Striker Mario said:
I don't know if increasing standards on video games is putting a dent on Nintendo's development plans, but I think at least coming up with fresh ideas and going with them shouldn't be too much pressure. If other games can accomplish staying fresh and great, I'm sure Nintendo can do the same thing.
I would love to fully agree with you, but then I read this, from the Paper Jam Miiting:
[quote author=Shunsuke Kobayashi] We were thinking, since the paper characters were coming all the way from the paper world, let's make the main story something really bizarre, crammed with red herrings and misapprehensions. We had things like going back and forth to the paper world, and the Mushroom Kingdom turning gradually into paper... But we overdid it a bit, and the first draft of the plot ended up being a complete muddle that wouldn't resonate with anyone... So we simplified the script and structured it with greater emphasis on showing the different characters meeting and interacting with each other. We had to do a lot of re-writes...[/quote]
Even apparently simple ideas might have a risk with them, and require much more development time than previously thought.
Incidentally, Miyamoto's guidelines on the Super Mario series and Paper Mario: Sticker Star might indeed lead to less development time:
not concentrating on story and cutscenes means that much less time is spent to create non-gameplay elements, furthermore explorations-based levels (nice that you immediately understood that I was talking about Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine and the first Super Mario Galaxy!) require by definition that each area is immediately recognizable in order for the players not to get lost, and also require a big moveset in order to properly interact with the environment in order to reach remote places (it's surprising that Super Mario 64 still has the biggest moveset, the games that came after it seem to have a subset of that moveset!). This means that a huge amount of time is needed to design just one of these levels, and if you want a decent amount of them, it's gonna be gruesome work for the designers.
Regarding Sticker Star, I would guess that much less time was needed to design the NPCs with respect to The Thousand-Year Door, furthermore being based on New Super Mario Bros. series meant that the art designers already had a model from which they could create art for the game. There likely was plently of art to be used as model also for the so common landscapes that, again, mainly stem from the New Super Mario Bros. series. And with a little story you need less characters that appear just once, less work for the scriptwriters and maybe even less complex animations.
By the way, I'm not talking about money here, Nintendo has plenty of them. And this is not a comprehensive analysis, otherwise I should talk about the issue of the Wii U mainly maintained by Nintendo and by its agreements with other third parties, about the new development teams at Nintendo and related teams (the one of Sticker Star is an example) , the issue of clarifying what "Mario" is about, which is important for Nintendo if they want the Mario-related IPs to be immediately recognizable outside the Nintendo fandom, and so on.
I'm not even saying that the developers are being more lazy, quite the contrary: they are so pressed by deadlines that they must do everything they can in order to spare time.
It's just a personal theory founded on recent interviews and features of recent games that, funnily enough, also explains the character restrictions of the 3DS version of Mario & Sonic at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games and suggests that a new development model with different deadlines (less likely for public companies) or much bigger development teams might soon be needed to return to the goodness of the GCN era.
I'm not being pessimistic, I just think we are in a transition period now.
