Comparison of Games.

Costume Quest

Developers: Double Fine Productions

Producers: THQ

Genre: Role Playing

Platform: Xbox 360 (Xbox Live Arcade)

                  PS3 (PSN Network)

Costume Quest is an adventure/role playing game available for download from Xbox Live Arcade and the Playstation Network. It was developed by Double Fine Productions, a relatively small developer based in San Fransisco. Double Fine was started by ex Lucas Arts employee Tim Schafer. Costume Quest was created as a result of what Schafer called "Amnesia Fortnights" during the production of Brutal Legend. During "Amnesia Fortnights" the Brutal Legend team would be split into smaller teams and they would come up with ideas for potential future games. Double Fine believed that EA had licensed a sequel to Brutal Legend, however when they found out they hadn't Tim Schafer went back to the ideas provided in the Amnesia Fortnights for their next release. Two ideas were chosen ; 'Costume Quest' and 'Stacking'

Compared to Double Fine's previous games that had four to five years production time, Costume Quest had only one year. The short time frame and small team size were down to Tim Schafer and his previous experience on titles such as 'The Secret of Monkey Island'  he was quoted as saying that "the limited time scale was beneficial to the development process"

Costume quest has a quirky feel to it and I think you can definitely tell that a small team worked on it, it feels more like an intimate game between player and developer rather than the big titles that are made by huge teams. This was possible because the game was sold as a small downloadable game so therefore was possible to be made by smaller teams.

Call of Duty; Black Ops

Developers: Treyarch

Publishers: Activision

Genre: First Person Shooter

Platform: Xbox360, PS3, PC

Call of Duty: Black Ops is the latest in the Call of Duty series which began in 2003. It was developed by Treyarch which was the studio responsible for other games in the Call of Duty series, Call of Duty 3, Call of Duty: World at War and Call of Duty: Reflex. Black Ops is the 7th game to be released from the Call of Duty franchise. As it is part of a best selling franchise the budget for the game would have been   much higher than that of games like Costume Quest because they know that the game is going to create a high revenue as it already has a dedicated fanbase from the previous games they can justify spending more money on development. Within 24 hours of going on sale Black Ops had sold more than 7 million copies, 5.6 million in the U.S and 1.4 million in the U.K which broke the record of the previous Call of Duty release, Modern Warfare 2.

Unlike for previous games during the making of  Black Ops Treyarch focused entirely on this game alone and didn't work on anything else. It had different teams working on the various modes of the game. As with previous Call of Duty games and a lot of other titles there is a large focus on successful online play so Treyarch invested a lot of time and money into this aspect of the game. They also really tried to make the game look really impressive, using motion capture technology similar to that in James Cameron's Avatar which allowed for more accurate facial expression. You can see when playing the game that a lot of effort has been put into the cut scenes, it almost feels like it's trying to be a Hollywood action movie. 

The differences between the two styles of developing a game are obvious here. One is a multi million selling title and the other is a small downloadable game. Black Ops focuses on delivering a very flashy and exciting game play experience based on a tried and tested formula created by previous Call of Duty titles. Because of the huge success of Modern Warfare 2 people were already interested and mostly convinced to buy Black Ops long before it had even been released. This means Treyarch had to spend less effort getting players to play their game. It also meant they could justify spending a lot of money to create a very impressive looking game.

Costume Quest on the other hand is a stand alone title, it's not part of a series so it doesn't have a fanbase already. It relies on getting the player interested enough to play. I think they have done this by trying to create a game which is quirky and different to get people interested in it. The artwork and style of the game is very simple but appealing and the idea behind the game, while simple, is also interesting and refreshingly different from other games. As Double Fine could not be sure of the success of the game they obviously had a lower budget for it, this is why the game is very simple in design and art style, however I think they make it work.