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Brian Fargo: "Tell Vince to shut the fuck up. He's annoying."

Obviously. Also, the scope of W2 is supposed to be bigger than The Witcher.

Witcher 1 was released in October 2007. Witcher 2 was released in May 2011, exactly 18 months later. So what were you saying?

Edit: The game was already in alpha state in Sep 2009, two years before the release. Just think about it for a moment.

Also, I love these "your personal approval as to what is a (insert something here)" things.
My personal approval has nothing to do with it, and if you think Witcher is on the same level as what W2 is supposed to be in RPG terms then there's nothing to talk about. By the way, weren't you saying that not even KotC is on the same level as W2 but on a much lower level? Or did you mean only that KotC has "shitty" graphics and W2 shouldn't be like that?

It has towns, NPCs, dialogues, C&C, quests, diverse areas and monsters. For the purposes of this discussion (the time it takes to make things) that's enough of an RPG.

It was also in development for 3+ years.

It was announced in 2009 and released in 2011.

Games tend to be in preproduction and development for a while before they're announced.

And? Games aren't announced when studios start working on them, but when they have enough to start showing them. In Sep 2009 they were showing videos marked "alpha version", which looked as good as the final game. Do you think they put the alpha version together in a few months?

Maybe, but they did develop their own in-house engine for the project. That was probably a huge timesink.

Naturally, and that's been my argument all along. No engine - 3+ years. Existing engine (not the same as a licensed engine) with systems and assets - 1.5-2 years.

Btw, in case you're wondering, they didn't built the engine from scratch. They used the Havok engine. Also, one of the interviews says that they started working on the new engine when they shipped Witcher 1, so we're definitely talking about 3+ years:

"It was one of the first things our programmers sat to, right after releasing The Witcher. Our engine has been rewritten mostly due to specific, RPG related tool requirements that we've had."

HAHAHAHA he still hasn't fixed it! http://venturebeat.com/2012/04/17/i...starter-for-wasteland-2/#.T48i7i09Qi0.twitter

This time even Brian Fargo noticed:

TwinkieGorilla does a good job.

There is no game engine named Havok, you meant it uses the Havok physics SDK thingie? REDengine it's a new engine AFAIK.

You're right, my mistake.

I could be an engine. You never know.

He's right. On the internet, nobody knows you're not an engine.

This is all really hard to tell.

I think experience from projects like AoD cannot be applied to professionals who already learned the ropes, because a lot of time will have been spent learning the tools, and I am sure a lot of time was lost for other things.

What every programmer knows is that you can make huge progress with an engine not in years, but often in weeks. But then you usually lose momentum, work slackens and you can lose months without any real progress.
That's also the reason why many guys announce a game prematurely when they have made something impressive in just a few days. You often see this is e.g. OpenGL courses when students think they can go from their first 3D scenes directly to making a full game, and usually competely overstretch themselves.

For an engine you usually don't need more than 1-3 programmers. About content creation I cannot say much, it must be a gigantic amount of work, requiring a large number of people, but a lot of that can be done parallel.
It depends a lot on the tools, the people, project management and experience.

But even when Fargo is a very professional guy, afaik he is not doing the programming. So he first of all it depends on who he puts on the job. Can he find someone who is already very proficient with their engine, and make speedy progress, or is precious time lost because the programmer is not fast enough and/or makes mistakes.

But from all I can say, a project like WL2 can not be done in less than two years, and only in two years when work goes very quickly and focussed.

If I was you, I would not be too confident to play WL2 in October 2013, an advanced build/demo perhaps, but I would expect the completed game to come out up to a year later.

Didn't someone post a video of LoG from ~2005 or so? How do we know how long it's been in development for.

Well, maybe it'll be somewhere between Torchlight and Fallout on the complexity scale, which seems like ~2 years would be doable.

Also, wasn't ToEE made in ~2 years? If they used a better scenario and a less-buggy licensed engine that game would've worked.

Honestly, though, Mysterious Castle was made by one guy in a relatively short time, and if they had pretty much that + quests, exploration, and some C&C I'd be happy.

They used the Arcanum engine and it was a short dungeon crawler.

Btw, another quote from Tim Cain (from that book):
http://books.google.ch/books?id=lro...#v=onepage&q=Gamer's at work tim cain&f=false

"The original schedule for Temple was 18 months, which was and is unthinkable for a full-featured role-playing game."

I'm not applying it. Like I said several times in this thread, my opinion is based on following games for two decades and reading developers' comments, like the one above. Tim Cain is certainly someone who has already learned the ropes and has a very extensive experience.

Huge progress and getting everything the game needs (from the engine) are two different things.

That I agree with.

Sorry for not reading the last few pages properly, but are we bracketing out the possibility of a delay later on? I'd think a delayed release is a reasonable thing to do even for a KS project, as long as it's 6 months or less, given the realities of video game production.

I don't know if we can say for sure how much/little 18 months is for W2, though. It does depend on what work they've done thus far, what engine they use and thus what kind of asset production line they'll have, etc. VD is definitely right in that TOEE was on an insane production schedule, and look at the situation with KOTOR2 as well - even though that was Obsidian's very first project, I believe they had as many as or more people on that team than W2 is likely to have.

Whether or not they can delay depends on how much money they have left over when the eighteen months is up. They can't just negotiate for more like they hypothetically could with a publisher (unless they hooked up with a publisher to help complete it of course, which brings up all kinds of issues).

Wasn't Fallout 1 made on a budget of $3 mill spread out over 3 years?

Also Fargo initially budget for a million (900k + his 100k) for the 18 months so I think it should be doable.