Quote:
Originally Posted by cheesehawk
With the size of their staff, 6.5 years is a decent accomplishment for creating a new engine. Look at Blizzard's track record for development, and their staff is 1000x larger. I doubt their games are as difficult to code as a flight sim, although their product was released in a much more polished state.
|
Excellent example. I own a copy of starcraft 2, it's polished to a ridiculous extent but then again, it's a multi-million dollar franchise with a humongous staff and much simpler requirements in terms of crunching the numbers required to deliver the kind of gameplay it needs to.
Well, SC2 came approximately 10 years after the first one. Assuming they didn't start working on it right away, i'd guess it was at least a 5 year process (they only ever talked about it and started providing development updates a couple of years before it was released too).
Remember, we're talking about a game with a vibrant pro-gamer community (started in Korea and expanded worldwide), with televised (3 tv stations in Korea) and online pay-per-view tournaments of professional leagues, tournaments sponsored by hardware manufacturing companies (from mice and headsets to CPUs and graphics cards), players who get paid almost as much as sports stars ($100K per year is not unheard of for a good professional player), bookmaking and even a betting scandal with set-up matches that resulted in courts getting involved.
In other words, a game with a ton of income and marketing surrounding it and it still took anywhere between 3 and 5 years to simply get it out the door, plus an extended open beta (3 months or so, maybe more) and multiple post-release patches to bring gameplay to a properly balanced level for competitive gameplay.
People have a right to be displeased about the initial state of affairs regarding CoD and the developers admitted so themselves very early on. What's tiresome is seeing that despite the commitment to and progress of fixing things (stated in words and tangible in the form of patches) which has taken the title to a 90% functional state if not more, there's a tendency often displayed in the forums to keep dwelling in the unpleasant past.
Yes, the release was less than stellar and that's putting it mildly. The current state of the sim is nowhere near the same state of affairs though, so why keep dredging up situations that have been rendered obsolete and are not applicable anymore? I mean, it sure is strange that in a group of hobbyists there seems to be a distinct and quantifiable portion of it that seem to be scared of the possibility of actually having fun, because something that happened during the first two months rubbed them the wrong way, no matter how justified the initial negative reaction was.
To put it otherwise, as long as the current ratio of fun vs frustration is a positive one and they keep working on it to improve it further, i really see no reason to think back to the release. Sure, i had 15 FPS over sea when i first installed it, but now i'm running 30-60 FPS (capped due to Vsync) over land on two year old hardware. I would have to purposefully try to make myself angry to keep thinking about the times of 15 FPS, which frankly is a waste of my time when i can enjoy the currently playable condition of the sim.
In other words, i would have to be holding a grudge and be determined not to have fun with it. It's like having a badly baked caked in front of me, i sent it back and they give me a perfectly edible one but i'm not eating it because i keep thinking of the first cake. Well, i only have myself to blame for not tasting some cake in that case
08-09-2011, 05:09 PM
We have a saying in the military, it's called TTT, and translates to something like "Things Take Time"
Hybrid Mode
