By As part of our extensive roundup where game developers clarify common misconceptions about games, lead developers from the Helldivers 2 and Palworld teams unintentionally, and perhaps predictably, arrived at a mutual understanding: enthusiasts of expansive, immersive games frequently underestimate the challenges involved in creating new content.
Helldivers 2 and Palworld were both tremendous successes that drew in tens of millions of players, and many of those players have remained engaged for the long term. Within this group, there exists a reasonable, insatiable desire for new updates, but regrettably, this material requires a significant amount of time to produce, irrespective of the approach taken.
“I believe individuals often have highly unrealistic anticipations regarding timelines,” states Palworld community and publishing lead John Buckley. “I personally indulge in an excessive amount of gaming. I comprehend the need for faster content delivery. However, I think people truly misunderstand the duration involved in creating these things.”
Buckley expresses concern that individuals view games like Fortnite and Call of Duty, which are developed by large teams of creators utilizing substantial resources and pipelines often planning over a year ahead, and presume that other games should generate content at a similar pace.
“So they dive into something like Palworld, enjoy it for a week, and then they wonder, what’s happening with this?” Buckley elaborates. “There are countless people who claim we’ve abandoned the project, we’re finished, or we’ve taken the funds and ceased development. We are, every moment of every day, dedicated to this game, but it requires weeks and months to create new elements. A fresh island in Palworld represents six months of labor. When it finally launches, there’s immense enthusiasm, yet prior to that, you encounter numerous harsh remarks about these matters.
“You attempt to clarify it, and while there will always be a few players who comprehend, and genuinely value that dialogue, many do not. They simply fail to grasp the timeline. Therefore, I believe development timelines are greatly misapprehended, and it would be excellent if more individuals recognized this, but accurately conveying it is challenging.”
Helldivers 2 creative lead and former Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt, on the other hand, addressed the broader challenges of game development and why developers cannot always react to feedback or suggestions immediately, let alone launch significant updates like the recent Heart of Democracy update.
“If you consider how movies are produced, you cast an actor and they simply deliver their lines,” Pilestedt mentioned. “But games are crafted with immense precision. You need to develop the character from scratch for them to even be capable of delivering those lines. People often ask, can’t they incorporate this or execute that? Most often, every decision you make, particularly as the game expands, carries numerous consequences that ripple out, rendering something that appears simple quite complex, or making something that seems extremely difficult surprisingly straightforward. It’s counterintuitive unless you have experience in game development to understand how they are produced.”