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curl-6 on 09 December 2014
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the_dengle said:
curl-6 said:

They're efficient for their size, sure, but real efficiency would have been doubling their workforce last gen in preparation for the added workload of current gen development.

And since the physics and collision boxes presumably have to stay the same so a designed level works across all pallettes, then yeah, it would essentially be just an object swap, wouldn't it? The new features are nice, but having the assets already in place reduces the workload a lot.

You can have all of your game's music composed by Koji Kondo and finish it in a year, or you can finish it in 4 months with one-third of the music composed by Kondo and the rest composed by two people who were unemployed at the time development started.

If that's not a strong enough example, how about if you could have your whole film directed by Stephen Spielberg, or one-third of it directed by him and the rest by two out-of-work directors.

The same applies to every other role in the development process. It's not to say that Nintendo shouldn't be training younger designers to take the place of the older ones in time, but the best games are made when everyone who touches them has the same vision. The more people touching them, the harder it is to maintain this focus -- and to supervise them all and make sure everyone is doing quality work.

I don't see what Mario Maker has to do with the added workload of current-gen development, either. As far as I can see this game would have taken pretty much the same amount of time to make on Wii or on 3DS. One year is a reduced workload dev time. New Super Mario games had dev times of three years. Hell, Wind Waker HD took six months to make! Why should Mario Maker, a game that actually has brand new assets and content, take less time than that?

You actually make a good point, but I still think the amount of delays on Wii U, (not that Nintendo are by any means alone in this department, of course) are indicative of the same underestimation of HD development that hit just about every other major developer in the early years of the PS3 and 360.