Final Fantasy 13's failings were mostly due to a horribly dysfunctional studio environment and a broken development process. They released a surprisingly honest postmortem of the project in a recent issue of Game Developer (you can find a summary of it at http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/30640/Exclusive_Behind_Th... ), and 'overambitious with the graphics' pales in comparison to the other things that went wrong. My favorite tidbit: They went through a large portion of the project with the game not in a playable state until they realized they needed to build a demo, and only then did they finally get the game playable and start testing it.
Perhaps one might say that developers are aiming too high in every respect (including graphics), and that's leading to flawed projects. But in this specific case, I doubt the game would have turned out good even if the graphics weren't given the effort they got. In many cases it's possible for a studio to easily scale up development when it comes to graphics, because with strong enough art direction, you can have 50 or 100 artists working on assets for different parts of a game and have a reasonable chance of tying all that art together at the end. Unfortunately, engineering teams don't scale nearly that well...
Thanks for the link, interesting read. Reminds me of some similar comments made by Warren Spector after Deus Ex - that it was a big wakeup call to them once they had a single playable level, because you could suddenly see that some aspects of the game didn't work as they were.
Possibly this suggests pg's minimum viable product + iteration strategy as being just as applicable to game development too, although I imagine the "minimum viable product" for FFXIII is a hugely significant amount of work in itself.
For FF you have a number of different game "engines". The fighting engine for example can be a stand alone component, same goes for the running around in the world / track. There is always a minimum viable product.
Perhaps one might say that developers are aiming too high in every respect (including graphics), and that's leading to flawed projects. But in this specific case, I doubt the game would have turned out good even if the graphics weren't given the effort they got. In many cases it's possible for a studio to easily scale up development when it comes to graphics, because with strong enough art direction, you can have 50 or 100 artists working on assets for different parts of a game and have a reasonable chance of tying all that art together at the end. Unfortunately, engineering teams don't scale nearly that well...