marshalleck wrote...
Actually, I'll amend this. If it can be implemented within the following guidelines, I'd agree that there's no reason not to include it:
-It doesn't interfere with or affect the single-player campaign in any way
-It can be coded, balanced, and QA'ed with no additional expenditures of either development time or money
-It will not delay or impact the development schedule or release date of ME3
But since that's never going to be a reality, I'm afraid we're at an impasse.
This is based on the somewhat tenuous assumption that there is a pool of "Mass Effect Money" and Bioware decides what they want to do with it, and that more money spent on non-multiplayer means a better SP game. None of these things are the case.
First of all, EA is pulling all the financial strings. What's more likely is that they have broadly the same, or even a bigger budget for singler player stuff than they had in ME2 (since ME2 was a much bigger commercial and critical success than the first), and then there is more money
on top of that allocated for the development of multiplayer. That is to say, had multiplayer not been planned, they would not have been given as much money as they were.
Now, the idea that arbitrary sums of money can just make better games is basically rubbish. Throwing a billion dollars at the writing team will not produce better stories, you can't just hire 50 writers and expect them to do a better job than 2 or 3. Too many cooks and all that. Hiring a thousand software engineers won't magically lift the hardware limitations imposed by the 360/PS3, and hiring a million concept artists won't improve the look of the game. Multiplayer is developed by different people, alongside the development of the single player game. There are a small number of staff members who
might overlap (or might not ) depending on the setup that Bioware uses, such as artists and writers. But the writers are already done fairly early on in development, and aren't exactly working at full capacity for the full two year cycle. Same goes for concept artists, who in many studios are already working on concept work for future games before the first game has shipped.
I'm not really sure what else I can say about this, but Multi does not ruin single player. Uncharted 2 is the poster child for Multiplayer being shoehorned into a single player game. Heck, even Deus Ex, widely considered one of the greatest PC games of all time, had a multi component.
Modifié par adam_grif, 03 janvier 2011 - 12:22 .
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