100,000 is really not a lot. There be not much you could do with that. I doubt I could hire actors and get one mission completed with that. At best I could see working. Is give more logic to the game. Cops can be hacked. Once you reach a certain level in hacking. Time is adjusted whenever you fast travel.
Cause 100K is nothing as far as AAA game development goes?
You're talking about 100K euro. Converted to USD, that's about 120K. 120K out of a 313 million budget is a drop of water in an ocean and some of you think you could achieve... anything worthwhile?
Right, but that $313M is a sunk cost, and the assets and the heavy lifting are done. At this point most of the changes are coding changes, so assuming you are paying your coders an average of $100 per hour, you're looking at 1200 hours of coder time. That's not insignificant, it's one coder working over seven weeks, or a team of three working two and a half weeks.
But point taken, it's not a huge sum. But I think the spirit of the question is "how would you spend your resources".
Way better NPC and vehicle AI, NPC/City interactivity, faction allegiance and faction estrangement. Of course a detailed police/wanted/criminal justice system that makes sense. And if it's going to cost that much money, then there should be additional content on top of all that.
You seem to be under the impression that a lot can be achieved with 100K and then some when the reality is much closer to what @hulkman2456 said.
1200 hours is nothing when talking about AAA software development. It might sound like a lot, but it's not. In that 1200 hours you'll have to fit in coding, testing, coding again because you couldn't possibly know every repercussion of what your change brought about. Then more testing. Then Q&A. Possibly more coding and testing and so on until ready for release.
If you knew then the only possible answer is... what? Hire an extra Q&A guy?
In all honesty, with such a paltry sum they might as well just buy an interior fountain with slip & slides modules. It won't do anything for the game but neither will 100K
Scratch that. It'll lift their team's spirit. That might actually accomplish a lot.
"WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOU HAD €100K TO SPEND ON NEW CONTENT?"
If I were a CD Project dev manager, I would order an NCPD/Maxtac paid DLC, with a brand new exclusive storyline good for 20+ play hours, which players can unlock a fully flyable NCPD helicopter when completed for €15.
100k is probably close to what the average programmer makes in a year (I make a bit less than that)
So what could 1 programmer do in a year? Actually quite a lot.
Or you could half that to 2 programmers for 6 months.
Something like adding NCART would probably take about month to add since nearly everything is already there, it just needs the code changed. (and some modeling work to remove the invisible walls along the tracks, but that would be a few hours to update the models and reload them back in.)
