| Someone mentioned the credits in the manual. According to those, there were 27 Game Designers of various ranks working on the project, 11 Programmers, and a database guy.
Now, I'm not an industry guy, but I'm in a GA Tech grad program very heavily affiliated with game design, and I've assisted in a couple of different research gaming projects on campus (one of which was MMO design). 27 designers is alot, even for a published game. Those are the sorts of numbers you see on EA titles, and EA is well known for throwing manpower at a problem rather than common sense. I'm sure they were each given very specific functions over which they were responsible, but even so with 27 people that's an awful lot of prototyping to juggle around, and I'm betting the design meetings were an epic affair. It's also a whole lot of ego, because everyone wants to see their baby (ie. pet idea of the week) implemented exactly as designed. Meanwhile, the code guys struggle to keep it all working together.
With a design staff over twice the size of the code staff, it's little wonder to me that the product shipped buggy. I'm sure they added more bugs with every content dump than they fixed.
- H | 