Games

It has two factions of enemies, each with a dozen or so units..

The level of detail in Helldivers 2 is insane for the type of game and company size.

Deformable terrain and buildings, enemy animations when you shoot off different limbs and they keep moving towards you, your cape burns off more and more as you use your jetpack, etc.

Call of Duty has 3,000 devs working on their titles.

Arrowhead has around 100 employees total.

I very much believe this game took that long with a team that size, and it shows and is a large part of why it's been so successful.

IIRC they developed the game on an older game engine that's no longer supported

Star Citizen has entered chat

Pretty sure the maps have static meshes but their placement is randomized. So the maps may be similar with handmade pieces, but those pieces are randomly placed to generate the map.

You're leaving out Joel completely. They had to make that system for him to GM us, and I like how we choose what new weapons and stuff we unlock with our actions.

I’m guessing they went back to the drawing board several times - probably because they felt their sequel wasn’t really as evolved or as fun as what they had hoped it would be, so they shifted I’m guessing from their overhead view to the behind the player 3rd person style game we know now at some point after churning at it for a couple years at least…

Like you know that Doom 2016 was the 3rd complete from scratch redo from what they originally started working on after Doom 3, right?

This sort of thing sometimes happens in creative projects; like when you hear a movie took like 7 years to make, it’s not necessarily that they literally shot scenes every week for the same film that whole time. It’s that the project was shelved, or they changed directors, or the studio lost interest for a while or they got a new script or something.

I'm going to provide a different reply than the others.

Yes, I would consider 8 years a long time to make a game like Helldivers 2.

But all that means is that a studio in a good position to make that type of game would likely be able to do it in a much shorter amount of time.

In this case, we have a studio that was, in hindsight, too small and trying to be too ambitious in the game they were trying to make. So, trying to grow a studio at the same time you are trying to build an overly ambitious piece of software is going to have multiplying affects on how long said project will take.

They probably developed, refined and scrapped 100s of ideas before they landed to the final game.

Likely a lot of time was spent iterating and experimenting with different ideas, testing out concepts, tweaking, etc. Haven't played the game but I do work as a software developer.