Originally Posted by Cez
Because we had years to make it happen. And we didn't care how much we "spent". That makes a huge difference. Producing that same amount of content in a year period, would have been next to impossible, even with a big budget. Note that I'm talking just about quantity (number of screens, number of characters, number of actions you can perform, etc), they will definitely have better quality.
We are talking about x number of months to craft the first episode, but then it goes down to a timeline of roughly one to two months to put together a full episode. Trust me, I've been there, that times passes FAST. You could insert 40 more people to create more content, yes, but 1) that's money, 2) in such a short amount of time it becomes extremely chaotic to manage, because you still want only a few people managing a huge team in order to hold the vision into something coherent.
Remember, a game like Mask of Eternity, or even Gabriel Knight 3 took 2-3 years to make. Those are 2-3 years of spending a lot of money maintaining a team. That's a hit that Bioware could take these days, but it would ruin a "small" company like Telltale. Professional has nothing to do with it --again, we are not in the golden years of adventure anymore where Sierra was one of the lead developers, they had a PR monster machine and their games were the popular ones. All that has changed immensely. And so, in order for a game like King's Quest to survive in this time, it would have to adapt to a lot of things.
What I'm hoping we get is what Tales fans got when you compare it to something like Curse of Monkey Island. Still, a lot less scenes/characters, but it was done in such a smart way that they managed to keep the feeling of Monkey Island. But, like you've said before, King's Quest is about exploration. Maybe Telltale will come up with a way where they give us a big forest that they manage to create within their budget, I don't know, I really don't know what's going on in there anymore, and they have scaled up since I left. But I'm setting my expectations accordingly to the amount of content they have created for all of their games, because that's probably what we are going to get for King's Quest.
I'm talking from personal experience as I've been delving a lot into that lately. If we were to do a commercial project, it would be hugely scaled down from the size of TSL --TSL would probably cost 2-3 millions dollars or so to make or more with a timeline of 2 years or so (if graphics were updated to latest technology). That's just development money and not counting in any Publicity/Publishing/Licenses related costs. Unfortunately, I don't think any adventure game would make that kind of money back.
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