The Strange, Unfinished Saga of Cyberpunk 2077
A drive-by pronouncement, one that is probably wrong because of how reductive it is, but it is visceral to me because I&#x27;ve been dealing with a similar situation at work: you can&#x27;t trick computers. You can&#x27;t intimidate them into working with groupthink, coercive meetings, aggressive talks, or vague threats of losing face, position, or job. They are binary. You either make something that produces the output you want, or you get a buggy, unworkable mess (to various levels of unworkable).<p>All the crunch and pain and buggy games are a result of humans trying to force the other humans who are programming the games and content, and indirectly, the computers themselves into doing a rush job.<p>You can&#x27;t rush art. Programming is an art since whatever is being programmed has never been made before, else you could go Copy + Paste and be done.<p>Yes, there are millions of paintings of meadows, just as there are millions of copies of very similar but ever-so-slightly different boring line of business applications. But if you want THIS painting, this one that you have commissioned to show the meadow in YOUR back yard, you can&#x27;t rush the artist, or else the painting quality will be reduced. Depending on how much rush you add, the quality can be subtly bad but close enough, or horrifically bad as if, say, this pretentious commenter were painting it.<p>Let the artists (programmers) take the time they need to produce the artifact. Yes, the artists can sometimes get stuck in cycles of tweaks (goldplating) and need to be told this artifact is done, ship it, but it always seems like we lean too far to the other side: feature factories, churn churn churn, crunch crunch crunch.<p>Let the artists paint &#x2F; program in peace!