Dades wrote on May 13, 2011, 19:20:
You can't just hire 500 extra people and expect to retain the same level of quality in your product. In the case of Starcraft 2 they set out to make a sport game out of it and they were forthright and honest about their intentions from the beginning. I don't like how it turned out but I can't say I was deceived. They simply had a different goal for their game and it turned out to be different from my definition of fun. Plenty of people enjoy Starcraft 2 all over the world. I think those people are strange creatures from another planet but that's a story for another time.
I get what you're saying here, but Starcraft 2 is a single example of the kind of thing I'm talking about. And it didn't start there.
I agree that arbitrarily adding more people to a project doesn't equal more quality...but I don't think that applies here. Especially since we're not talking about games that generally push the graphics limit anyway. And graphics aren't the only thing that they lag behind on.
As I said, lesser developers, with less resources than Blizzard have managed to do some amazing things. I don't just accept that Blizzard is universally unable to innovate in their products because of fear of dilution of quality.
They are one of the few companies that
can afford to take more risks and push the envelope more without much fear of failure.