Q
Anonymous asked:
In case of hypothetical rethink, is it possible to change parts of the plot by adding/removing game portions while the development phase already started or every plot related choice must be set in stone from the early stages of production and never altered?
A
Generally speaking, the further along in development the content is, the more costly it becomes to change that content. This is because we can’t turn back the clock to refund any development time spent building that content, so changing it requires us to throw some amount of work away in order to build the new thing. It’s a lot quicker and cheaper to change things while we’re in the planning phase than it is when we’ve already built the environments, animated all the characters, and recorded all of the dialogue. We can’t refund the recordings and demand the voice actors do it all again. If we want to record new dialogue, we need to pay for the voice actor, the studio recording time and staff, and any other associated costs.
Remember that budget and dev time are finite - we have to ship the game eventually. This means that every bit of content has a necessary point-of-no-return where we can’t change stuff anymore because we lack the budget for it. This means that it is absolutely possible to change things, but it entirely depends on what those changes would cost. The more expensive the change is, the less probable the change becomes. The cheaper the change is, the easier it is to get in and later we can do it. Changing numerical values in the game is pretty easy, which is why we can change things even after the game has launched. Changing environments, animation, or dialogue is very expensive, which is why we rarely make those changes post launch.
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askagamedev posted this In case of hypothetical rethink, is it possible to change parts of the plot by adding/removing game portions while the...