Although you may be right, I don't think I could deal with Nintendo's releases becoming even more predictable. If you take Zelda away, do they make new ip's instead?
Sorry but it's a zelda subject so I don't see second degree.
Nothing is worth more than a zelda game.
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| RolStoppable said: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is going to be released later this year, but can the game be worth all the work that was put into it? No. The Zelda series has become increasingly more dangerous for Nintendo. The manpower needed to complete Skyward Sword grew to 200 people in the later stages of development. Now think about how many games could be made by such a big amount of people. Nintendo doesn't have the luxury of third parties filling the gaps, so it's of high importance that they can provide a steady stream of games all by themselves. Otherwise something like the first half of 2011 happens. I am not just talking about the Wii here. The DS and 3DS have also been greatly affected. There hasn't been coming out much of anything lately. Nowadays Zelda takes too much effort to make and while the games turn out to be great, it's still too big of a sacrifice considering what else could have been. No single game is worth five years of development combined with a ridiculous amount of people working on it. It's hurting Nintendo and more importantly, their customers. That would be us, the gamers. |
Exactly! Wii Music 2, Wii Play3, Wii Fit 3, Mario Volleyball, Mario cooking, Wii Troll etc.
We, Thez gamers, Wii don't want AAA games, Wii want more shovelware NINTY!
And i thought 3rd party are filling this gap!
bs
RolStoppable said:
This thread doesn't support the idea that Zelda should be removed, but only seriously reconsidered. The current development process is more than just flawed. Zelda needs at the very least come back to a two to two and a half years long development cycle. So in other words, I am not suggesting what ninty_shareholder thinks. Zelda has its place, but so do many other Nintendo IPs as well as there should be room for new IPs to be developed. As a basic example, if you split up the time and manpower needed for Zelda today in half, you get four games over the same period of time and all of them could still be AAA efforts. |
So Zelda is a 4*AAA game, a AAAAAAAAAAAA game! Nice!
Seriously, they should try to make this game perfect and nothing less. I don't get it Rol.
They could use their Wii/DS money to invest in new manpower for new IPs. Nobody wants to get a half-baked Zelda in exchange.
give it up! just this time.
I guess you are right. It's not like a long development time made games like GT5, FFXIII and DNF the cream of the crop.
RolStoppable said:
It takes talent to make good games and talent is finite, so Nintendo can't just throw money around and expect to maintain the same level of quality in their games. It used to be possible to make Zelda in a shorter amount of time, it only requires a more focused approach right from the outset. I am not asking for the impossible here, really. A Zelda game that took only two and a half years to make wouldn't automatically be half-baked. |
So you think the talented programmers were not focused enough? Not working hard enough? I still don't get it! Quantity over Quality? I thought you would hate Ninty, because they made so many half-baked games this gen. And then this...
I concede one point to you. If they are able to produce the same game in half of the time with half the manpower, they should do it. But that should be impossible without entering slavery. I don't know what you're driving at? Sounds like typical-Rol-ing, in short t-rol-ing! Sry
ninty_shareholder64 said:
Exactly! Wii Music 2, Wii Play3, Wii Fit 3, Mario Volleyball, Mario cooking, Wii Troll etc. We, Thez gamers, Wii don't want AAA games, Wii want more shovelware NINTY! And i thought 3rd party are filling this gap! bs |
Well thought out as always.
They could have definitely produced 4 2D zelda games in the same time.
3D just ruins everything.
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As much as I'm hyped for SS, you may have a point, maybe... I wish I knew exactly how many man-hours were put into this project so that I could break it down more easily, but if I had to go out on a limb and guess I'd say that three games the size of Wii Sports Resort could have been made in the same amount of man-hours.
This is based on the assumption that roughly 400 man-years were put into the game - 200 developers working on it during the final year, and an additional 200 man years accumulated by a smaller team working on it during the remaining time (it comes out to 50 developers for four years, which doesn't sound unreasonable to me).
The second assumption is that a game like Wii Sports Resort should take a 50 man team about two years to create, maybe slightly more if there is trouble during production (as in the case of WSR). That comes out to 100+ man-years per game, or ~350 man-years for all three. Allowing for an error margin in my estimates we get about the same numbers...
This is of course an over simplification since SS would for example require a much larger art-staff than those type of games, including musicians, character designers, texture artists, story and scenario writers etc, whereas three completely unique WSR style games would require a larger emphasis on programming new gameplay mechanics - combined they would have much more mechanics than a Zelda game.
From a financial point of view it really doesn't make that much sense to continue investing such enormous budgets in this game. At most, SS will sell 10 mil. units lifetime, which is similar to Smash Brothers Brawl and Super Mario Galaxy. IIRC, those games took about half the time to complete, though in the case of Smash Brothers the teams were much larger, spanning multiple companies, so the total man-hours were definitely not less than Zelda's. From that point of view Smash Bros. also makes very little sense, which begs the question: "Where do you draw the line?".
But this line of thinking is incomplete. One crucial thing to question about SS is the size of the main team throughout the majority of development. 200 people is a maximum that is only maintained during the final stages of production, when everything in the design is essentially approved and all that's left is to create the huge amount of assets the game demands. What I don't really know is how development and planning play out before that milestone.
For example, maybe the game was being created by a small core team of 20-30 developers during the majority of its production, similarly to how Pikmin 3 (another game that is taking ages to complete) has been said to have progressed. That would also explain the amount of time it has taken for SS to release. Even then the total amount of time invested in the game comes out to 300 man-years, which is still more than enough for 2 Wii Sports Resort type games...
However, if you take into consideration the fact that during SS supposedly five-year long production time, the Zelda team also created Phantom Hourglass, Spirit Tracks and Link's Crossbow Training, then things start to look a bit differently. Both Crossbow Training and Phantom Hourglass were released in 2007, which makes it seem unlikely the Zelda team working on SS during that year was any more than a handful of people. This effectively reduces my estimate from 300 man-years (200*1 + 25*4) to 275 man-years (200*1 + 25*3).
Add to that the fact that Spirit Tracks was released in 2009, also by the same team. Since it's a smaller game let's assume the whole thing only took 75 man-years to produce: 275--> 200 man-years for SS.
Suddenly we've reached a number that starts to look a lot more reasonable IMO, especially when you consider that Zelda games usually have troubled developments and Miyamoto "upending the tea-table" frequently, resulting in increased man-hours for the game.
So my question to Rol: Do you REALLY think games like Super Mario Galaxy (1 or 2, for that matter) or Smash Bros. Brawl had considerably less than 200 man-years put into them? Remember that there is a whole studio in Tokyo dedicated to the Galaxy games, and that Brawl is a MASSIVE undertaking.
A Nintendo shareholder with no interest whatsoever in games would probably take about 2 Wii Sport Resort games over a Zelda or a 3D Mario or Smash any day of the week, but would anybody who loves games really make that trade? Furthermore, how many of those games can a company release during one generation before they stop being 20+ million sellers and people get tired of them? We probably could have had 1 or 2 more, but definitely not 8 more like the shareholder would think.
The same goes for 2D Mario games. We could have had one more, but it's not like there is such a HUGE gap between the ideal situation and what Nintendo have delivered. There is definitely room for improvement, though, and I hope the teams continue to improve in the way they are managed.
To summarize: thread title is needlessly sensational in order to attract viewers - IGN would be proud 
Until you've played it, every game is a system seller!
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RolStoppable said:
It takes talent to make good games and talent is finite, so Nintendo can't just throw money around and expect to maintain the same level of quality in their games. It used to be possible to make Zelda in a shorter amount of time, it only requires a more focused approach right from the outset. I am not asking for the impossible here, really. A Zelda game that took only two and a half years to make wouldn't automatically be half-baked. |
so.... you're suggesting they do as for mario and bring back console 2D zeldas, that requier less manpower for equal (if not superior) quality, in order to reduce the time between zelda games?
I know you hate the DS zeldas (or at least spirit)... so you still believe they have the sufficient flair to do this?
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