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Xenoblade Chronicles 2 made with just 40 (approx.) staff members


Kezay

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Siliconera - Monolith Soft Boss on XC2 Development Struggles

 

For many this might not seem very newsworthy but for me it was kind of surprising to read that XC2 was made with a staff of just around 40 people.  I'm still pushing through Xenoblade Chronicles 2; I'm about 70 hours and six chapters (I think?) into the game and I still feel like I have so much to do.  There are so many side quests I've got to complete and systems to run through that I've actually held off doing stuff that progresses the main story in lieu of other activities for about five or six hours now.  The rabbit hole of stuff to do just keeps going deeper the more I follow this path! 

 

But really, to think this game was largely done with a staff of around 40 people just comes off as really impressive in this day and age when it's not uncommon for staff sizes for similarly sized projects (and even smaller) to be much higher.  And hey, besides a few issues here and there XB2 has been pretty friggin fantastic so far so kudos to the team for managing a title like this with a staff of that size.

Edited by Kezay
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Currently about 72 hours clocked in, and in the beginning of Chapter Eight. And depending on whatever sales may pop up in the month, I might get the expansion pass (soon to expire $30 gift cert).

 

Reading how there were only 40 members in the core team would explain some of the more critical aspects, such as why there are characters models that looked like they were designed more for XCX than XC2 due to outsourcing assumingly, and aggravations in regards to how the UI in the menu system was designed due to some folks in that department leaving (the battle UI is fine).

 

Other than that, makes me wonder how they could have fared if had the full crew, which I would assume they did after BotW was completed. I could only imagine.

Edited by avalonknight
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Fair point with the Menu UI and I think they actually talk about issues with the UI after three of their programmers moved on.  For instance, no idea if I'm just doing it the hard way or if it's the only way but do you really have to go through each blade one by one under blade management for their skill/affinity upgrades to activate and take effect?  Cause I have like 15+ blades I actively use and it's a bit of bother doing things in that manner.

 

Anyway, considering when BotW was completed I wonder if they had their full crew or if they had some going into pre-planning for their upcoming game.  By that point they were little more than half a year out from releasing XC2 anyway.

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After reading about other games' development cycles I can't imagine the kind of time and effort that the core 40+ people had to go through to build up a game this big. Can't help but wonder if the game could have been even better polished if the full crew was working on it though.

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10 hours ago, Kezay said:

Fair point with the Menu UI and I think they actually talk about issues with the UI after three of their programmers moved on.  For instance, no idea if I'm just doing it the hard way or if it's the only way but do you really have to go through each blade one by one under blade management for their skill/affinity upgrades to activate and take effect?  Cause I have like 15+ blades I actively use and it's a bit of bother doing things in that manner.

That is one method. But for the ones you have active in your party, you can go into characters and select the Blade from there, and can cycle through them with ZL/ZR, very useful if the active Blades unlocked a new node on their chart, otherwise it's through the cumbersome Blade menu. Also gotta that I miss the extras that the last two Xenoblade titles had such as the material encyclopedia, and they could have basically just take the XCX menu system and translate it here. I know the menus are clunky there as well, but XC2 made some weird decisions.

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My hope is the releases of quest and DLC, they fix what they need to fix in the background so this game can be even better than it is currently or at launch. I have yet to own this game and I plan on soon but it's on the list of games, I want to get like Odyssey, ARMS, FE Warrior, Mario+Rabbits, HW DX, Bayo 1+ Bayo 2.

 

But I have finish BotW first, I have pretty much finished but tackling this Sword of the trial is harder than I thought. I can't  get pass the 5th floor on Master Mode. It's not that I can't fight, I came up with creative ways defeat the enemies but the hits of the stronger enemies and a small part the healing coming up with the creative ways to beat them drains the life out of me. So I'm shrine hunting to get stronger so I can take more hits. Up to 22 hearts so far. I may try again before 30 but we'll cause I have no clue why I can't get passed this barrier for this part of the DLC much less tackle part, which probably is a walk in the park with or without Sword of the trial.

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