–] Rooster326@programming.dev 4 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

They may have aged like wine but most youths don't like drinking wine. It is an "acquired taste". They don't have the nostalgia you have for them.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

most youths don’t like drinking wine

Then they can wait six years between sips of AAA piss, I suppose.

My friends with kids don't seem to have any problem picking up Sonic, Pokemon, or Guantlet. One's even picked up Eldin Ring.

They don’t have the nostalgia

You don't need nostalgia to enjoy nice things.

[–] Rooster326@programming.dev 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

Elden Ring is hardly "aged". L DLC in the last 12 months. There are modern Sonic and Pokemon games and they hit a short cycle time.

The "can wait 6 years" is the whole point. They aren't waiting. They aren't getting attached enough to bother waiting. That's literally the whole point of the article. Did you read it?

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 4 points 3 hours ago

The “can wait 6 years” is the whole point. They aren’t waiting.

You don't need to wait to play games that came out thirty years ago.

Plenty of young people are into retro gaming.

[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 hours ago

the second one is definetly not as good as the first.

[–] chiliedogg@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I didn't play the second of the remake games because it was a PS5 exclusive. I usually buy into one platform (it was Xbox this gen) and hop on late in a console cycle for the other side to get cheap consoles and games, but for the first time consoles are getting more expensive over time, so I still don't have a PS5. It's on PC now, but building a PC costs as much as a modest house right now.

[–] pressanykeynow@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago

I won't argue your point that PCs cost too much nowadays but gotta say you got some really amazing house prices.

[–] eletes@sh.itjust.works 23 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

I think back to early 2000's, I was playing the Jak and daxter games all throughout elementary to highschool with a decent amount of replayability. Same with metal gear solid. And these were pretty fleshed out games worth the money back then.

Kingdom hearts was the first time I got fed up with development hell.

[–] Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 22 points 11 hours ago

Ratchet & Clank had it's first three games released in three years. Same graphics and no one cared.

[–] sdcSpade@lemmy.zip 34 points 12 hours ago

A few years ago I was hit with the sack of bricks that is all Donkey Kong Country games being released one year apart. I have vivid memories of playing the second game for a very long time and then multiple times after while imagining what a third game would be like and you're telling me that was only one year? There's no way those games would mean so much to me if we had only had one per console generation.

[–] missingno@fedia.io 74 points 14 hours ago (21 children)

I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding.

Honestly, what I miss most are the low budget straight-to-handheld spinoffs that used to flourish in that space. Handhelds especially felt like a space where developers weren't afraid to go wild with experiments, because development cycles were cheap and quick. But that attribute started to show cracks in the 3DS era, it was inevitable that this would no longer be sustainable when all of the budget had to go into bigger and bigger and bigger console games, while next generation handhelds also got more expensive to develop for too. There wasn't room for these quick and dirty side projects anymore.

[–] NikkiDimes@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago

Good news! AI slop hits two of those marks!

[–] Ryoae@piefed.social 2 points 6 hours ago

That's where mobile comes in.

Problem with mobile, is that games have gotten too stupidly cheap to the point of scamming.

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[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 90 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (17 children)

Also, and I'm just throwing this out there, maybe the circlejerk of nostalgia bait for Gen X/Millennials means fuck-all to younger people in general because it's the nostalgia of their parents, not their own thing?

Like, aren't we seeing this in so many different properties? As time marches on, interest wanes? Nobody cares about Marvel movies anymore. Nobody cares about Star Wars anymore. The most hardcore fanatics tend to be older and had the originals, which were literally original content, as things they grew up with. Part of the mystery and excitement of them was how much was left unexplained. Seriously, the Clone Wars was this mysterious fucking thing when it was just an offhand comment by Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: A New Hope. Now we have entire TV series dedicated to the background of the Clone Wars. Mystery gone. The first season of The Mandalorian brought back a sense of mystery to the series and then promptly dropped it to mix it in with every other piece of Star Wars memorabilia.

Young people want their own stuff that they're growing up with, they don't want rehashes of the shit their parents obsessed over.

Look at the continued interest in Adventure Time spinoffs, for example. Adventure Time first came out when I was just shy of 29. It would be fodder for the children of people just slightly older than me. It was also enjoyable for older folks who enjoyed silly fantasy, which gave it wider appeal. It persists more because it was an actual original thing that some people grew up with.

We live in an era where copyright that lasts 100 years after authorial death has broken corporations brains and they are scared to death of anything original in case it might not be a clear moneymaker. Letting interest in a new property grow over time is almost unheard of in the Netflix era of two seasons and then fuck you, it's over. So even when new properties are explored, most aren't given enough time to mature into something that becomes truly nostagliac for a younger generation.

If corporations want people to be as invested in long-lived series, they have to allow the option for new, interesting series to take the stage. Is it really a shocker that people are over games that started in the NES era? That young people want stories and ideas that reflect the world they live in, not the one their parents grew up in? Young people absolutely lose their shit over Undertale and Deltarune, both games made by a single auteur developer. Pokemon, referenced in the article, were sleeper hits that took time before they became an absolute craze.

I'm in my forties, and I constantly talk about how the world our parents brought us up to live in was dead before we were born. It's the same but at an accelerated pace for kids these days. The world we know and are trying to prepare them for no longer exists. Our stories and nostalgia become meaningless for our kids because it doesn't speak to their experiences.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

[–] lechekaflan@lemmy.world 3 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

I'm almost 50 but uninvested in Nintendo.

[–] Lfrith@lemmy.ca 5 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

Pokemon games come out often.

I think that's the big difference. In a single console generation like the PS3 you had Naughty Dog put out Uncharted 1, Uncharted 2, Uncharted 3, and Last of Us 1.

For the PS4 they put out Last of Us 2, Uncharted 4, and Uncharted Lost Legacy.

And for PS5 nothing.

Games aren't released often by individual studios anymore. The ones that stay part of the public eye frequently release games like Call of Duty or have a live service model like GTA V that has people keep playing like it is Fortnite. Or keep releasing sequels like Pokemon does as opposed to 1 or 2 releases a console generation.

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[–] myfunnyaccountname@lemmy.zip 16 points 12 hours ago (6 children)

Same for elder scrolls or gta. Kids today get 1, maybe 2 games of their favorite series before they have to do adult things. The only teams releasing on a quick schedule are the shit mobile games.

[–] thedirtyknapkin@lemmy.world 6 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

i mean with those games it feels like you get one every game third generation at this point.

elder scrolls 6 is going to become halflife 3 at this point.

[–] pressanykeynow@lemmy.world 3 points 3 hours ago

HL3 problem is that they want it to be as groundbreaking as the previous titles. The problem with elder scrolls 6 is that even if it is released it's probably going to be bad.

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