Jumpin on 13 December 2018
Cutting down on characters wouldn't have necessarily sped all the other sections of the development up.
The way video game development works is they staff people for different segments of the game and usually in the final stages they're polishing stuff. It's almost certain the character artists and animators, and any engineering resources (and xml scripters) were entirely different staffers than the rest of the team. The only staff they'd have had in common was QA, and cutting out a few characters would have saved them days, not months.
I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
