I'd rather wait and have a complete game out of the box, than a bug-riddled frustrating experience that needs major patches, overhauls and community mods to function well, just because there is no money and the investor/publisher holds the developer team by the balls and screams "get it out of the door now".
Look at some recent examples, Silent Hunter 5 is one (actually SH3, SH4 and SH5 are all similar in the regard), Rise of Flight is another. Both had some very good things going for them, but RoF is just now starting to be what it should have been on release and SH5 still has a long way to go. That's not the developer's fault as much as it is the publisher's fault.
In the end, if the initial release product is lacking then the release date doesn't mean that much. I can play a half-finished game or a buggy game and wait 6 months before it's patched to an acceptable state, or i can wait those 6 months and get a game that functions as it should and has the required content right out of the box. In any case i'll have to wait 6 months to play the complete game, the only thing that changes is that with an early release i can whine on the forums about it being incomplete
That doesn't mean people are not entitled to their opinion, as some prefer the early release/gradual updating route just to get their hands on the game faster and i'm not saying everyone who doesn't agree with me is a whiner. To the contrary in fact, they have as much right to say what's good and agreeable for them. Similarly, this is my personal opinion because i find the wait for a complete game less agonizing than the wait for updating an incomplete one. This ties in with certain publisher's habits, who force the devs to rush the game out the door and then refuse to support them to completion. For example, in the Silent Hunter series (again), i think it was SH4, the community had to really pressure the publisher before they agreed to provide the final patch. It's harder to convince someone to fund the development of game patches when they already have your money, than it is to request features during the develoment when they still have to take your requests into account because they haven't got your money yet.
By that i don't mean Oleg's team, i mean the publishers, and if the delay is any indication of lack of publisher pressure on the dev team then we can maybe have hope that SoW will be published by 1C directly or various smaller/independent publishers. Just my 2c as usual
03-12-2010, 01:10 PM
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