It’s a question of longer development time with smaller teams, or short timelines with big teams. A small team working on content in series is more cohesive, but, requires a longer timeline. A big team can do a lot in a short time by making content in parallel, but this necessitates that content be siloed to prevent needing constant revision. A few long quest lines with lots of outcomes, or a bunch independent quests with simple outcomes.

A small team working longer will cost the same as a big team working shorter (generally speaking). But the priority is short timelines, for the sake of chasing trends and packing the latest greatest tech in. This same kind of priority, trend chasing and insisting on the latest and greatest tech, also leads to spectacular failures of long timeline games, like “black flag” or “duke nukem forever “, but the issue there is not the long timeline, but the constant changes in priority to chase trends.