PorkyThePaladin
Arcane
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2013
- Messages
- 5,392
All I can give you is my personal opinion. After all just a few days ago I talked about that with a friend of mine. In short I agree with you. I would love to see a rise of truly historical KCD-like games. Not necessarily RPGs. An smaller scope AssCreed-like action-y game grounded in reality would suffice in my eyes. Moreover one could say we have the tech, the tools, the basic game systems, and supposedly the know-how to do that. And if we don't do it, others might, robbing us of some unique opportunities in the process.
However the situation is more complicated by the reality of game development and the massive difficulties a production of such a game entails. We didn't spend 5+ years just to eventually find the perfect formulas of what to do and how. Just because we made KCD it doesn't mean we can now conjure up a similar game within a fraction of the time with a fraction of the people. Making a KCD-like side project would mean creating another 80-head team at mininum all similarly or more competent. These people would spend a lot of time learning how to work together and learning all the nuances of the tools, the tech, and the game systems. Not to talk about getting used to the the whole production pipeline. Moreover the creative people would likely be some stubborn bitches and would want to modify the formula significantly which means inventing a lot of new wheels and reinventing some old ones for the needs of this new direction. So in the end the price in terms of time and money would likely not be so significantly lower.
Yeah, I am sure in practice it's a lot more difficult than in theory, which is always the case, but still, I can't help but feel that all the technology Warhorse has developed for KCD and will develop for KCD2 (the engine, the combat system, stealth/other systems, physics/graphics, tools, shared assets, etc) is kinda wasted on just 2 games. If only you guys could convince THQ Nordic to finance a sort of core Warhorse studio to work on that, and then have peripheral studios or sub-studios working on individual projects, each utilizing the core technology. Your Assassin's Creed example is spot on, as this is exactly what Ubisoft does, but of course, unfortunately, they are terrible at it in terms of producing quality content, it's all about quantity over quality. But Warhorse could do it differently, focus on smaller games with better content. If they were managed well, and stuck to using the core tools/technologies (which would improve over time), then I feel like that would lead to massive savings, and let them focus on their specialty (writing, quests, characters, places).