Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: Why did it take so long to get new droids? My thoughts:
The game was released 6 months to one year early. I don't think anyone can dispute that.
As a consequence of this, whatever systems were hacked into place for support purposes are temporary scaffolding, but it's MUCH harder to remove such scaffolding when you've got offices sitting on it!
They released the game with major subsystems missing, and with professions unfinished. In particular, cities, mounts, vehicles and spaceships were all still dreams of the future. Unfortunately, those dreams were items that were listed as basic game features, not ones the player base would have to wait for.
So the developers have been in crisis mode for months now, trying to effectively finish the game while simultaneously supporting live servers. This is CRAZY, and a very bad business decision, and an even worse development decision.
That being said, they KNEW, without a doubt, what their top priorities had to be: Get the unwritten systems into the game. They HAD to do this, no negotiation, no choices, no arguments. The first few months they were just scraping by, trying to keep things from falling apart altogether. After a little while, they got things under a BIT more control (though far from perfect), so in November we got our cities and mounts, and in December we should see vehicles. After that, Droid Engineering suddenly becomes a real issue, and some of the talent that's been working overtime on other features can now be turned to our droids.
One thing, spaceships were never supposed to be in release, they were always going to be in an expantion pack a year or more later. Although if the game had released in December of 2002 like we were told at one point then we would be getting spaceships next month. Other than that little nitpicky issue....
Oh, and I heard on the grapevine that DE's will be getting love in the December update, although following one of our DE motto's, Don't believe it till it is ingame and working.
Niklut wrote:
One thing, spaceships were never supposed to be in release, they were always going to be in an expantion pack a year or more later. Although if the game had released in December of 2002 like we were told at one point then we would be getting spaceships next month. Other than that little nitpicky issue....
Oh, and I heard on the grapevine that DE's will be getting love in the December update, although following one of our DE motto's, Don't believe it till it is ingame and working.
The problem is that our dev is the one that works on mounts and vehicles I believe so if those aren't working right in december we won't get any love until january and if the systems are complex as they say because of the scaffolding effect then it could be spring before we get any REAL results.
Of course, the simple fact is that without spaceships, it's really NOT very star-warsy. In addition, one might note that the droid updates are indeed happening before the spaceships.
Droids are such a fundamental part of the Star Wars universe that they should have been among the first systems finalized.
But worrying about that at this point is counterproductive and pointless. What is in the past cannot be changed (unless you have a REALLY cool new toy you're not telling us about).
Everything you mentioned is probably right Rho. Another factor that's always stuck in my mind is an early comment by TH, when he said to the effect that droids are tied very closely to the internal workings of the game. Whether this was by design of a by-product of droids being modeled off of creatures doesn't matter; from a programming perspective itis quite easy to realize that when system functionality is closely tied to the core of that system, it becomes more difficult to modify or enhance that functionality without effecting other functions. And it's even more true when you're 'hacking' a system to meet impossible deadlines; you pay a price for it later.
A good of example of this (in reverse) is how DE features have broken down on these last two major patches, even though there's no easily defined cause-and-effect link from our (gamers') perspective. There's so much going on behind the scene that we don't know about.
Let's hope the developer(s) has learned some things from the mount experience (another feature that is probably tied pretty closely to game inner-workings) that will hep to make the DE fixes and enhancements easier.
We can only hope... 
I don't know about 6 months early. From the rate they were fixing things that last month of Beta3, I'd have said 2 months at most. I just wonder if SOE has learned anything. Not the devs, but the SOE suits. I remember a post by Holo or Q on the old beta boards where they said the sudden release date was like getting doused by cold water... THEY knew it wasn't soup yet.
When your scrambling to hotfix bugs and add content in a live environment, basic changes takemany times longer to implement than in beta.
I can tell you this, that if the beta-players for EQ2start complaining that SOE is pushing THAT game outtoo early, like we did when SWG's release was announced, I won't be playing it.