Quote:
Originally Posted by furbs
What was leaked by people after the russian release is one thing, being told by the developers before release is another.
Yes the sound in that update was described Oleg as placeholder and everyone ripped it apart, and as you say nobody thought it would ship like that! 
All im saying is please dont dress it up.
Keep it real man...lol  |
Quote:
Originally Posted by kendo65
I'm with Furbs on this one Blackdog.
That's how I remember it too
It wasn't all as clear as you're implying. Hindsight has made it seem much more obvious, but for every issue coming out of the Russian launch it was possible to come up with alternative explanations - I know because I did it. I decided that until I had it on my own PC I couldn't rule out people running with un-optimised settings, below spec HW etc, as reasons for the apparently bad performance. (With hindsight I can see that I did that because most of us had been doing similar for months already - constantly shooting down the opinions of Tree and the few others who picked up that there were possible issues. Trust and faith in the devs was a big factor too. I believed that if we were going to be served what was effectively a beta then they would spell it out)
Are you really saying that you and Tree were singing from the same hymn-sheet prior to the game launch (?!) and that the rest of us were mugs because we hoped for something better, because that's not how I remember it?
Your take on the Spit start-up sound has the feel of hindsight about it too - the obvious way to interpret Oleg's statement is that the sound in the video was a place-holder that would be switched to release-standard sound prior to launch, not that we could expect placeholder sound at launch  |
All i'm saying is you guys had a different interpretation of the same facts and were more interested in different features than i was.
If the writing was on the wall and all the people who were claiming release failure months ahead of time knew it, then how come the "negative-minded" people rushed to preorder while i was seriously thinking of cancelling my CE preorder (which i could only get if i didn't cancel, since i had a relative in the UK for a few months)?
Short answer: wishful thinking.
I knew there was trouble but i wanted the printed map and Spitfire manual, so i went ahead with it. Other people just assumed there would be no trouble because they wouldn't like it to be, even though they were predicting it. Sorry, i can't wrap my head around it and that prevents me from sympathizing with such a viewpoint.
Also, during the development phase i was paying closer attention to certain aspects that not many people cared about and when it was pretty clear that these new features would be part of the sim, i naturally thought "this will cost development time from other stuff".
So yes, i pretty much expected the kind of initial trouble we got and that's why i didn't consider it a big deal: i was sure it would be there in exchange for other, new stuff that i really wanted to see. And by really i mean that it would seriously diminish my opinion of the title if they weren't included.
Flying with old IL2 sounds for a few months in exchange for all the scripting goodness and foundation laid in terms of online campaign capabilities, plus the new CEM/DM and aircraft systems modeling? Glass half full for me, it's just a matter of time for the patches to complete the rest of the features.
Flying with perfect graphics and sounds right from the word go in exchange for an engine that lacks aforementioned foundation for long term development? Sure, i'd still buy and fly it, but it would be IL2:redux with no innovation in the long run. Glass half empty for me in this case and a much shorter attention span for the title.
In the end they went with the first option and i couldn't be happier about it.
I didn't expect things to be perfect neither did i expect them to be awful and due to what i considered more important i found things acceptable when looking at the bigger picture, even if i had to wait for two patches to get the sim to a playable state.
That's what also made it easier for me to accept the initial reports at face value and not assume something was wrong on the user's end. When we saw the gaming expo footage i thought "ok, PCs are under-specced and they have a bit more time to optimize things".
When i saw the footage and reports from the Russian release i thought "turns out they ran out of time and money to optimize things further because they were working on the other stuff i consider so important, no biggie, i'll wait".
In other words i knew there would be issues just like others did, i just considered it a minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things (in contrast to them) when compared to what i did get under the hood of the sim. It's not about right or wrong, it's about what i like in terms of features and what other people like and these things called opinions tend to differ greatly among humans.
If someone tells me that AA doesn't work i won't put my blinders on and say "no it works". I'll just say "i don't care as long as i have cool new feature X in exchange for that and they add functional AA at a later date". Same for sounds, or any other feature that is among the first bits of sensory input i get from the game. That stuff is easier to gradually fix for a developer studio with the relevant experience.
It's the stuff that isn't immediately perceptible i care most about, because coming up with a new engine from scratch that can do things the previous one couldn't is the bulk of the work and can't be shoe-horned into a finished game at a later date.
We just have different priorities and jaggy aerial masts are pretty low on the list of mine, that's all there is to it.