makingmusic476 said:
I can't think of any other examples where that is really the case. The only franchises I can think of that haven't been mentioned yet and that may apply are Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed, but the former barely deviates from the formula set by Modern Warfare with each sequel, and there are four different development studios working on the franchise, while the latter has a team of over 450 people working on it. Or at least that's how many worked on Assassin's Creed II. Uncharted 2 is the only game I can think of that really pulls off a lot more than what GG did with Killzone 3 over a comparable 24 month time frame, but even then Naughty Dog put almost all of their work into the singleplayer experience. The multiplayer only has the most basic of feature sets, relying instead on the franchise's unique mix of TPS and platforming gameplay to stand out. |
Every game has a limited scope for development whether it is 200 people over 5 years or 50 people over two years. How they assign their resources dictates on what features get cut, which features get implemented and how many new gameplay mechanics they bring on board, etc. It is possible that they put too much on their plate and therefore wasted man hours, it is possible they didn't get a working alpha early enough to test their multiplayer etc. Given the level of resources they had available to them what comes out the other end relates almost entirely to their goals and direction as well as straight up project management. What you see out the other end in their game is the result of the choices they made and how well they pulled it off.
P.S. The number of developers who worked on a project is entirely different to the number of developer years on average spent over the number of developers who worked on the project. Just because they had 450 at one point or different points doesn't mean they even had as much development resources as GG had with KZ3 if they had a more stable, large team.
Tease.
