Andromeda cost 40 million, TW3 cost 32 million... What went wrong?

Why must CDPR and Bioware always put so antagonistically? Can't one enjoy both games and developers? The Witcher had its fair share of glitches on release, not to mention an awkward fixed keyboard setup. They fixed that real quick but I could not play the game on release for a week due to that. But when it is CDPR all is forgiven. Also, CDPR is funded by the EU. I doubt EA gets any extra state funding!

CDPR was supported by Polish government not freaking EU. As far as I know EU DG never issue any funding for game-developer. 

Actually the EU provided funding to some developers like Image & Form to create games.

link


This is mostly why some GB studdios said Brexit gonna be hard to bear for them 

Why does someone always have to be offended? I'm trying to explain to you that this whole thing that a game is 3x cheaper to make in eastern europe is a myth. So that you can understand, that CDProject didn't somehow cheat the system.

The argument that cost of living and average wages are lower here have no bearing on software development. I live here and I can tell you for a fact, that Software Development jobs are the highest paid and most lucrative jobs to find, and the wages in those have nothing to do with the other industries.

Maybe EA can make their next Mass Effect game in Poland, for 3x cheaper, right? I'm sure that will make it on the level of The Witcher 3. /sarcasm

The downgrade is a real issue, the only different is that CDPR tackled it head on. Directly addressed it in next patch. 

www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-05-19-cd-projekt-red-tackles-the-witcher-3-graphics-downgrade-issue-head-on

While on the other side of our blue planet, this happened:

Jonathan Cooper‏ @gameanim
Folks have been asking so here are my thoughts on Mass Effect Andromeda's animation. Hopefully people will better understand the process.

Jonathan Cooper‏ @gameanim
First though; going after individual team members is not only despicable, but the culprits and choice of target revealed their true nature.

Jonathan Cooper‏ @gameanim
Just as we credit a team, not an individual, for a game's success, we should never single out one person for a team's failures.

Jonathan Cooper‏ @gameanim
That said, animating an RPG is a really, really big undertaking - completely different from a game like Uncharted so comparisons are unfair.

Jonathan Cooper‏ @gameanim
Every encounter in Uncharted is unique & highly controlled because we create highly-authored 'wide' linear stories with bespoke animations.

Jonathan Cooper‏ @gameanim
Conversely, RPGs offer a magnitude more volume of content and importantly, player/story choice. It's simply a quantity vs quality tradeoff.

Jonathan Cooper‏ @gameanim
In Mass Effect 1 we had over 8 hrs of facial performance. In Horizon Zero Dawn they had around 15. Player expectations have only grown.

Jonathan Cooper‏ @gameanim
As such, designers (not animators) sequence pre-created animations together - like DJs with samples and tracks.

Jonathan Cooper‏ @gameanim
Here is the Frostbite cinematic conversation tool circa Dragon Age Inquisition. (Source: www.frostbite.com/2014/08/creating-biowares-first-rpg-on-the-frostbite-engine/ …)


Jonathan Cooper‏ @gameanim
Here's thecinematic conversation tool for the Witcher 3. Both tools make it fast to assemble from a pool of anims.


Jonathan Cooper‏ @gameanim
Because time denotes not every scene is equally possible, dialogues are separated into tiered quality levels based on importance/likelihood.

Jonathan Cooper‏ @gameanim
The lowest quality scenes may not even be touched by hand. To cover this, an algorithm is used to generate a baseline quality sequence.

Jonathan Cooper‏ @gameanim
Mass Effect 1-3 populated default body 'talking' movement, lip-sync and head movement based on the dialogue text.

Jonathan Cooper‏ @gameanim
The Witcher 3 added to this with randomly selected body gestures that could be regenerated to get better results.
www.gameanim.com/2016/03/23/cinematic-dialogue-witcher-3/

Jonathan Cooper‏ @gameanim
Andromeda seems to have lowered the quality of it's base algorithm, resulting in the 'My face is tired' meme featuring nothing but lip-sync.

Jonathan Cooper‏ @gameanim
This, presumably, was because they planned to hit every line by hand. But a 5-year dev cycle shows they underestimated this task.

Jonathan Cooper‏ @gameanim
(All this is exacerbated by us living in an era of share buttons and youtube, getting the lowest quality out to the widest audience.)

Jonathan Cooper‏ @gameanim
Were I to design a conversation system now, I'd push for a workflow based on fast and accessible face & body capture rather than algorithms.

Jonathan Cooper‏ @gameanim
While it hasn't 100% proved this method, Horizon Zero Dawn's better scenes succeed due to a use of facial mocap.

Jonathan Cooper‏ @gameanim
The one positive to come out of all this is that AAA story-heavy games can't skimp on the animation quality with a systemic approach alone.

Jonathan Cooper‏ @gameanim
The audience has grown more discerning, which makes our job more difficult but furthers animation quality (and animators) as a requirement.

Yes, the highest payed, most lucrative jobs... in Eastern Europe.

You know that that, for some countries, is an average or mediocre wage right? I mean... this isn't hard stuff to grasp.

I think one of the biggest differences is how fixed Geralt is versus how open they try and make Ryder.  That can impact many different areas of the game.  Instead of trying to make a face look good with a character creator you make one face and animate it instead of relying on systems.  Another thing is that the story and development of the character is fixed you do get to choose what line of dialogue you pick for Geralt, but normally it will have the same tone just either being an acceptance/refusal or levels of the same tone.

With that being said from the little I have read about Cyberpunk 2077 it seems they might be going more of the BioWare approach and being more open with their protagonist and if that is the case I wonder if they will have the same problems BioWare has had and how the community will react if those problems are the same.

alright you got me... it was indeed downgraded so that consoles could just run it. DAMN imagine if it was purely PC exclusive like StarCitizen holy shite the Witcher would have even looked more different than today's version 

To illustrate, the average pay in Poland is aproximately 730EUR. In UK and France, you go over 2000EUR.

From personal experience, our local average pay is somewhere around 800EUR, reportedly, which is way over twenty grand. Not sure where they got that, but there you go. They're obviously not including teachers, because that'd make the average wage plummet like a meteorite.

In US Dollar, you hillbilly, that's about 950 bucks. Tell me whoever would work in the US for 950 bucks a month. Wait. Noone.

This is why the Polish actually spent MORE money on development. Relatively, 40 million USD are less to Americans than 125 million zloty to Poles.

You compare raw amounts. Not what it means in their respective countries. Andromeda was a cheap development compared to Witcher 3, which apparently has no errors or shortcomings, according to every single fanboy I've met in my years.

Ale ty seš beztak idiot někde z jihu Ameriky co netuší ani kde Polsko je, natož s kým sousedí, takže mi udělej tu radost a zavři hubu.