Let me clarify: Limbic Entertainment (the Developer), having received another substantial financial injection from Ubisoft Entertainment (the Client), instead of spending the funds on a user-friendly modding tool, improving models, creating new Campaigns and scenarios, and meticulously refining the terrain and landscape, spent them on renting obscure office spaces and paying inflated salaries to hired staff (who, unfortunately, only delivered about 30% of the value of the investment).
1. Limbic is a small studio, as far as I know. And before "Heroes," it had never worked on large projects (well, this information is definitely accurate). Ubisoft, however, hired them specifically for a AAA project, which is how the seventh installment of "Heroes" was positioned. Yes, it was indeed positioned as AAA, and the price tag speaks volumes about that.
Conclusion: someone decided to cut costs on the developer.
2. All of the above goals require not only funds but also time. I won't comment on the rest, but we all saw how the models were created (specifically, how quickly they were created) during the development process of "Heroes 7" (thankfully, this process was quite open. At least that's a plus). Saying "very quickly" is an understatement. However, speed is only a positive aspect. To achieve this speed, the developers must have a) motivation (in the form of salary, of course), b) decent working conditions (including premises, yes), and c) there must be a lot of them (that is, the total salary must increase). So... All the investments from the above ("renting obscure office spaces and paying inflated salaries to hired staff"), in my opinion, sound quite logical. But from your message, I conclude that Ubisoft was probably unhappy with this allocation of funds. That is,
Conclusion 2: someone again decided to cut costs on the developer.
3. Okay, as a result, we don't have a user-friendly modding tool, etc., and so on. Who will do this? Will Ubisoft hire someone else again? Just as they hired Limbic to improve the sixth installment? And will they again do everything crookedly and with a reduced budget? Or will everything remain as it is? Apparently, it is quite possible that it will remain as it is. But they could have added more budget (even exceeding the limit), demanded improvements from Limbic (just to avoid making a fool of themselves. And who knows, maybe such an approach would have expanded the player base). And then they could have parted ways with them. Instead, they are parting ways during the active development phase (yes, this is an active development phase. Until the very end, Limbic released patches with good regularity. As someone who was playing "Heroes 7" at that time, I saw this very well).
Conclusion 3: yes, the same conclusion.
In general, I'm not necessarily defending Limbic. They are probably "good" in their own way: I think they simply don't know how to make such games. But the point is that this was obvious even before they were hired, and all of this should have been taken into account in the development process. And not be surprised later that an indie studio's game turns out to be not very good.
