Free Step Dodge

Well they only had 10 months to make the game. The issues going on with doa is more so KT's draconian time restraints. Anthem was just mismanaged. 7 year development that only went into actual ground work and production 2 years before release.

KT spent a tonne on their new in-house engine and some risky new IPs, and has been desperately trying to recoup the costs, is what I've gotten from the time since Nioh/Toukiden went out. Lots of games pushed out of the door early, lots of minor iterations marketed as new titles, lots of external contracting taking priority over their in-house titles.

Wouldn't call that effing up, just small publisher issues.

Well, I'm sure that the development team thought that things were pretty effed up. lol

I mean... not really. You do what pays the bills, right? Churning out the same old tired-looking IPs leads to stagnation, and slowing profits. New engines and IPs combat that. Keeping games in the oven until they're perfect whittles down the profit margin, which makes no sense if the playerbase will buy them undercooked, anyway. If you're a developer, you do what the publisher says will pay the mortgage.

And all of this is relative to the absolute killing you can make by chucking out a gacha game or two... Remember, TN currently have three gacha games featuring the DoA cast, out there. Two of which are pure profit licences, and don't even require development investment.

When your core IP is a niche game in a strugging genre, all this sounds far from effing up. It sounds like keeping your job.

"Fucking up" (making repeated errors) is different from "fucked up" (unfortunate, undesirable). I'm saying that the situation was likely fucked up for the dev team given that they had to use/fix/adapt the new engine which likely wasn't wholly suited for everything they would want to do otherwise. Akin to how BW was forced to use the Frostbite engine. The similarities probably start to peel off from there, though.

Having to put the game together in only 10 months, if true, would also be fucked up.

It's DoA6's engine, designed for DoA6, with everyone else adapting it later. Pretty sure those 10 months were just asset porting and gameplay changes. If you want to reach for a 'fuck up' (undesirable, unfortunate,) in terms of 6's lifecycle, the Square contract for NT was probably more intrusive. Can't imagine any developer who wouldn't jump at the chance to work on a Final Fantasy, tho...

Again, it's all relative.

Like, not wanting to be a pedantic sob about this, but trying to compare what's going on for KT/TN to the monumental carnage going on at Bioware is... misguided, at best.

Bioware really, really screwed the pooch.