its ridiculously easy to port games, takes no time at all, xbox's are small easy pc's, the only difference is testing/bug finding across a more open platform, they are running out of time so giving us a hint that basically pc testing/porting/work won't even bother starting till the xbox version is out, likely because they want to start pulling in money, and get the game out before it looks out of date.
Its seemingly MASSIVELY scaled back already, because its a classic case of over reaching. Spore, what they wanted to do was a great all encompassing, 5 seperate FULL titles all in one with massive replayability due to how ridiculously varied the game can become. In the end they realised, the aims were far to grande, they scaled back and delayed, scaled back and delayed, scaled back and delayed, what came out was 4 almost awful mini games and one long winded repetitive half finished game.
The problem is, when you start with say 50 goals, and you put 2 people working on each goal, 2 years into a 4 year project you realise it will never work, you cut 50 goals to 25 goals, suddenly 50% of your work to date is literally in the bin. SO you haven't even been working on 25 goals with 4 people on each for 2 years already, so you've still got a huge amount of work to do. another year later you drop another load of features/goals, and more work/time/effort has been wasted. Another year later and you realise the remaining 10 features, don't make any sense or remotely work well without all the existing features and you almost start again from scratch.
THats the problem when you just try FAR to much in a single title. Games that work best, COD4, was a simple progression of an established idea, with a couple of basic, but working improvements, and what resulted was a working, fun, improved game. Slow and steady improvements, massive fundamental changes and so many of those new games, a la Spore, are huge let downs.
Alan Wake tried to do way to much, be the best looking game, have massive open enviroments, have the most powerful physics engines and effects, have the best story, be incredibly long, have a bunch of new idea's and features. Almost every single game that tries to do that much, fails. Crysis was the best looking, had a great physics engine, but is pretty damn short, the story wasn't original, it went ahead in some area's, and cut out other things to compensate. You can't have it all, everyone that tries, fails.
Hope they manage to get something half decent out eventually, but its got every sign of being a complete mess.
. FSX doesn't count
.
