Gal Civ release-date
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Stardock Forums
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Monday evening. After having taken a one-week break from Beta 1Z, I have just updated to Beta 2. I like the new main menu...but especially, I very much appreciate the bottom-page note stating that the finished game is about a year away. This prudent declaration puts the development-and-testing process into a reasonable temporal perspective. It takes away any stressful pressure to rush towards a phoney, premature target-date, as it is too often the case with some overhyped games.
Take for example MOO 3. It was scheduled to be released at the end of May 2002. In-house, early beta-testing during the first months of 2003 showed that some major features did not efficiently perform in actual gameplay. The target-date was consequently pushed back to the end of September. And recently, this date was revised to the end of November. The final stage of beta-testing, with 25 non-employee participants, will soon start, while one aspect of the game, the Galactic Senate, is not quite finished yet. The developers might be pressured by the publishers to get the game out for the December Holidays, a very lucrative period. But suppose those 25 testers, at about five or six weeks from gold-mastering, find major bugs or find that certain features are tedious to operate, then what?
Gal Civ, at the Beta 2 level of development, already appears to be an impressive game. To learn that the finished product is one year away is reassuring : it means that the financial managers at Stardock and Strategy First are not going to pressure the developers and testers to meet the arbitrary deadline of an over-optimistic release-date.
Take for example MOO 3. It was scheduled to be released at the end of May 2002. In-house, early beta-testing during the first months of 2003 showed that some major features did not efficiently perform in actual gameplay. The target-date was consequently pushed back to the end of September. And recently, this date was revised to the end of November. The final stage of beta-testing, with 25 non-employee participants, will soon start, while one aspect of the game, the Galactic Senate, is not quite finished yet. The developers might be pressured by the publishers to get the game out for the December Holidays, a very lucrative period. But suppose those 25 testers, at about five or six weeks from gold-mastering, find major bugs or find that certain features are tedious to operate, then what?
Gal Civ, at the Beta 2 level of development, already appears to be an impressive game. To learn that the finished product is one year away is reassuring : it means that the financial managers at Stardock and Strategy First are not going to pressure the developers and testers to meet the arbitrary deadline of an over-optimistic release-date.