Well I said it before. The Conduit was really just a tech demo formed into a game. It was more engine than substance. That's why the level design was retro 80's style FPS. As a technological piece of work it was fantastic. It did indeed display advance graphic techniques using the TEV.
The Grinders/their engine(can't think of the name at the moment) can render about the same number of baddies as does Left 4 Dead, maybe a few more since I don't recall ever seeing more than about 30 zombies at any given time and most tend to despawn quickly. Their Imposter engine for the Grinder runs about 60 enemies(this is likely offline number, who knows online). They are also revising their engines as they go. though already in development games don't gain such benefits.
So my concern isn't so much the capability of the game since TC had spot on gameplay that would work perfectly fine for L4d style, but in the effect that the Maps will be sucktastic. I don't recall any levels in TC that were well good. This could have been intended design, but it could also be just bad level design.
On the other topic. It is possible to turn out multiple quality games within descent time frames. It has to do with work distribution. Often the in question AA/A games from studios are dropped on a single studio who will do nothing else. This sometimes leaves various personal resources not doing much or just doing the same thing over and over in essence wasting money. How many times does a song or texture need to be made for a model. It's also not the case where it's the last day of development and the texture artists are just finishing. Reality wise you can have your textures and various personal resources finished and only come back to do touch up if things change. This is the benefit of smaller studios. When one personal resource has done the majority of work they can go on to work on a different project and only come back when needed. At EA, Nintendo, Capcom, SE.... they don't do that. One team one game. That's not to say there is some shifting of staff around, but don't expect it to be general practice with these companies.
Squilliam: On Vgcharts its a commonly accepted practice to twist the bounds of plausibility in order to support your argument or agenda so I think its pretty cool that this gives me the precedent to say whatever I damn well please.
