What aspect of developing a large action RPG (Elder Scrolls, Dragon Age, The Witcher, etc.) often takes the most time?
There is no short answer to this. Websites like Gamedev.net, polycount.com, etc all of the websites where they talk in detail about all the disciplines involved in game development will give you an idea. At highlevel all aspects will take a collosal amount of time, resource, experience. Art, code, design, audio, story, animation, production,… and each of those aspects have dedicated areas that will take huge amounts of time. Art: character, environments, props, vfx, tech art, combat animation, character animation, rigging, UI. Design: level design, quest desig, narrative&story design, side quest design, loot and item design, character progression design,… code: AI, gameplay code, combat code, engine code, character progression code, optimising and streaming code, network and replication code, etc the lists goes on and each of those mentioned are TEAMS working tightly together to get such games as you mentioned developed. And give or take they all take the same amount of “most" time as they are so depedent and intertwined. Maybe some teams are finished a month or so earlier. (Rarely happens) every discipline usually works extremely hard the full development cycle. That at minimum will take you 4 years at bare minimum. Look at Home - GameDev.net good place to start and keep looking for new game development sites to learn the answers.
What is an explanation of the sentence "you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain"?
There are many memorable dialogues from the movie dark knight,however this intrigued me the most-you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. probably it’s because it didn't dawn on me till now how brilliant it is.I have a very interesting explanation of what it actually means,a simple example would suffice.we all know the infamous incident of sinking of the titanic and how thousands perished on that fateful day. we hear the bravery of the engineers and the captain, security,etc. who let women and children take the life boats while they sacrificed their lives.On that ship, also present was Bruce J. Ismay , the owner of the white star line company which made the titanic. There were rumors about him escaping the ship in the disguise of a woman. Though he didn't escape disguised as a woman,he still left the ship in the last life boat and was labelled as the coward of the 20th century all over the world. However, few eye witnesses say that he stayed in the ship and escorted women and children in to the life boats and then he left in the last life boat as he feared his life.now think about it , what if he had stayed back in the titanic and sacrificed him self? - he would go down into the history as a hero.but he did not,now people remember him only as a coward ,a deserter - a villain.so:you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.