Its fair to say, he went overboard with the animations, and i think he will realise that.
Being generous to DPC for a moment, I think the jury is still out on the question of whether he went overboard this time. Don't get me wrong, I'm leaning in that direction myself, but it could be that the episode is a total knockout and justifies every day it took to create. Fan response to episode 9 could be so overwhelmingly positive that it simply reinforces his belief in what he's doing and the way he's doing it. We'd only see him start to question his approach if,
after playing the episode, people come out with comments like this in sufficient numbers:
"Sure, it was good...but was it really 9 months' worth of development time good?"
That's a crunch question, I think. And by taking as long as he has this time around, he's pretty much guaranteed that it will factor in to how a lot of people play the episode. After the initial buzz has faded...was it worth it?
Among the things I'll be looking out for is the 1 minute 23 second long animation that is included somewhere in episode 9. Remember we know from the status updates that that animation alone took very nearly one whole month to render. It
could be amazing...but will it be amazing enough that you wouldn't trade it to knock about four weeks off development time right now?
Like any creative endeavour game development is about choices: what do you spend your time and resources on, what's
worth spending your time and resources on. For the verdict on whether he got the balance right for episode 9 we'll have to wait another 1 minute 23 seconds worth of development time and cross our fingers that it was worth it.