I'll admit it's a hope as much as anything. I don't think for a second that there won't be a lot of hard work done during this delay that'll probably suck for a lot of staff, but there's a difference between an intense shift at work and full on crunch.

I think the fact that this is the first delay announced, and there's no hard date given is cause to hope. If they'd given a date like 10 February, say, I'd be more immediately worried about crunch. The fact that there's no public deadline will hopefully reduce the chance that there's crunch because there's less pressure to finish the work. That, and the fact that the delay seems to be a response to criticisms about textures/lighting gives me hope that there's not a huge amount of work, if any, beyond that.

When you look at CD Projekt and Naughty Dog delaying their games and causing more crunch, I think it speaks to the culture of the studios. CD Projekt clearly don't give a shit. They keep doing it and are fairly brazen about it too.

Then there's Naughty Dog. When you look at Schreier's article on The Last of Us 2, the thing that strikes me is that the delays and resultant crunch appear to be down to Druckmann making fairly substantial changes to the game's narrative after criticisms about the writing and it just spiraled from there with constant chopping and changing. There's also clearly a culture at that studio that means some are far more affected by crunch than others and it's the lower level employees and contractors who get the worst of it, so it'll never change.

You've also got to consider the games themselves. CD Projekt are known for making games so demanding they even give high end PCs a real hard time. As Schreir notes in his TLOU2 article, Uncharted 4 had bags of grain which would realistically deflate when shot. It's like RDR 2's realistic horse bollocks, ludicrous extravegance for its own sake.

Halo Infinite doesn't strike me as being the same as those games. I don't think it was ever going to be a boundry pushing game in terms of visuals etc. even before the demo last month. I think Infinite's delay is more down to the fact that the pandemic has completely fucked their production schedule and so they just can't finish the work they're doing on getting textures and lighting to an acceptable, if not mind blowing, standard in time for the XSX launch.

However, all that might be wishful thinking and rationalising. It may be the case that the studio's already been crunching to finish in time for the XSX launch and this delay means another month or two of crunch. Hopefully not though.