The other thing to keep in mind is that CA built their own game engine for this series of games.
Tearing up any part of the game engine (which dates to the late 90s) is sure to have big breaking consequences for other teams and any half decent project manager or mid level manager should be aware that this cannot be done in parallel with other activities without first really carefully communicating and engineering interfaces.
Any sort of navmesh rewrite or fix in the engine would ideally be done BEFORE non artistic assets are laid out. Ideally, they should have set out to automate the mesh generation and built artist tools for mesh editing as a major goal.
Tearing up any part of the game engine (which dates to the late 90s) is sure to have big breaking consequences for other teams and any half decent project manager or mid level manager should be aware that this cannot be done in parallel with other activities without first really carefully communicating and engineering interfaces.
Any sort of navmesh rewrite or fix in the engine would ideally be done BEFORE non artistic assets are laid out. Ideally, they should have set out to automate the mesh generation and built artist tools for mesh editing as a major goal.