There are various scales of post release support. Completely disregarding content enhancement patches and focusing on fixes, some games are almost unplayable out of the box and there's a patch out on release day, others are the same but the patches take longer and some games while not perfect are at least playable straight after installation.
I think they are aiming for the third scenario, releasing without game-breaking bugs but maybe a few minor ones that can be easily patched. Of course, this takes more work to achieve. IL2 was similar in that regard in that while post release support was very good, it was mainly about content additions and tweaks instead of correcting fundamental flaws, as there weren't any game breaking issues on the first release version.
To be honest, i think that having a playable SoW at X date is better than having an unplayable or frustrating SoW at "X-2 weeks" date. I sure would like to have it on my hard drive as we speak, but if any game is suffering from game breaking bugs that detract from the experience the novely factor wears off quite fast and i end up not playing it anyway because i'm waiting for the fixes, hence no use of having something that doesn't work for any other reason apart from the ability to watch all the fancy stuff in motion for a couple of days. In that sense, having a game that doesn't work well enough is like not having the game at all and i feel that the Maddox team realises this and try to release with as few bugs as possible, hence the extra delays if we take the complexity of the project into account.
It would be good to have some concrete information to lay the speculation to rest, but most important for me is to have a title that works within 90% of what's advertised straight out of the box.
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09-30-2010, 01:52 PM
Hybrid Mode
