SotS 2 Info

[Erick the Red]

I can understand them being under a lot of pressure to release before the holidays.

One thing that stands out to me in the apology and the plan is the promise to do 2-3 updates a week. It's hard to imagine a development environment where that is reasonable. Instead it sounds like more marketing talk. Why would you want that many releases anyway? It's not like more releases fixes things faster.

[spellman]

Probably because there's lots of stuff in the pipe and they want to get it out ASAP once it's done.

Anyways, this sounds a lot like a Paradox foul-up. Something-something Elemental. Except instead of poor use of the design doc and feedback, a screwed up schedule and lack of triple-check oversight.

[Zed-F]

Check this: http://arinndembo.com/?p=743

It sounds to me like:

1) Kerberos had a contract to deliver at a certain time (Q3-Q4 this year.)
2) Paradox was depending on said contract for revenue.
3) Due to people having to leave KP for personal reasons (Arinn is not the only source on this) the product fell behind schedule. The problem was not lack of money at KP -- they had the money to pay for the devs from the contract and from SotS1 sales -- it was lack of manpower.
4) This was basically an unsolvable issue that KP just had to deal with; anyone in development knows that adding people late in a dev cycle almost always hurts more than it helps.
5) Kerberos was not able to finish when they had projected because of these manpower issues.
6) Paradox still needed the game shipped for their own bottom line's sake. So someone at Paradox lawyered up (as alluded to earlier) and said NO we will not delay the release past late October.

As a result, we get KP being forced to release the product before it's ready, by contract. Sadly, not uncommon in the games industry. I'm 99% certain this is the general scenario.

As far as the update schedule goes, this is Kerberos; they've already done update schedules like that before early in SotS1's and Fort Zombie's lifespan, so yes they can and will roll out updates in short order to incrementally improve things, and will continue to do so as long as it takes to get the product up to snuff.

[Mist]

This is all guesswork. Paradox people over at their forums stated clearly in few places that the release was delayed *multiple* times and that the decision to ship was taken jointly. I know it is convenient to blame the publisher, but no publisher in the world can really afford bad PR like this. Especially if the game is not for mass market audience. Also if the developer is not able to meet delayed deadline with anything better than technology alpha ( it's hard to even call it a beta at the moment, betas usually have working Options menus ) then it speaks volumes about the project management. Or quality control processes. Take your pick. Either way there's plenty of blame to hand around. I'm pretty sure Frederick Wester ( Paradox's CEO ) is breathing fire right now, he had to apologize personally, and that's something that didn't even happen during the horrors of Magicka / HoI3 launch

Personally I'm inclined to believe the Murphy/Chaos/Overambition theory. They had a fairly stable build at some point. It probably did not meet the deadline goals and had some/a lot of missing or incomplete features ( *Overambition* ), but that was most likely the version shown on trade fairs, used for beta and doing previews in the press. The CEO made a call to pull these gimped features from the release build ( from State of the Union at Friday morning post ), recompiled build imploded ( *Murphy* ) into unstable heap of crashing code resulting in a launch resembling elaborate corporate suicide ( *Chaos* ). Releasing on weekend, when Steam shuts down for business did not help much either.

Anyhow, I'm glad Steam put me off it for now, I might repurchase once/if a non-Steam version happens ( who knows, there's a petition on Paradox forums backed by a paradox publishing division employee in official capacity, only needs some 4800 signatures more ) at which point it'll probably be patched into respectability.

[Krill]

Where to sign that petition?

[Mist]

Here

The Paradox guy in question wrote post #33

[Krill]

Cheers. Signed up myself.

[Zed-F]

Personally I'm inclined to believe the Murphy/Chaos/Overambition theory.... <snip>

That's not incompatible with what I posted above; actually they are complementary theories. The Murphy/Chaos/Overambition/Wishful Thinking statement Mecron made describes why the game was in the state it was in at the point the decision was made to release. Certainly losing two programmers during production falls under Murphy and not having enough slack in the schedule to cover their loss falls under overambition and wishful thinking.

Certainly Paradox and Kerberos are jointly responsible for the decisions they have jointly made. The reasons are probably understandable and sensible from their own points of view. The end result is another less-than-stellar launch, which both KP and Paradox are known for. Fortunately they are also both known for strong post-release support for their games.

[Sissl]

*Disengage the cloaking device...*


Aaand.... one week later they actually released 2 full patches (monday and friday) and two "hotfixes" or mini patches (wednesday and friday) for 4 updates in a week. From what I've seen, the experience has substantially improved. There's still a lot to go, but I'd say we've gone from 'imploded codebase' to 'largely stable, but incomplete' in the first week. Over the next 2-3 weeks I'd say we're on track to get to 'feature complete and fully functional' -- and from there to 'polished.'

They've already put in a (to me) astounding amount of work. Zed-F, we have a potential treat waiting for you when I see you next.

*Engage cloak and set course for.....<static>*

[Tyrmith]

So it's worth buying now?