Lens of Truth: Killzone 2 vs Gears 2

[Squilliam]

DMeisterJ said:

NiKKoM said:

shanbcn said:
KILLZONE 2

• Announced E3 2005
• Preproduction until end 2006
• Production until end 2008
• 18 months Full Production
• 140 Guerrilla Games Staff
• 50 Sony Staff
• 27 Programmers

This is how KZ2 was made ,in around 2 years but 18 months in full production. But total staff was 217 which is amazing. Budget for sure was way more then Gears 2

Well too bad they themself said they have been working on it since at least november 2004:

Right after the E3 2005 trailer..

How long ago did work start on the sequence?

Jan-Bart: We started working on it in late November, and only finished it three days before the show, at the very, very last moment!

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/616/616591p1.html

Yeah, the artists were working on a CGi sequence way back when.  Yeah, I'm sure it took them a few months to get it together, realizing they had to get together what they wanted the game to look like, the art direction and such. 

As you can see from the PDF, the game was only in production for 18 months, rather than the 4+ years many people seem to bring up.  I'll trust the PDF of GDC rather than an ambiguous comment from Jan-Bart.  He didn't go into enough detail in that comment to draw anything, like I said, I'm sure they had been working on the game for a while before E3 07 because they needed to find out what type of game they were going for. You do know that artists are always working on a game before the developers right?  And they only started developing the game at the end of 06 After Liberation.

Those artists are game developers, silly. Don't you mean programmers? Even then, I doubt anyone can make a game on an entirely new engine playable in less than 6 months if we take that 18 months to mean programming. So therefore they must have been developing the engine during that pre-production stage which many people would consider full fledged development.