I am disgustingly excited for this game. I've even registered a forum account. From the influences of other city builders to the setting, every word I hear from Gaslamp seems so wonderful. At this point I'm terrified that my expectations and opinions are so high that I will be inevitably disappointed. This is some first date of middle school level anxiety- childish giddiness. Someone temper my rampant enthusiasm, tell me that Gaslamp has claimed things they can't possibly pull off- they are not gods, surely!
They aren't, but it's quite probable that the Things that whisper to them from the walls of their offices are. That or someone's been adding Perfectly Safe Secret Ingredients to the coffee.
Gaslamp Games will be unable to deliver on people's expectations at release, I'm sure, timetables and all. The new development model seems to be to release unfinished games and then complete them in their maintenance life.
Is that really new? It seems more to me that patches actually happening consistantly is the new thing; because I saw plenty of old buggy games and plenty of new not very buggy ones. (or unless you're referring to like, the minecraft business model but I don't think CE is doing that?)
He's referring to the fact that it is much more common nowadays. But I do agree that it is not an entirely new thing.
I don't understand. Is this all a good thing, or a bad thing? I'm very puzzled. With regards to the status of development and what actually makes it into the game: some stuff always ends up on the cutting room floor, be that due to a) feature creep, b) simply running out of time and money, or c) not being fun. I think a lot of people assume that when features are cut from a game it is due to a or b; most often, oddly, I think it is due to c. I think we'll deliver something people will enjoy a lot.
Personally I think releasing games that aren't 100% patched is probably a good thing because in practice the alternative would presumably be lots of delays (and those don't even always work--Blizzard comes to mind here). Also regarding cut features, another factor could just be... when you're imagining the feature it has a lot less limits than once it actually exists as a fixed, finite Thing. (coming to mind would be like Spore, in theory, is like, this really complex huge game that does EVERYTHING and then in practice its like, five games we've kind of seen before but stripped down a lot and is a lot less impressive.) (I think your dev blogs really probably help a lot with addressing that issue, though, so!)
I feel kind of bad popping in here when I should be packing and getting ready to move, but I wasn't making a value judgement, just observing the change of standard practices now that the internet allows constant feedback and the delivery of post release patches.
A little late with my answer, but here I go. The simple answer is, it is neither. There are people who prefer to get a "final" game from the get-go, and there are people who prefer to play "beta" versions and see how the game changes but get to play it earlier. It's merely a matter of attitude. There are companies which release games which are atrociously broken and bugged and require patching from the get-go to be playable. In these cases it's "bad", but that is something these particular companies do, not "everyone". Unless they have precognition, no game developer will be able to make a "perfect" game - they release something which is approximately fitting the targeted player base, and patches are used to fine-tune it and remove minor bugs which weren't fixed before because they are nigh-unnoticeable. That is how it should be. And if you do it that way, it is "good".
