I'm sure there's some flex. (Specialists & teams helping out on other projects; individual moves between projects; support guys outside the dev numbers, like QA, being prioritised for launch titles etc). But they're pretty insistent that that's the ballpark figure consistently assigned to ED, and growing on balance [1],[2],[3],[4],[5]
I think these aspects have more explanatory power when trying to understand their output vs their staffing:
Likely Issues:
- This game is clearly a giant ball of complexity, and is likely breaking every time they try and change it significantly. (Proc gen, multiplayer, huge scale, multi-vehicular, multi-platform games likely lean that way
)
- The seasonal model was fairly pants. Seemingly involving stunty dev runs with small teams at times, but requiring a shiny product at the end. It also encouraged laying down structural additions that didn't impress on arrival but were designed to be stepping stones to later additions.
- The current, more classical, dev approach requires a prolonged run with far less to show in the meantime.
- Sometimes R&D just doesn't go anywhere. Stuff happens. In dev, doubly so. (And possibly treble-y so in 'giant ball of code' dev )
Possible Aspects:
- They may not have released all of the dev undertaken for the Beyond period. (I don't like speculating about 'hidden builds' as a rule, but we know the ice stuff was a fair way along back in June 2018. I think it's safe to speculate that some of this stuff had some meaty work done on it in the last year+ which will only become obvious at the point of release).
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TLDR: Further time / patience / deity offerings are required to see if they can actually wrestle meaningful change into the game under the new delivery model ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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