Why do Zelda Console games take 5 years to develop.... ?

[tolu619]

Mythmaker1 said:

JNK said:
they do take ALOT time into planning the game. The games are often very unique and all the dungeons and riddles have to be thought.
Making a Zelda game is easily compareable to making a GTA game.

That doesn't strike me as a particularly apt comparison. In terms of sheer scale, these games are very different animals. And Zelda dungeons are, with very few exceptions, not exactly complex, or even particularly deep; they aren't bad, but they're pretty simple overall.

Sir, are you a developer? If not, ask any web developer or game developer you know. I've made games, web apps and desktop apps before. More often than not, the user interface and user experience (or the graphics and animations, if we're talking games) take longer to create and polish than the actual functionality. In GTA, most of the environment is static (buildings, vegetation, etc). I'm not referring to vehicles, weapons or NPCs. The environment. And most of it is based on realistic places or structures, which have simple, basic templates.

In Zelda, most dungeons are filled with moving parts, rooms that connect to each other (sometimes from floor 5 to floor 1), and a general theme in both the aesthetics and the puzzles. Even before the actual creation of the assets (which aren't based on a simple and reusable template, but on totally fictional concepts meant to achieve certain purposes), the dungeons have to be planned out, sketched and so on. After the creation of the assets and testing, some things may have to be cut or changed. That's much more time consuming than  creating a virtual neighborhood containing residential buildings and stores which all look fairly similar (which is an accurate representation of what neighborhoods look like in real life anyway). The GTA team also doesn't have to program numerous moving parts, elevators, sliders, wind zones, magical switches and so on into their environments. They do, however, have to program many different vehicles and weapons, and test and tweak the handling and feel of all these. As a developer, I can tell you that that doesn't require much extra coding. Just reuse the same template, tweak the variables (speeed, weight, friction, etc) so that differrent ones have different values, then play it and see how it feels, then tweak the same variables again (without doing any extra coding) until it feels just right.

I am not saying that GTA is easier to develop. I am saying that you're wrong for saying that the scale of the work required for these two games isn't in the same league. I can't say which one requires more work without actually working on both games myself (I assume GTA simply because of the voice acting and the HD texxtures), but the work load is very comparable.

 

And guys, they don't use a new engine everytime. Twilight Princess was built on the same engine as Windwaker. The art style isn't dependent on the engine. It's  dependent on the artist's use of shaders, and the body proportions they decide to give their characters.