Information Writing by October, Scripting by April: Brian Fargo Comments on Deadlines

[Infinitron]

What the hell. You've broken him.

 

[kaizoku]

IMO it would still cool if they did a voiced slide show intro. Like in the 2nd part of the fallout 1 intro.
Or something like Legend of Grimrock (where they used artwork instead of historical photos).

I wonder how much that would cost.

 

[mbpopolano24]

Well, but let's not jumpt to conclusions here. Maybe both VD and Fargo are right.... We just did not input the right data into the 'equation'. Let's see. Acccording to Fargo, if you cut all the crap out, it takes 10% of the usual time to make and RPG. VD took (will take, maybe??) about 9 years to make half of an RPG, so 10% ot that is, more or less, 18 months... that assuming VD's and Fargo's teams share similar incompetence competence in creating an interactive novel RPG. See, here we go, it makes sense now, they are both wrong right!!

 

[Brother None]

10% of the time

Heh. Reductio ad absurdam is easy (learn to read what "up to" means). Or you guys can just admit the WL2 has unique time-savers in place and saying "it can not be made in 18 months with any level of complexity" was jumping to conclusions. It can be delayed some, anyway, if and when necessary.

 

[Ulminati]

Could Crooked Bee please post the original email sent to Fargo?

Er, no, why should I? In any case, if you're so curious, I did link that heated 17-page screenshot discussion thread to him.

Did he like the wizard?

Also many thanks to you for providing us with the infos. If you keep this tempo up I'm gonna run out of brofists to give

 

[almondblight]

Heh. Reductio ad absurdam is easy (learn to read what "up to" means). Or you guys can just admit the WL2 has unique time-savers in place and saying "it can not be made in 18 months with any level of complexity" was jumping to conclusions. It can be delayed some, anyway, if and when necessary.

Except I don't think that it's impossible to make a good game in 18 months. "It's possible he'll pull it off" and "his explanations are bullshit" (or more probably, poorly worded, exaggerated, and taken verbatim by people who aren't thinking) aren't mutually exclusive.

But really, reductio ad absurdum? "Fargo saying that these two superfluous things take up 75% of the time makes total sense, but if you were to say that a couple more superfluous things took up another 15% of the time that'd be crazy!" I find the idea that publisher meddling, trade shows, and voiceovers take up 15% of the time much less absurd than the idea that cinematics take up 50% of it.

 

[Brother None]

"up to", dude. Not 50%, up to 50%. It did occur to you he's talking about big, cutscene-focused projects on this, and isn't say this would apply to - say - Arcanum or Fallout? As in, games that barely have cutscenes aren't likely to have 50% of devtime put into cutscenes, are they?

If he believed you could do it in 25% of the time with the two things he lists (which factors in publisher meddling, which you ignore for some reason, and I'm not sure trade shows aren't factored into milestones, since they're inherently related), then why would he schedule for 50% of "standard" development time? Well over 50%, in fact, if you factor in the pre-production already done, which isn't huge, but shouldn't be fully ignored either.

You can think about what he said and use your smarts to figure it out, or you can give it a wilful reading because you'd rather not believe it's possible. Up to the individual, I guess. People who aren't thinking, indeed.

 

[almondblight]

"up to", dude. Not 50%, up to 50%. It did occur to you he's talking about big, cutscene-focused projects on this, and isn't say this would apply to - say - Arcanum or Fallout? As in, games that barely have cutscenes aren't likely to have 50% of devtime put into cutscenes, are they?

Did you even read what he said man? He's talking how they were able to speed up production in this game:

"The only reason we have the ability to have an accelerated production schedule is that the tools and user generated assets offer us a huge head start over the old ways of doing things. I would also add that in game cinematics can take up to 50% of our time to implement and not having to do that is also a huge savings. In addition, I am not having to make milestones to prove we are making progress which shaves another 25%."

If you think that doesn't apply to an RPG like the one he's making, then we're in agreement. But don't pretend that quote's about some FMV game or something just because it's stupid as it stands.