Well, the costumes being designed as one piece is kind of sensible. Remember what I said about effort-return. Least effort for the return. That, as we know, is really slapping a full body model on the character ala Cyrus, maybe maybe allowing it to be altered accordingly by the engine based on the bones and slider settings. Actually snipping the thing into a few items would involve mesh work to cut carefully and retool a bit to make sure it wraps, and making recolouring would involve going through the textures and redoing them. It's apparent whomever they got to do said textures didn't have much time at all to do it, probably some texture artist worked off his or her feet by DLC spam deadlines... as evidenced by the really bad lining, the bad alpha map, the lack of recolouring...
Although to be fair I MAY be giving too much credit to Volition. I tend to have in my head the image of the developer as trying to make a game (and when a game is as fun as SR3 you can tell it's because the developers had a blast making it) and the publisher being a soul-sucking monstrosity who cares only about money, but doesn';t understand what actually makes money (fun good stuff) so will crush the consumer base in an attempt to make more money (ala EA). Not so much killing the golden goose but butchering it and then getting a committee of business analysts who deal with toasters (items that don't care about what the consumer wants aside from 'does it toast bread') to work on figuring out why it's not producing gold anymore. And firing anyone who said "Wait, let's not kill this thing, ok?"
It MAY actually be Volition is as much at fault, that the rank and file are sloppy or have given up on quality, or that the executives are pushing stuff through and skipping QA to just get it out the door for money, and are working their employees to the bone in the process...
I'm never sure about that, but the best sign of a thing like that is how many units a game sold (if you can find out), and far moreso.. how big they're hiring. When a studio starts a hiring blitz of 'experienced staff wanted' that either means a: they're dramatically expanding, or b: either they fired most of their staff or they quit. A really good indication is if they've started to produce lower quality content, and they're on a constant hiring blitz regardless, and moreso some of the original or big-name leads within the company have "left to pursue other interests". Bioware's a great example.. everyone is jumping ship it seems, the quality of results has dropped noticably, and they've been on a constant hiring blitz for years. Yes, constantly hiring, for years. When you're hiring "executive artists" constantly, that means either you're expanding stupidly fast, or your turnover rate makes your average fast food joint look like a stable career. Of course, as usual, the average worker suffers, and puts up with the shit or goes to find another job.
Volition has a decent number of executive jobs offered, but without knowing how constantly that's been going on, it's tough to tell if it's just general hiring and expansion.. but the fact that the game is doing such DLC spam indicates THQ isn't pleased with the return (despite it being a well-rated decently selling game) and they're starting to feel executive meddling and stress.
Just my feelings of course... again, I'll have to see when this 'expansion pack that's not an expansion' comes out... if the quality bar is about what recent DLC is, I might start to properly worry a bit.
![[V] IdolNinja](/forum/data/avatars/m/0/62.jpg?1394026296){kind=avatar}
