What impact will C-19 have on the development of games?

[In The Name of Zod]

(in relation to D4 now being a work from home project)

I am imagining that people would need to adjust to different work environments and the distractions that it brings. It would be much harder to communicate with co-workers which is bound to create more wasted hours of work. Motivation will not be as high. C-19 will slow things down, it has to.

Trying to workout how large a setback this would be for D4 is probably worth talking about. So, thoughts?

 

[TheJedi]

Considering the power of fast internet available depending on where the developers live and looking at how Wow development is being affected currently I surmise that the delay may not be as bad as some may think it is.

 

[Rush]

I would give it around 3 years. I am being optimistic of course

 

[maxicek]

I work in software development, it affected us a bit at the beginning, but people adjusted very quickly. But that is the coding part.
I think in early development, where people are bring up ideas and concepts need to be discussed, it would be more difficult.

 

[In The Name of Zod]

Yes I've tried making games when I was fresh out of high school for a few years. We needed to have meetings every couple of weeks usually at a pub or a club over a few drinks. I have no doubt that the guys at Blizzard wouldn't have the same problems we had but issues start to arise when you get one disruptive person in the group. Someone that wants to hijack good plans at critical moments. Trying to keep everyone on the same path is difficult and unless you can actually be apart of their working day I'd say dealing with anyone like this is impossible. Coding wise, working from home could be a blessing though.

 

[Rush]

Coding without disruption is absolute bliss I have to agree there. Perhaps they will be even more productive. A lot of research is suggesting people working from home are actually working harder.

 

[Elly]

It's tough working from home though if you're not disciplined or you have distractions you have no control over. I find it difficult to not get distracted over things I HAVE control over. YouTube is a temptress and if I get caught up there I can waste a good hour before I realise it. Also the distraction of things that need doing in the house/garden.

I admire people who can be regimented about their day when working from home and stick to set times for work, lunch and stopping (not going back to work after dinner).

It's definitely a skill but I imagine it would be different with bosses on your case to meet deadlines. Trick is, how to weed out the skivers in coding?

 

[In The Name of Zod]

Behavioral science also plays a big part in the way we automatically associate certain behavior's with certain places. If we are not used to working from our home PC then it's going to be hard to adjust to suddenly having to. The larger a team then the greater the likelihood would be that someone in the team would fall victim to this problem. I think that's a pretty reasonable assumption.

 

[In The Name of Zod]

VNN just released a video where this subject is hit upon with direct quotes from Gabe Newell when discussing the impact that Covid is having on production at Valve. 50-75% was the figure extracted from it. Here is the vid.

How this could translate to Blizzard is at course unknown as they are both very different companies. However, if the impact is similar then D4 could be as far out as 4 years till release.