Ruffiana wrote on Feb 24, 2012, 14:02:
I can only agree with rule 2. The first is just a fundamental misunderstanding about how the development process works and the third is just whinging about how expensive options for your entertainment luxuries are. ME1 and ME2 were far from light on content out of the box. I see no reason to suspect that the 3rd installment won't have plenty of gameplay as well.

Fact is developing for consoles adds a huge window of time when you are "done" with a game before it's ever stamped, put in a box, and thrown up on a shelf to be sold. You CANNOT continue to add new content to a game during that time. All you can do is fix bugs with things that are there and make any changes needed to pass TCR. That's it. Anything new restarts the process from scratch.

The lion's share of that work is on the programmers' shoulders. Most of your content creators, your artists, designers, writers, etc. have very little to do during this time. It's a great time to take some of the content that was in development and got cut because of time constraints and finish it up. Or even create new content. By this point you have a team that's just finished making the game. The tools are as solid as they're going to be, the processes and pipelines have been fine-tuned, and it's the content can be created [i]very[/i] quickly.

It's quite possible that content that would never have been in the game can made from scratch during the TCR process. It’s very likely that content cut earlier in the process could be picked back up and finished. The data for that content can even be put on to the same disc as the finished game. Because it's not an integrated part of the game and because it requires an online activation of some sort it can be assumed than any major issues with the extra content can be resolved with a patch. You cannot make that assumption with the core game. What's on the disc has to work.