Good points, but mine didn't get thru. If the new player experience is a huge job, it will probably take a long time. I understood from the interview that the work had not started yet. The launch of the new player experience was also described to be, at the latest, when the new engine comes.
Logically this means that the work on finishing the engine is really quite far away.
Eroz, finally 220/26/70 Adventurer & proud General of Regulators on ex-RK2 (outdated) equip
Rokroland, 170 Engineer No more crab for j00 Northern Front on ex-RK2
Ranged roxxorz!
Sig last updated properly when West Athens still had people sitting about the subway.
Eroz, finally 220/26/70 Adventurer & proud General of Regulators on ex-RK2 (outdated) equip
Rokroland, 170 Engineer No more crab for j00 Northern Front on ex-RK2
Ranged roxxorz!
Sig last updated properly when West Athens still had people sitting about the subway.
Well, i am sure it has been already said: content designers!=engine coders. You can task those two things in parallel and have the content ready in the old engine (by the content designers) and work on the new engine as well.
Best example would be the newly created encounters (like the daily missions and The Collector): They have been thrown in, while the work on the engine was progressing. It may be, that there had to be coded some minor stuff for the daily mission system that hands out the missions (basically, randomize the missions a NPC gives and scale them with the players TL), but the rest is just content. But very, very, VERY, VERRRY well made content.
regards
/Z
Level 200 Nanomage Nano-Technician on Rimor speaking... - Unit Commander of Knights of Ka
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The Daily Missions update took like 8 months to implement. Note that the Daily Missions material is really quite a huge update/change to the game. I suspect Means & Co. didn't fully contemplate the repercussions of making changes to every single RK and SL zone when embarking on the Daily Missions project.
Means said the starter island took something like a week to design and implement but that was done with a much bigger team back then.
Given current teams' size and Means stated intention to make a real quality starter experience, I'd be surprised if they could go from concept to implemented in under 3 months. I would have hoped they would be focusing hard on the starter experience, even putting it ahead of the new alien PFs and PvP zone. What they should do is get the starter experience in place on live to start the debugging iterations and -then-, while they wait for the engine/heads to finish off, see what additional little PFs they have time to toss in.
The new player starter experience -has- to be in place for engine launch, the things like 150-200 APF zone and 'PvP while you wait for BS' are very nice but not mandatory to be done before engine launch date. The impression I get is that the team (or maybe upper management?) is getting a case of 'feature creep' ('OMG, we have to have this in or it all fails!') ahead of the engine launch and this is slowing down the process of getting where we need to be.
Rebalancing is the other elephant in the room and I suspect another project that turned out to be -way- bigger than the team anticipated when they started on it. If it's really going to happen on the scale we have heard so far, it needs to be in-game and smoothed out/tweaked before the engine launch. You don't want 100k flavor-of-the-month PvPers jumping into the game at engine launch and exploiting the snot out of new, untested PvP(and PvM) mechanics.
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Dagget
President,
Venice Academy