For instance, Masahiro Sakurai, from Smash Bros, initially explained how Rex, from Xenoblade Chronicles 2, was cut from the roster in Smash Bros Ultimate due to time constraints. At first, this was taken a bit… awkwardly, because later he added Byleth from Fire Emblem Three Houses, when that game was in development.
However, when Pyra and Mythra were added, also from Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Sakurai explained how it wasn’t possible to have Rex playable with a swappable Blade, due to the Switch’s hardware limitations.
Here’s what I understood later on: if Sakurai stated that “Rex wasn’t added due to hardware limitations”, when Smash Bros Ultimate was released in late 2018, less than 2 years in the Switch’s lifespan, that… wouldn’t have been good publicity ^^;
So yeah, was there a developer’s excuse/justification that you only understood later?
As someone who makes games as a hobby, I 100% side with the devs in these situations because I’ve experienced, first hand, the time consumption of game development. I used to be much less understanding and more critical (typical on Reddit). But after thousands of hours of game dev, being on multiple failed projects, and with nothing to show for it – the only real excuse is that they didn’t work 24/7 on it. That’s the hypocrisy of Reddit in a nutshell: no excuse for failure, work harder. Also, crunch is ruining the industry…
In my experience game design was nothing but crunch. 16 hour days of debugging, refactoring, learning from mistakes, etc.