Sasquatch247 said:
how is it that 1 man can create a highly complex, graphically pleasing game in the time it has taken a full team of what, 30 people, to not be able to release a single game? Something is not right and there is something that Taleworlds isn't telling us. To my knowledge they have never addressed this fundamental question, why is it taking so long?
Poor management. 1 person who has a vision of how they want a game to be can consult with themselves in a fraction of a second. Meetings and discussions that take hours or even days between groups of people can take a millisecond in your own brain.
I made these trees from scratch in unreal engine in a couple of days. It wasn't that hard. But I had to make loads of tiny changes outside the scope of the trees themselves to make them look this good. If I was just a 3d artist who worked for a supervisor or art lead, I would have to consult him or her, and he or she would have to consult other 3d artists or higher-ups to make sure my changes were feasible, and they would all have to analyse their part of the project to make sure it would work, and this might get taken to meeting after meeting with no immediate result. A decision I could make in an instant would take a group far longer.
This is why group projects are often completely incoherent if they're not tightly managed. Everybody has different ideas of what they want the end result to be, and even if they all follow the art lead, communicating the exact "feel" you're going for artistically or gameplay-wise can be next to impossible.
Look at this:
There's a giant seam on the shield rim. The colour texture looks like it's been photoshopped to hell and back and now it barely even resembles metal. The helmets don't read like the material they're supposed to depict. The "workflow" (design process) of the woolen coif looks completely different to the other objects, so the lighting baked into the textures is all wrong.
It's glaringly obvious that these objects were all made by different people. I reckon I could quite accurately work out who made what, and that's not a good thing.
In complex multidisciplinary projects, 30 people don't work 30 times as fast as 1 person. Organising labour, especially on creative prrojects, is extremely difficult and the problems therein are fundamental social dilemmas.