Dan Vavra from Warhorse studios wrote some interesting comments about the nature of development and how it conflicts with kickstarter pitches.
Source:
Kingdom Come: Deliverance - Blog ...The problem with Kickstarter projects is that you are promising something that's not ready yet and you are making that promise at a time when even with the best planning in the world you can never be quite sure that everything you're planning and everything you would like to have in the game will succeed in happening. When you're planning a game of such massive dimensions, even with a crystal ball you can't have 100% certainty.
A game on the scale of Deliverance has thousands of graphic assets and animations, hundreds of features that have to be programmed and thousands of lines of script, and all these incomplete things influence each other. To assess at the beginning of development how long some asset will take to program and how easy it will be to program some feature is simply impossible and so there's no choice but to estimate, refine the estimates during the course of development and if they don't add up, then make cuts or extend the development and make it more costly. Obviously, from previous experience your estimation gets more precise, but it's still an estimate and usually at a time when the person who's going to do the job in question isn't even working in the firm yet and the technology you want to use for it has yet to be programmed.
While in the case of a commonplace game you go and peddle your wares a few months before publication, when all the chaos is pretty much behind you and it's clear to you what you will succeed in implementing and what you can still get done in the six months left to publication, in the case of Kickstarter the most you can do is show a prototype and your plans. Of course it's not written anywhere those plans will succeed and experience tells you that all too often they don't succeed. Just look at stuff like Broken Age, Wasteland, Divinity and Star Citizen and their original estimated schedules.
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So keep your fingers crossed for us and I sincerely hope that the list of things we planned that will not end up in the game will be as short as possible
Basically, we all know that Kickstarter is risky, yet Dan tries to elaborate on the development process to share some perspective.
However, developers can talk all they like about how uncertain game development is, and while there is certainly a need to better educate the public (and backers) about the complex nature of game development, this doesn't negate the need to hold developers accountable. They can't just promise what they like and then say sorry, shit happens in development. To confound matters, we backers/consumers outside of the inner workings of development have a very limited understanding of the context behind a given issue such as a cut feature (eg the technical hurdles they faced, budget management concerns, work prioritisation etc). How are we to hold a developer accountable if we are not in a position to fully judge their competence regarding a matter?
The best we can do is assess each developer and situation on its merits, according to how honest and transparent they have been, the little information we do have, and the overall progress and quality of their game.
Personally, I accept Larian's explanation for the day/night cycles decision and believe they made a difficult but correct call for the best interests of the game. Also, considering the vast improvement demonstrated in Early Access, the wealth of features added beyond what was promised in the Kickstarter and Larian's track record of treating its fans fairly and generously, I am inclined to place greater trust in Larian's decision. I do hope they will be more circumspect in the future if they decide to do another kickstarter, as it seems clear they bit off more than they could chew, to our disappointment.
Yet I am left with this question also: Would Original Sin be as rich as the game it is today, if Larian had been less ambitious?
