SOW and round shapes quallity

[Feuerfalke]

Originally Posted by Tree_UK

No, I think you misunderstand me, I am saying that given the time when the development started and how things have moved on then there are always going to be areas that appear to be outdated or that could be improved. For example, If SOW had started development last year then the technology available would be so much greater than 3/4 years previously. Obviously bigger companies develop faster because they have the money/resources to get games out fairly quick, thus never being too far away from what the latest technology has to offer.

As above posters already pointed out, these equations are... let me say: superficial. Like in any building or development process, you have a start of a production that starts at some point and you keep reshaping and redesigning things until they all come together and are polished for the end product.
It's not like they say, "Well, we've got a plan, lets start programming it 1:1", starting from line 1 and finishing with [END] 2 weeks before production begins. I can't imagine any process being that static, linear or unable to be changed to include improvements and changes.

And it's not necessarily right, that bigger teams with more resources or money produce games faster. If you think about which games you describe with these words, it's either the mainstream games or those of very renown software-developers. But if you take a closer look, e.g. at Call of Duty, Unreal Tournament, Sims, Flightsimulator, etc. you can see that these are all sequels very much based on previous releases, with minor changes to the engine and mostly cosmetic changes.
Long story short: Just because somebody get's more money doesn't mean he does the job better. If it was that way, we could have spared one or the other global financial crisis.

[winny]

It could be part of the reason why SoW is taking so long. It's gonna take much longer to program than a 'game' and in that time there are new developments in the industry which then get included and so on.

'Normal' game developers would just release the game after 18 months, then continue to develop the idea and do a sequel (sales dependant). SoW has to be a lot more future proof than your average shooter. So it's probably being constantly updated engine wise, as new tools become available. It must be hard to know when to stop.

[Feuerfalke]

^^ exactly.