I have been working with an old workmate to create a game with cryengine 3, having worked for the past 6 months we currently have over 8k cryengine ready assets. With textures, animations and sounds this is in the 15k region although game assets will likely be closer to 14k once we have a finished title. The method I used to speed up the process for making the majority of assets was to use tileable textures and make many of the items modular. For instance we created over 300 different Tudor style walls which work in conjunction with one another to create a giant lego set allowing massive variety when creating town. Due to everything working off real world scale and being modular it made creating floors and partition walls easy, enabling us to have fully furnished interiors with every building.

Characters are also modular and run off 1 skeleton and have over 100 variations ethnicity, young, old, fat, thin etc. We decided the best course of action was to create 1 solid rig which would drive all the characters which also has a full facial rig setup to work with either faceware or faceshift.

I would imagine games like the new GTA and others titles of this magnitude to have closer to 100k of assets due to them having much larger teams and also the fact they have a library of existing models which can be taken from and improved where and if needed.

Best of luck with your project though as creating content to fill a world is quite a task and so finding as many ways to speed this up is extremely adventageous.

Best regars,

Leon