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Jumpgate Evolution: Pre-E3 Update Provides Details on Game Status
MikeB
Community ManagerAdministrator RarePosts: 6,555
NetDevil's Lance Robertson, Executive Producer on Jumpgate: Evolution, has posted a pre-E3 update on the game's official forums giving starved fans a long awaited update on the game's status.
Lance begins by providing a bit of context with the history of the game's development, and then goes on to explain why they essentially "went dark" for a long period of time with really nothing in the way of new information: they threw out most of the game. After a good deal of testing and getting people into the game, they realized their game was not where it needed to be and the changes involved to fix that necessitated throwing out tons of work. Over the past year they've been working to re-work the game with a much more clearer vision in mind and they are ready to begin talking and showing off the game once again.
Lance does warn that many of the things we've seen on JGE in the past may or may not still be in the game, however, the game will still be quite familiar on the surface, and that the main goal of the game, that of massive scale space warfare has remained intact:
I’m going to be honest with you and tell you something that may be difficult to hear: what you saw and heard of Jumpgate Evolution before now may have little bearing on the actual game we're going to deliver. When we went into that dark period to redesign much of the game, much was thrown away and new needs came to light, but we ultimately ended up with a much clearer vision of what we want Jumpgate Evolution to be, as well as the path to get there.
Now we’re finally ready to begin showing you what we’ve been working on. What you’ll see may look and feel similar on the surface, but it's what’s inside that counts. We’ve reached a level of confidence in our game that we didn’t have the first time around, and we’re much stronger for it.
Read the full update here.
[Thanks Darkholme for the tip!]
Comments
Good decision on their part. If only more companies did that instead of releasing garbage they aren't happy with.
Companies that can make the tough decisions like this are the comanies that earn my money.
"If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse." - Henry Ford
Basically its not the same game anymore. The game some of us waited for...
I do wonder what the new game will be, but i think they should change the name...
Vaporgate Evolution sounds very suiting.
By the time this game comes out I just don't think I'll give a flying crap anymore. Much like what happened with Tabula Rasa...
Yoink.adios\losers
I hear it's due out in the spring of 2043. At least, that's when it'll be released if they keep going at the current rate. Maybe I can ask for it as a 65th birthday gift.
Unless of course they arbitrarily decide to throw it out and start all over again.
Does this story sound familiar to anyone? Tabula Rasa comes to mind right off the bat. To a lesser extent WAR as well.
I wonder if its really possible to recover after going down the wrong road for so long?
Guess we'll see as they reveal more about the game in the coming year.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
If my memory is correct, they were actually pretty close to a release when the feeback they got from the "family and friends" beta was so bad they decided to restart/retool.
If that's the case, I like what they did. I think the delay was smart. Let's hope the additional time allowed them to create a better product. That'd be nice.
littlemonkey
Those cooky Colorado boys,Must be the altitude.Best of luck and try importing some oxygen.
Uh-huh. Boy, someone needs to get fired big time. There must be some good stuff to smoke in them thar hills...
It's simple - if you can't do it, sell it to someone who can, if you can't deliver on your hype, sell it while the game concept still has hype and potential.
Year after year and nothing, argh - if you catch some stardust and make this project to the store shelves sometime, I'll be sure to set aside a part of my Old Age Security check to see how you finally have come along.
hrmm 5-6 years later we find out they hit the restart button. this game i know consider a myth. great idea to redo the game. but, they pretty much shit on the entire community of the game and kept them in the dark for ages like they always do. to be honest i dont care wat they bring to E3. the way they left every1 in the dark n now says this pfft. I got 100% more faith in black prophecies then this game. Dont expect o see this game anytime soon. 2015-2016 is most likey when ull see it (if it does come out). and im pretty sure their investers are mighty pissed by now.
Maybe they should rename it to Jumpgate Forever.
I for one am glad that they DUMPED the CAREBEAR requests. This is a war game and I love the original. The CagMisfits is waiting in the shadows, into battle once again old friends.
As for being like Tabula Rasa, I think dumping the bad content and making a game true to what Jossh and all the other programmers and gm's at Netdevil had always evisioned is kick arse.
CagMisfits
You have one thing to ponder...YOUR IN MY WAY!
When in doubt, Let it Rain.
Even if they did release in 2043, that would still put it coming out about twenty years before Duke Nukem Forever.
A Do-Over this late in development? Well that's never a good sign....
*sigh*
I was actually looking forward to this game. Not so sure now, have to wait and see what they "fixed" and what they said was "wrong" with it.
By the time they get this one done, Earth and Beyond coulda been brought back to life <sigh>.
It's going to be Avesome!!!
You know you are going to play it when it comes out. Best companies release software when it is done. The light at the end of the tunnel is filled with action packed space dog fights against other fighters and capital ships. If you can't wait, try a little real life while you are young
Now I do miss Earth & Beyond, loved that game. Too bad that EA didn't support it at all. Marketing for it was practically nil, updates few and far between, etc. I think if EA hadn't absorbed Westwood, E&B would still be up and running today. This is why I was looking forward to Jumpgate so I can get my space fix again.
pffft, not much in the way of constructive comments, eh?
Well, Netdevil did what they figured they had to do, I'll just mention 2 much ignored things that would be important at least to some players in a spacegame:
1) Don't throw out the cool NPC AI components in favor of all scripted stuff, like that moon exploding with drones, no matter how you make the occurence more rare, you can always smell scripted stuff from lightyears away... and that smell is always a bad one.
Attacking a ship in the depth of space and not knowing how soon the ship's SOS might get you into hot water because other NPC units might or might not happen to be doing something nearby.
Ships or anything else that just >spawns< always sucks... immersion killer.
2) I hope you don't make the game over-dense, where everybody is always on top of each other for the sake of continual battle.
Its nice if the vastness of space is somehow expressed in a space game.
For all of EVE's 3000+ systems, all their solar systems are the same thing repeated, and it feels like driving through texas, small village after small village with the same dismal layout.
Independence War, a single player UK title did pretty good on giving you a feeling of space being vast, yet travel times were not a problem, and some areas where more dense than others..
3) take advantage of something CCP completely missed out on: if your game space spans part of a galaxy, have one end be the outer fringes with less stars and more black, and the other end be near the center of the galaxy with more stars and more nebulae. That means different areas will actually have a different flavor, and probably different use.
4) the fact that you just "found out" from a game test that it would suck having the the same scenario repeat twice a week with everything back the way it was scares me a little. Obviously, Blizzard makes a killing on that kind of static scripted stuff, with every dungeon resetting on a weeky basis. A lot of people don't seem to mind killing the same stuff over and over and over and over and over...as long as they get a chance to that really rare pvp trinket once every week.
I hope to god you can do the 3 faction pvp + pve battle stuff and so on by using that brilliant object oriented AI you used to talk about, instead of scripting stuff.... thinking about EVE's scripted stuff, its all dismal, spawn some ships, they die, spawn some more etc etc with different background fluff floating in space that has no meaning beyond decoration.
or did you have technical problems with the AI ? was it too heavy on CPU? was it unable to work out large battles? think Sins of a Solar Empire - no scripting, but good AI, great battles....