It probably takes days for each trophy to be modeled, especially in HD.
It'd take a few minutes to write a short bio for each if you knew what you were writing about, or took some time to even just glance through the wiki page of whatever character. Just assign a handful of people to do that for a few months, give it all one pass for review and revision, and then you'd have everything. It's a lot of work, but it's more doable than thousands of HD, 3D models.
So here's hoping we get some descriptions still.
Couple of days late due to blizzcon, but just want to point out that writing in-game strings takes a lot more work than this. As someone who works with this sort of stuff for a living.
First, while it's probably minutes per description, that adds up quickly when you're talking about smash. Then you have to take that amount and multiply it by however many languages you are localizing the game to, and in this game we know that's a lot. Around ten I think? So that's already a factor of ten on the writing workload.
Second, "if you knew what you were writing about" is never really the case. With Smash in particular, you are talking about characters from multiple franchises, and I would be very very surprised if there is any professional writer in the world that has the level of Nintendo and Video Game expertise to quickly write entries for all possible things you could find in Smash. Especially if they're professional writers since that probably means they have less time to spend on fansites and wikis absorbing information, due to having to spend more time on their careers.
So, with that in mind, the "one pass for review and revision" becomes more complicated too. Because then QA and LQA (localization QA) has to not only read through all the content that was written but
also has to do the research to make sure that all references and claims made in the trophy are accurate to the terminology and glossaries established by each franchise. When doing localization it gets even more nasty because it isn't just the simple job of translating, but making sure your translations don't wind up being different than a previous translation, which is easy to ensure with big characters like mario and pokemon but a ton harder with a lot of more obscure content where you can't just pull up the game to verify, or maybe the original source game wasn't even localized correctly or consistently.
So then you have QA take ideally several hours going over this text to make sure it makes sense. But then you have cases where it gets in the build from a preliminary pass, and someone in QA testing the game finds out that, hey, something is wrong. Say 20% of strings have bugs, that's still a significant portion of content that has to go through bugging, triage and regression processes. Then, because THOSE get changed as a result of source changes, you have to send a second batch to localization
again so that localization also fixes the errors.
Just to break it down more simply, for any single string you have involvement from dev/designers (depending on the string), from the writers, from the editors, from QA, from localization translators, localization editors, localization QA, and any other random individual who has knowledge or authority pertinent to what gets written. That's a ton of people, from around the world.
And that's why, even ignoring the art modeling and rendering and all that artistic work, the writing itself also involves a lot of hours of work, which translates into a lot of money. Which is why shortening this workload makes a ton of sense.
If I were a producer perspective, I would do exactly the same and find different incentives. But as a fan, I still find it ****ty since the mitigation to justify their exclusion doesn't appeal to me. Like, if they removed spirits and left in a lower amount of trophies than those in past games, I'd be happy. As a fan, lol.
