Opinion: Why Getting Mad Over Elden Ring is a Waste of Time and Energy
It has been 3 years since Elden Ring was announced. During E3 2019, the Bandai Namco-published game by FromSoftware was shown off to the world with a trailer that was, to be frank, quite light on details. It did, however, reveal to the world that the director of three of the most acclaimed Japanese games of the last decade—Hidetaka Miyazaki—would be working with George R. R. Martin for world-building and lore.
Needless to say, this fact got a fair bit of attention, considering Martin’s previous work has been the subject of a money making machine in the form of HBO’s Game of Thrones. Here we are in 2021, and just about any time there’s a video game-related press conference or event, people are frothing in the mouth for something about Elden Ring.
Here’s something that the more rabid parts of the fanbase just may not have realised yet: video games tend to have long development cycles, especially if it’s the first game with a brand new setting. The only real problem with Elden Ring, as far as we can tell, is that maybe it was announced a bit too early.
The Usual Video Game Development Cycle
Typically, a AAA video game takes a long time to make; Cyberpunk 2077 was first unveiled almost a decade ago and it still came out as an incomplete mess. Depending on how much work there is to be done, a game can take anywhere between 5 years to an entire decade, and that’s not even counting how advancements in hardware and software could effect plans for the games.
The general trend in the gaming industry has been to announce upcoming games much closer to release. That’s why we see games coming out within less than a year of its original release. While a much smarter idea from a marketing standpoint, it looks like the current trend might have given a few gamers the wrong idea about what it actually takes to make video games.
