As part of our big roundup where game devs explain what people get wrong about games, lead devs from the Helldivers 2 and Palworld teams unknowingly, and somewhat unsurprisingly, came to a bit of a silent agreement: fans of big, living games often underestimate how hard it is to make new content.
Helldivers 2 and Palworld were both enormous hits that attracted tens of millions of players, and plenty of those players have stuck around for the long haul. Among them, there’s an understandable, unquenchable thirst for new content, but unfortunately, this stuff takes a long time to make, no matter what you do.
“I think people have very unrealistic expectations of timelines,” says Palworld community and publishing manager John Buckley. “I play an unhealthy amount of games myself. I understand that need for more content quickly. But I think people really misunderstand how long it takes to make things.”
Buckley worries that people look at games like Fortnite and Call of Duty, which are built by armies of developers working with enormous resources and pipelines often looking over a year ahead, and think that other games should pump out content as quickly.
“So they come into something like Palworld, they play it for a week, they love it, and then they go, you know, what’s going on with this?” Buckley continues. “There’s so many people that say we’ve dropped off, we’re dead, or we’ve run away with the money, we’re not working on it. We are, every minute of the day, working on this game, but it takes weeks and months to make stuff. A new island in Palworld, that’s half a year’s work. That takes six months. And when it comes out, people are super excited, but you just get so many nasty comments before that about these things.
“And you try to explain it, and there’ll always be a few gamers who get it, and they really appreciate that dialog, but quite a lot of them don’t. They just don’t get the timeline. So I think development timelines are very misunderstood, and it’s something that would be cool if more people understood, but I think it’s hard to accurately explain.”
Helldivers 2 creative lead and former Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt, meanwhile, touched on the broader complications of game development and why developers can’t always respond to feedback or suggestions instantly, let alone release big updates like the game’s recent Heart of Democracy.
“If you think about when movies are made, you get an actor and they’re there and you tell them what to say,” Pilestedt said. “But games are so meticulously crafted. You have to build the actor from the ground up for them to even be able to perform those lines. People say, can’t they add this or do that. Most of the time, all of the decisions that you make, especially the larger the game gets, have so many consequences that cascade, making something that seems easy really hard, or something that seems really hard to be super simple. It’s unintuitive unless you’ve worked in games to see how they’re created.”
