I look at what styg managed to do, building an engine from scratch, having a deep combat and character progression systems, an actual useful and varied crafting system, along with nice graphics and sound design... Then I look at what a multi-million dollar team manages to push out at obsidian.
There are a few problems, I think.
First, I think that as one approaches AAA quality, labor/cost increases not linearly but geometrically. I'll give a simple example that comes up often with respect to Primordia. People say, "Why not go to higher resolution? How much more work could it be to go from 320x200 to (say) 1280x800 given that much of it is based on hand-drawings anyway?" Then they do some math that's like, "It can't be more than four times as tough because 1280/320 = 4. And since you're using the same design, it's probably at most like twice as much time, if even that." But then you look at how godawful the animation is in the "enhanced" versions of Monkey Island and realize that, no, upscaling the number of pixels doesn't just mean a/b work (which would, in any event, be squared given the two dimensions) -- it also means significantly increasing the number of frames of animation. But even that is often not enough because animation shortcuts that work at low resolution don't work at all at high resolution. So, in fact, you're talking about many times the labor.
Similar things seem to apply to writing. For example, with Age of Decadence, a lot of people complain about the dialogues seeming to be thin, or there not being a lot of NPCs to talk to. But adding those options isn't a matter of 10% more dialogue. It's a vast and demanding increase. Each new branch of dialogue requires branchlets and they have to fit back into the whole. And once the amount of writing becomes greater than what one writer can do, you need extra layers of review for consistency, etc.
Second, people don't realize that for every Styg there are dozens if not hundreds of ~Stygs who tried the same thing and failed. We don't see all of them, or even most of them, because they never get far enough. Styg or VD or Chris Bischoff or even Craig Stern -- these guys are a very rare breed. We are seeing the best of the best. You aren't going to be able to fill a team up with them, and even if you could, there is no reason to expect them all to work well together. In fact, in many cases I would expect the opposite: that brilliant, self-motivated, auteurial polymaths are unlikely to be able to subordinate themselves to a team structure.
So when you start trying to push from Underrail to Fallout, suddenly the whole model that makes Underrail possible (
i.e., a lone genius working in isolation) ceases to function. You need a team, and an entirely different kind of people to staff your team, and you need a lot more of them. The more you add, the less likely they are to be of the same model as the creators of AOD, Underrail, etc. I can say from personal experience it is a weird feeling going from being
the writer of Primordia to being one of the most insignificant writers on TTON. I probably put as many hours into the writing of my stuff on Torment as I did on Primordia, but at the end of the day, I don't in any way feel like it's "my game" or even partly my game. But even then, the number of writers was tiny compared to the number of designers, artists, etc.
Once a team starts to swell, management needs to worry not just about putting food in their own mouths ("I can go hungry if I have to!") but about providing for the dozens of people who depend on the project's success or else they'll need to move, find new work, uproot families, etc. This, in turn, presumably means that market pressures become much more powerful. One great virtue of game development being a hobby for me is that anything I get from it is a gratuity. But if I had lots of people depending on me, I'd be much more inclined to follow market trends and take fewer risks. When it's a small auteurial project, moreover, the psychic rewards ("This is
my game, as my soul cried out for it to be, and now it exists!") are much greater. In other words, I think it is much harder to motivate a large number of "cogs" in a development project with these kinds of secondary considerations ("It's true that I am slashing your salary by 50%, but our game is defiantly original!").
Anyway, I actually haven't followed Tyranny enough to opine on it, and I think generally the Kickstarter run
has produced some convention-defying games (obviously I'm biased in favor of TTON), but I don't think it's fair to say, "If one man can do Underrail, ten men can make Fallout, no problem," any more than it is fair to think that Vic, working just a bit harder, could've made Primoridia high res.
But it seems like we're both comfortable where we're at!
