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The news drought (almost over)
Diovidius
Member UncommonPosts: 1,026
I wanted to share a few dev posts over at gw2gruu about the news drought:
There is not going to be any sort of beta related announcement on the 11th. There will be a blogpost going up that week but it is in no way beta related. Sorry for the confusion guys.
Thanks for catching that. No 8th profession reveal either guys... sorry to be the bearer of bad news. That reveal is still on track for this year but not the week of the 11th.
It is not an advertising ploy at all. Yes, we will sometimes hold things for several weeks if they appear to line up with a major trade show or other opportunity to get word about the game out to a wide audience. For example, if we really wanted to wait for a marketing opportunity to release information about the new profession we would have either rushed it into a demo early or we would hold it til next year. We aren't going to do that because we'd like to reveal it to you guys when we feel like it's ready to reveal. Take the ranger as another example, we thought that it was ready when we revealed it. Turns out we still had some work to do (which you'll hear about soon). This is something that is just going to happen as we develop and play the game and find things that we thought we were happy with and now aren't. I think this policy of not showing things until we have them in game (and think we are happy with where they're at) has resulted in us being able to give you a better idea of what the game actually plays like rather than what we hope the game will play like. In the end I think this is a win for all of us.
Ranger info is coming soon. And we have seen your frustration about lack of info and will be trying to do something about it. Note: this doesn't mean we are announcing beta or the final profession this week, but we will be trying to keep you updated more frequently.
Edit:
To explain the "very very very soon" comment a bit. That was Ben Miller speaking about cross profession combos. Now, Ben is very excited and passionate about what he does and tends to express himself in those sort of terms. Him saying very very very soon is a bit of his personality coming through. We understand of course that this creates some moments of confusion but it is a side effect of letting our players interact with our developers directly at shows. You have to take into account that you are dealing with a lot of different personalities and that what one person says is not directly equivalent to how you yourself may regard it. For example, Jon Peters may have added another 5 or so "very's" onto that statement whereas I probably would have said "sometime in the future". The alternative to letting our devs interact with our community is to only speak through a few select individuals who have both the proper temperament and training to be very clear and conservative with predictions. It's been a conscious decision on our part to have more interaction with our community and misunderstandings like this are one of the unfortunate consequences. All of that being said, we'll be talking about cross profession combos "soon" and definitely before we release information about the final profession (Bucketmancer).
Comments
All i see "sry but no" and "delay" in almost every line but HEY...atleast they gave us pritty pictures for holloween...that's the best news in months sadly..
Next blog update: "Jimmy's new dog and Gwen's got a new dress, so development of the game is going well and we are excited".
Ppl who thought that silance = something big happening .....prepare to be dissapointed..they have nothing...
I don't mind waiting to be honest, atleast they are giving players feedback and keeping a close eye on people's views and suggestions. Besides won't most people be playing Skyrim on the 11th?
So 8 weeks? Within the next 8 weeks, there's going to be info on the beta and 8th profession? Cool.
I just hope theyll release before summer 2012
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
With so many games being released early and broken, I can stand to wait for a polished, bug free game.
It's nice that the devs are so straightforward and honest. I really appreciate that.
there is alot of other qoutes and situations that you could read delay into at least when comparing to fans expectations, and I have done that for a while. Guru is now on the 6 release date speculations thread, and so far the first 5 have been horrible optimistic, and I think number 6 might be aswell be when exspecting a Q1 release.
You could go back to when the fancommunity was all psyked up about hiting the 5 year development date, and ArenaNet kindly advocated that the real development work first started summer 2007. (that could be implying that anything before summer 2012 would be early to ekspect). Not that the optimistic fans was eager to take the hint, insisting that either ArenaNet have the qualities to make the game faster, or that you really should count from back when utopia was in work.
Or the way Colin had to state time after time, when fans was most psyked op about an expected timeline with a short closed beta, and even shorter open beta maybe followed by an immidiate release in january or "gasp" before christmas this year, that between each stage Alpha, closed beta, open beta, and release there will be a process of deciding how and when to go into next stage, based on the feedback recived. (wich could be read as a warning against exspecting things done to soon)
Alot of fans seems to count everything shown in a blogpost as finished , when in fact the demo and ArenaNets statements have showed that everything is still subjekt change due the heavy iteration process. Counting how little is missing to be shown, does look different when post comes up telling about returning to subjekts already shown (the ranger being reworked , the crosscombo skills). Seeing how much is itterated and how much is still worked on, combined with the ambition of making the best game ever, does bode well for a good game, but does not point at a close releasedate. Looking at the demoes (both from this and last year) it is worth to remember that a rather huge team have spend several month of work to get them ready. If thats points at the workload there is left for the rest of the zones(20+) then again you have to be rather optimistic to expect a game only missing the finishing touch. The news drought could be there for a reason. We have had it twice now!
You could even go back to ArenaNets movement of office, to a bigger place and think about if that did point at a game being released a 1/2 year after? The sceptic in me said no at that time. And since that I have tend to look at the pessimistic side of things! As always I would love to be wrong though.
IF they can make GW2 the place we hope it is.... and they keep adding enough updates, and making money with them... the game could end up with a lifespan of over 15 years....
They just can't release the game untilll they are absolutely sure about their core mechanics.. They just can't....
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
You have to appreciate the fact that ANet is not rushing their game. They are takign their time because there is so much bype about this game that they want to make sure they deliver on the release date.
I'm curious what's wrong with the ranger...
Aren't they suppose to make minor fixes AFTER release and not delay it any further? Because that way, they'll get better datas on what's wrong with the ranger versus to what they think is wrong with the ranger.
Delay it, polish it, re-iterate it, whatever -- there will always be something wrong with the game when it comes out, that's almost a guarantee. So fixing it with limited data tells me that they will never be happy with their game...because it seems that what makes them happy on Monday is not the same thing that makes them happy on Friday.
They'll never get this done this way.
Ready for GW2!!!
Pets
Ranger instantly triger "pet system" in me...
Not to be the negative nancy but yeah I was thinking the same when I read that. Besides didn't they say long ago "we won't show it until it's done"? Yet with their iterative idea hardly anything is done, as they keep taking everything back to the drawing board. Sylvari, Animations, Combat, Rangers, etc. I'm sure I'm forgetting something there.
This was the concern I stated long ago about their idea of iteration and how it can bog a project down when not controlled.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Iteration never bogs down a project. Don't know where you got that from. There's absolutely nothing wrong with checking and re-checking things. Making sure something works exactly how they want it isn't bogging down a project. What's bogging down a project is releasing it when it isn't ready. Then people have to wait for all the crappy stuff to be fixed. Depending on the developer, the timing of those fixes are spread out. And when they do fix the crappy stuff, it still might not be how the game was suppose to end up as. So at the end of the day, people are disappointed.
You and others can be impatient all you want. ArenaNet can take 5 more years for all I care. I can wait. Because I'm not purely an MMORPG gamer. I have other games to fill my time with.
First I'm not impatient, they can take all the time they want. What I said has nothing to do with being impatient.
As to iteration not bogging down projects, the process of iteration does not, most dev houses use it to fine tune their features. However there is a point that you have to realize iteration only goes so far, especially when we're talking internal play-testing. On top of that, consistently rethinking your ideas can severly bog down development as instead of moving forward you're consistently moving backward. Resources are finite not infinite. What happens when you're still back tracking yet your time is running thin?
For all I care they could take five more years, it's no skin off my back, as GW2 isn't even one of the main releases I'm anticipating, it's simply a game I plan on trying out.
That's not how things work though they're not going to be allowed that time, they're talking beta by the end of the year. Yet they still have major features being reworked simply because they don't find them perfect
This is why it concerns me. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
And this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern
Specifically this line...
"repeated pattern of action, process or structure that initially appears to be beneficial, but ultimately produces more bad consequences than beneficial results"
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Reworking a feature bogs down the project because instead of moving forward, they are keep on going back wards in a seems to be an endless loop of iteration and re-iteration. Someone need to step up and make the final say.
Until now we have not heard anything about the 8th profession because they can't even get to it with all these re-iteration and going back and forth.
So yes, they are bogging themselves down and it shows.
Ready for GW2!!!
Yup. With the way they judge things on being completed, Id say scrap the 8th profession for a launch release. Introduce it later while the game is live. Other wise we'll be waiting forever for it to be "perfect".
The only timeframe they've ever given us is that closed beta will start before the end of the year. I can't tell if they said it earlier than September 27th, but that's when a lot of different sites reported it. I know we're all impatient, but I think it's a little premature to talk about how they're getting bogged down with iteration.
If closed beta doesn't start by the end of the year, or it does but then it drags out for 6 months, then I think we can start pointing fingers at the iterative process as being the cause of the delays.
If anything, for a game that's still in alpha, I'm pretty happy with what we're hearing. Some of the things, like ranger pets, they've never been happy with, but most of it seems like tweaking a working system and making it into a better system. We're not hearing about things being fundamentally broken that would require massive fixing. At least if you're tweaking, at some point you can stop and just ship it.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
I doubt the news drought is over. It's just going to be the same cycle of INFO HYPE and dead silence, just like it was all of this year and the year before. They hyped the game way too early. Yeah, there's going to be a blog post the week of 11/11/11 and the last profession is still "On track" for the end of the year. What about after? Are we going to get more filler posts made of lore that the writers still on salary wrote up to keep us quiet? I don't really care about the lore given to me outside of a game.
They said that after working with the other professions they realized the Ranger was somewhat lackluster and the pet system was extremely underpowered, so it went back in for redoing. They did something similar with Elementalist, though they were more subtle about it. Most of the Ele's skills were overhauled and a bunch of new ones were added.
Anet has a habit of redoing things if they're not happy about it; sylvari, necro's undead skills, ele powers, ranger concept, etc. Hell, the entire Guild Wars 2 game is just a redo of Utopia. But there's a reason for that, they want it to be as good as possible. And you have to give them credit for the time it takes them to redo something. They were working on sylvari for like...years? Throughout the conception of GW2. Then in a couple of months they have an army of new concept art, models and animations for their redesign. That takes a considerable amount of man hours and talent.
Bug are one thing, but how classes and races actually function are a core mechanic that ideally are refined BEFORE people get their hands on them. You can't really hand that to players then one day be like 'We changed our mind, it's going to work like THIS from now on."
Unless you're Blizzard.
"Forums aren't for intelligent discussion; they're for blow-hards with unwavering opinions."
Like I said it's a concern, it's not a critique as I don't have all the facts. However I did further explain myself in my next post as this was simply agreeing with another person, not detailing my stance. If you want to see why i feel as I do read the next post.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
There are those people that are creative and they cam make wonderfull new things.... And then there are people that get the job done.... I hope Arenanet has a healthy dose of both....
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
New post (I also updated the OP):
To explain the "very very very soon" comment a bit. That was Ben Miller speaking about cross profession combos. Now, Ben is very excited and passionate about what he does and tends to express himself in those sort of terms. Him saying very very very soon is a bit of his personality coming through. We understand of course that this creates some moments of confusion but it is a side effect of letting our players interact with our developers directly at shows. You have to take into account that you are dealing with a lot of different personalities and that what one person says is not directly equivalent to how you yourself may regard it. For example, Jon Peters may have added another 5 or so "very's" onto that statement whereas I probably would have said "sometime in the future". The alternative to letting our devs interact with our community is to only speak through a few select individuals who have both the proper temperament and training to be very clear and conservative with predictions. It's been a conscious decision on our part to have more interaction with our community and misunderstandings like this are one of the unfortunate consequences.
All of that being said, we'll be talking about cross profession combos "soon" and definitely before we release information about the final profession (Bucketmancer).
Not true most of the time.
Did you ever stop ant think they just advertised to early ?....could be still way behind, and not always polished !
Since this is buy-to-play, they could be making expantions 1,2,3, and 4, all at the same time. So many could chew up all the content, only to have to buy the next expantion pack after just one week.
Just something to tink about.