Right on. I really don't know anything about those games apart from the fact that they're the genre I don't play. lol That said, I find it hard to believe they're actually so dissimilar in scope and production value. Does BF4 really have more than double the content of Shadow Fall? CoD really has so much more content that after starting with a studio nearly twice the size, they needed to add four additional studios do complete it all? Again, I don't pay close attention to these games, but when KZ gets slammed, it seems it's always because of sluggish controls, boring gameplay, and other things which can't be clearly defined. "Only a third of the content of BF/CoD" seems like an easy jab, but this is the first I've heard it mentioned.
I honestly am not sure how much extra content and stuff BF4 would have than Killzone SF, but from my experiences, 3rd party games almost always have more content (significantly) than 1st party games, and I do know that BF4 had 5 expansion packs, and Dice probably already had a second team working on Starwars Battlefront before they launched BF4.
As far as Cod Ghost goes, well they had two years to make a new game with a campaign, multiplayer mode, and aliens Co-Op mode (plus they have a crap ton of custimization), and they probably needed help because they had to ship the game to not 2, but 6 different platforms, and at the time, X1 and PS4 were still early dev. kits, and had an all new architecture, so it probably wasn't too easy.
(so yes, obviously a ridiculous number of platforms can weigh down a developer).
But they probably will not need any help for the next one as they have 3 years, and will only have 3 platforms which are all very similar.
I think that your theory may hold some weight for last gen. as the architectures were very different, and so it is a lot more work, but with consoles basically becoming stealth PCs, the cost for multiplat development is likely much lower, and no matter what they would always have at least 2 platforms as PC isn't going anywhere.
Yeah, like I said, I'm not sure what MS employees actually do. Maybe they use the "monkeys at a typewriter" strategy for coding. Again, it seems unlikely that H4 had nearly triple the content of KZ3, which was made by 125 people.
You should watch there development documentary for Halo 5. They get stuff done there. Also, Halo has a lot of content...It always has a epic campaign with super high production values, Multiplayer with Arena style, and BTB style of play, and multiple gametypes off of that. It has Forge mode, and Theater mode, as well as a Cooperative firefight mode (or spartan opps), not to mention all the features like custom games, 4 player split screen, system link support, Spartan customization, and campaign scoring.
So yeah, like I said, bigger game = bigger team.
More devs. are required for more platforms, I am not arguing that, just your notion that shipping for one extra platform could cause the team to inflate by 50%.
Sony games have no content? That's what you're telling me?
I never said that. Please don't take my words out of context.
I said that 1st party games (with few exceptions) are not as big as 3rd party games.
Take Titanfall, or Sunset Overdrive as example (since you think I'm just calling out Sony). They are both wonderful, and fun games, but they just don't have the content that a game like Cod, or Assassin's Creed.
lol So, the only evidence you'll accept is a developer publicly complaining about the need to support their users? That seems to be a bit of a wild goose chase. How about chubbs saying that multi-platform support is indeed a significant undertaking in terms of effort and complexity? Does that count for anything? Seems there were other devs in his thread agreeing as well.
I might. Can I have a link to the thread?