Game Dev - How Long Does It Take?

Those dates are out bro.

Morrowind was released 2002, so I think there is a couple of years there of post release patches and I question the start of the dev cycle.

That said I think 2-3 years of SOTA was feasible before feature creep and if they kept to the crowd sourcing

So this is how I saw it

- Saw working demo (didnt know anything about Unity back then)
- All the backend stuff for handling cash and servers etc was already established.
- They have an engine, they had crowdsourced art, they had Unity store.
- ALL they had to work on for 2 years was mechanics, story, fine tune the code
- Create a back end for handling player submissions; this would of covered dungeons, scenes etc Could of probably expanded to mobs if done correctly (those scene jams were fucking amazing)
- If they were proactive they would of created a simple way of introducing new quests

Ultimately in the original vision of this game they would of had potentially unlimited content ( I seen what the Ultima crowd can produce and its amazing ie the MUSIC), could introduce new quests rapidly and the cash store could of supported micro transactions.

If they clearly made Single Player areas where you could go Co Op or opposed for main story (ie Dark Souls) then have some more of your traditional MMO areas where all the PvP happens/ socialising etc they would of had their bloody different play styles.

Now if they did that from the start.  Smaller map, but great scenes and story for say 10 hours.  Then tested all the implementation of the systems and built from there who would of given a fuck about feature creep?  Who would of cared about cash shop? NO ONE.  Thats how you build good will. 

Hey guys in progress here is the frist part of the story.  Oh BTW we have made Town X MMOISH so you will see everyone in this hub.  Off they go on adventure bit of story, instead of some shitty hat quest for a limited time.

People would see that, each release a little bit more of the story, leave the old shit there, all of a sudden you have 25 releases of testing, WITH CONTENT/STORY, and thats what gathers momentum not this fucking half arsed rubbish testing they are doing.  PLUS all this good will you have created.

One thing to consider is a lot of that is brainstorming and shit. Diablo 3 took forever but I doubt they were actively working on it that entire time, otherwise what the actual fuck. A lot of these were a brainfart in 199X and then finally someone blew the dust off the idea and started working on it 4 years before it launched in 2009.

The original scope of SotA was achievable in 4 years with half the budget. That's why supervision, management and skilled workers is important; with amateurs, time and money are wasted, no matter the business.

I was alluding to that in my post.  I mean look how quickly that pump out Call of Doody

I think the UO emulated servers are amazing and is the benchmark of what can be done out there.  Look at M&B Napolean mods.  

Fucknuts McGee (or Bowen or whoever it was, they all sorta' mesh together now) would remind you that SotA will have at least 500,000.

Mocking the notion that SotA will compete per backer claims.

You should go look at some posted stats they had almost overtook that crown in the summer of 2015. The expansion and movie aren't going to make that much change the game has peaked years ago.

I might agree with this, if it hadn't been for them revealing (repeatedly) that they didn't have a solid business plan to begin with.

No, they never said they didn't have a business plan. It's been a read between the lines sort of thing. I've seen various people say it many times (Joviex, Tarsilion, etc.), because when you have at least a bare bones understanding of game development, it becomes apparent.