lol it gets shorter every time this story is told. It was 18 months, and it started with a fully complete game engine with tons of finished assets.
For a similar comparison, GTA Vice City was released in October 2002 and GTA San Andreas was released in October 2004 with a 2 year dev cycle. Starting with a complete engine and doing what amounts to a total conversion does significantly shorten dev time.
Also, it’s not like they moved mountains to achieve this. FNV shipped with countless game breaking bugs and would CTD every 10 minutes on my system at launch. It only became playable after the first few patches. GTA SA shipped on disc, with the version that most people played being the initial PS2 version, and that version works quite well. So basically they achieved the 6 month reduction by lopping off the QA cycle.
Was it a short dev cycle even with that all being said? Yes, especially for an HD era game on an engine the team wasn’t as familiar with as the GTA SA team would have been. But let’s not rewrite history.
lol it gets shorter every time this story is told. It was 18 months, and it started with a fully complete game engine with tons of finished assets.
For a similar comparison, GTA Vice City was released in October 2002 and GTA San Andreas was released in October 2004 with a 2 year dev cycle. Starting with a complete engine and doing what amounts to a total conversion does significantly shorten dev time.
Also, it’s not like they moved mountains to achieve this. FNV shipped with countless game breaking bugs and would CTD every 10 minutes on my system at launch. It only became playable after the first few patches. GTA SA shipped on disc, with the version that most people played being the initial PS2 version, and that version works quite well. So basically they achieved the 6 month reduction by lopping off the QA cycle.
Was it a short dev cycle even with that all being said? Yes, especially for an HD era game on an engine the team wasn’t as familiar with as the GTA SA team would have been. But let’s not rewrite history.