The Reason Why Nintendo's Games Are So Good? Devs Are Given "As Much Time As They Need"

The biggest takeway from this is that NintendoLife must give their writers extremely tight deadlines

This explains why Metroid Prime 4 has been MIA ever since it was announced then.

@DinnerAndWine

lmao

I tried to look up Nintendo's worst-scoring Metacritic games to see if any of them appeared particularly rushed and contradicted this statement, but it would seem that most of Nintendo's worst games weren't so much rushjobs as they were failed experiements, cynically motivated products, or the very special case of Devil's Third where so many moving parts didn't come together. Seems they have the games to back up what they were saying.

It's really sweet when someone, even when anonymous, has good things to say about their empoyer.

All I gather is that a decent Nintendo game is still better than 60% of the industry's best work.

@DinnerAndWine Man, was wondering where that burning smell was coming from when I got on NintendoLife today, then saw your comment.

Like with Metroid Prime 4 they thought it was a great idea to give it the game development back to the original people who created the other games, so I think Nintendo knows how to do things most of the time. I mean a lot of Nintendo games are kid friendly and most of the designs look like they came out of a kids show or something but I still think Nintendo knows how to make games.

Devs Are Given "As Much Time As They Need"

Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash? Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival?

@StephenYap3 It is quite obvious in hindsight that internally Nintendo had pivoted to the Switch and had to sacrifice some games simply to make sure that the Wii U wasn't utterly devoid of content before the Switch and its games were ready. They are still a publicly traded corporation and have to act like it, especially when faced with the failure that was the Wii U.

@Zuljaras I suppose it's Game Freak's fault, not Nintendo 🤔

I've always thought the best Nintendo games have fantastic attention to detail. Whether this is because they are given more time I don't know.

The portable nature of the Switch guarantees people will give it a lookover and consider buying it before any other console. And it's not purely based just on GPU but Software availability that covers the gambit of games for different age and social economic groups. Nintendo games aren't just about pixels but enjoyment and on the go gaming. Deadlines come and go alot depends on how much time/labor plus market conditions permit release if you release buggy release that is sure to torpedo your chance NIN will give you better options. And souring gamers isn't helpful either.

@Zuljaras Them I think and they have to get the games out before the new shows air.

This kills many projects, not just games. I’m a backend developer consultant for a large company by day and I can’t think of a time in recent history where we didn’t both have a deadline and started cutting corners to finish. Unfortunately you can’t always push the deadline back (like when fire season is approaching in the western US)

We should talk about how SMP still only has 4 boards

That means Pikmin 4 is going to be the best game ever.

@nessisonett Nintendo made an official statement more than a year ago Metriod Prime 4 was scraped, and are now revert development back to Retro Studio from scratch.

This lends credence to one of the general theories of why Pokemon games are heading towards mediocrity. Gamefreak, stop cranking the games out once a year. Take two years! Maybe three!

Everything except Pokemon apparently, but I guess that's Gamefreak's problem rather than Nintendo's

This makes sense, but I also think that it seems Nintendo developers also play and enjoy their own games. I've seen one too many games on other consoles (Ubisoft games in particular) where it seems like the people making it where just adding separate things described in a design document, not really implementing something they'd actually play.

@TheDavyStar What I like about Nintendo is that in the rare case their games are bad, it's because they are either somewhat dull and uninspired (in the case of games like Amiibo Festival and Mario Tennis Ultra Smash) or they tried something new and it didn't work out (in games like Starfox Zero or Paper Mario: Sticker Star). Unlike other companies, their games are never glitchy or blatantly unfinished. With Nintendo I can at least see that if nothing else, they BELIEVED they were putting out a good product. They don't try to rip people off or pull a fast one on consumers.

@Octane I just KNEW you were going to mention that...

But why does Pokémon feel so rushed, then?!

@nessisonett It isn't missing. They very clearly gave a large update regarding the games development, which is the opposite of missing.

@tekknik Just because you haven't personally experienced a deadline and corner cutting doesn't mean anything, because it is wildly pervasive in the industry and has been constantly reported from huge numbers of the major AAA developers.

@BitLounger Just because you think a game needs more content doesn't mean it was rushed. It could have easily been that way by design and Nintendo felt satisfied with it. Just because a person has as much time as they need to work on something doesn't mean it will turn out to be a masterpiece every time.

@Deltath It was a joke, hence the

Problem is Animal Crossing still feels like it's in beta with all the missing content and minor update after update. Then you can talk about a game like Pokemon S&SH which is far from perfect and really lacking as an overall game.

@StephenYap3 Mario Party Switch (but olders ones too) /s

No! Don't reveal Nintendo's secret to the competition! They all think the way to success is to release an incomplete mess, then patch it and sell loot boxes!

Too bad Pokémon isn't a Nintendo franchise. Oh, wait!?

I think there's a big difference between a game that simply takes a long time to make and a game that keeps changing direction throughout development. With Animal Crossing, the direction was obviously clear from the start and it just took a while. I also think it's important to plan a game for a particular console and release it whilst the console is still doing well, rather than end up with a Twilight Princess type situation where it ends up getting ported to the next system and that influences the game.

Actually, I love New Horizons, I really do, but it feels surprisingly incomplete as it stands. There are a few things I expected to see, such as classic furniture sets, that I haven't even seen a hint of yet. Hopefully it'll become available in the future, but more and more I suspect the current version of the game is less complete than previous ones. Awesome piece of software though.

Nintendo Devs = artisan
Works within leasure time to make great products

If only the Pokémon Co. would allow this philosophy to be applied with mainline Pokémon games.
Nintendo really should takeover personal development of the next few Pokémon games.

@locky-mavo They're locked up in that Death Spiral that Miyamoto warned about, ironically.

@OscarHTX Aye don’t talk bad about Mario Party 4

@Deltath you most definitely read my comment wrong as i said the exact opposite, that i always have a deadline and to exacerbate issues even more some deadlines are inflexible unless loss of life is acceptable.

Edit: I had some grammatical issues in there that made my point unclear. Hopefully it’s more clear now.

@Sonicjan @thiob @RPGamer
Not developed in-house at Nintendo. Developed by Gamefreak, published by Nintendo.

@JR150 This is really a cop out.

So what are Nintendo games? Mario and Zelda?

@Trajan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Entertainment_Planning_%26_Development

Miyamoto is famous for saying, "A delayed game is eventually good; a bad game is bad forever."

@JR150 I forgot about all their AAA iOS and Android games.

I remember reading on here sometime ago that the only company that came close to Nintendo in terms of “attention to detail “ was Namco. And secondly that Sega never really gave game development “a couple of extra months” and that annoyed people like Yuji Naka.

By the time Metroid Prime 4 is done it’ll be the perfect game of all time.

Untrue, Nintendo had several shortcomings and games that aren't as great as this article tries to make it sound like. Kirby, Yoshi, even LM3 wasn't that great. Reviews aren't everything.

@Trajan it's not a cop out, it's a fact.
Pokémon is a Nintendo franchise in part only, as the ownership is divided between them, Creatures Inc. and Game Freak, making it the only Nintendo franchise that Nintendo doesn't outright own.
They don't develop them, nor do they set deadlines by themselves, because they have to deal with The Pokémon Company International who manages and lines up the release of merchandise, anime, etc..
That is the reason why recent Pokémon games have such low quality standards and rushed releases, compared to pretty much every other Nintendo-owned franchise.
I mean, Nintendo has its stinkers too from time to time like everyone else, but those are usually budget titles like Amiibo Festival or failed experiments like Star Fox Zero.

@clvr So we only judge Nintendo on Mario, Zelda, Mario Kart, Splatoon, Arms, and their mobile games?

I think a major problem is that any Nintendo game always gets 10% added to the 'real' score, by which I mean the score the exact same game would get if it were developed/published by a different developer on a non-Nintendo platform. So many Nintendo games on the Switch get scores of 10/10 or 100% or 5/5 stars or whatever. If they'd been Sony or Microsoft games published on PlayStation or Xbox, they'd have received 9/10, 90% or 4,5/5 stars. The perfect recent example: Animal Crossing is a fun game, but it has some really glaring flaws (crafting tools gets extremely tedious extremely quickly; you can't use the touch screen for several actions that would really benefit from it, which was mentioned as a negative in the Nintendo Life review but in subsequent articles was already described as something that "wouldn't work well anyway"; so many things have been cut just so they can add them in byte-size updates for the next year to make it look as though they keep supporting their games - right now there's far less to do in New Horizons than in even the GameCube game, basically once you've caught all of this month's critters there's nothing to do, no projects to fund other than a couple of expansions to your own home). The thing is, this site (as well as any other Nintendo review site) lets people who already adore those kinds of games review them, which combined with the rush to get reviews out leads to honeymoon-inflated scores. If you play a game in a series or genre you really like for the first time, unless it's really bad you're always going to think "wow, this is the best thing ever" until you've been playing it for some time and start to notice and get frustrated by its flaws. For some reason, reviews for Nintendo games never take this honeymoon period into account. Reviews for any other game, especially if published on any other platform, do. Even this site's original sister site, Push Square, factors the honeymoon period into its review scores (most of the time). Looking at the latest reviews for some important games: Final Fantasy VII Remake gets an 8/10, Resident Evil gets a 7/10 and Doom Eternal gets a 9/10. If Nintendo had developed the exact same game, published on a Nintendo console, they would have received 9/10, 8/10 and 10/10 respectively.

All of this considered, it's easy to see how Nintendo dominates those "best games of all time" lists.

@RickD
Oh, i have Metroid Prime Federation Force 3DS.
That was the only Metroid game i played.

kinda nutty idea, giving workers better conditions increases quality of the product! i always figured crunch was the best way to squeeze a product out of them

that one of the reason i love Nintendo so much, they put care in every game and franchise they release unlike most game companies.

@Trajan we judge them on the games they actually make, like every other company.
It doesn't seem that hard to grasp.

@nintendoknife agreed. Not every game and not every site, but it happens quite often, and I think it diminishes the value of high scores given to games that actually deserve them, like BOTW or Odyssey.
And this unfortunately applies to Nintendo-published games, too, such as Pokémon. Looking back at the reviews for Sun and Moon I shudder a bit to be honest.

@BitLounger As well as slapping on the Ally System at the last minute, considering how utterly broken it is unlike the much superior Star Rush on 3DS.

Don't go saying Miyamoto's philosophy is good. It isn't. I would commend it if we got a new F-Zero game, but he's all like "Ehh, why do you want new F-Zero?" "There's nothing else to do with that game." If I were him, I'd know exactly what the next step is; online multiplayer and online track creation.

If any one other company could adopt this philosophy too, I wish it would be Gamefreak. Granted, this hasn't been an issue for them up until last year, but something's definitely gone wrong in there at some point after SM came out.

I can't help but think of the Cooking Mama: Cookstar fiasco going on right now, and how the developers rushed it out to production, despite knowing full well that the IP holder was not satisfied with the end product and wanted them to make corrections.

Methinks people need to remind the devs on social media about Miyamoto-sama's quote.

“A delayed game is eventually good, a rushed game becomes Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash.”