Release of Shroud of the Avatar postponed again

While I don't agree with Envy on many things I do agree on this. Why is it we don't have a launch date less then half a year to beta? Why is it that this wasn't even talked about in the livestream? In interviews in September RG was saying early 2017. When I worked for contract work on large projects we had a standing rule, 2.5x what you est is what you plan on for any given feature. This way when your done you put into the tracker 90% complete this lets everyone know your done with it "feature" wise and will only need to modify it in case it causes issues with other things or needs more debugging. Because you know what its easier to go to a client saying here we are 10 hours under the budget so you saved X amount of dollars then to say we need more time because of XYZ and it will cost you more now.

They appear to be adding things in after the fact without fully thinking out the issues that those systems will cause. The guards and stealing items from NPCs flagging you for PVP are a prime example of why wasn't this talked about before. Because the threads on this have already brought up the issues that if you want to be a thief just go into Solo online no issue with someone seeing you and if your seen by NPC nobody is going to kill you.

I think most people are upset we are not being talked to. Its like if you drop off your car for winter tiers and they say come back in 2 hours you come back and find out we have all these new paint jobs and spoilers for your car, here have a coffee while you wait and you can buy these wonderful snacks or request an oil change without telling you the tiers aren't in because a truck broke down so now your waiting without knowing what is going on or how long the wait will be.

Project management on this is failing to deliver and communicate those issues that do come up.

 

The way I see it they are always hiring 1 or 2 more employees. Yet they have a 30 person team. To me that says the have someone come and work for a
While then leaves for a larger software developer.

It usually takes 6 months to fully train a new person for most jobs.

I think that is why the delay.

 

I wouldn't doubt it. One cannot live on fan-supplied booze and pizza without the survival instinct kicking in at some point.

 

Maybe they will be able to launch within a three year window from what they initially told us the expected launch date would be lol.
Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtue is the first of a 5 game series of full-length, stand-alone games (each using the same game system), referred to as Episodes 1 through 5. Estimated availability of Episode 1, Forsaken Virtues, is October 2014, with Episodes 2 through 5 estimated for subsequent yearly releases.

 

ya they are in a pickle. Damned if they do and damned if they don't. One could argue that the game has to actually launch in order to die. Lets not hope for a miscarriage.

 

So we're getting EP4 at release....cool...

Yeah, getting a little sick of this lame excuse as well.

The startup I work for does this with interns...

...and then we spend 6 weeks fixing the mess...

Lack of program/project management. You certainly don't leave that up to developers. That's a disaster waiting to happen.

 

Uh, if a programmer for example needs 6 month to know what's going on i would fire him right on

 

Lol. No Comment.

 

Let it die, it can be reborn.

 

That would be awesome. I could resell all the stuff I sold, again! Im sure no one would be upset.

 

When given the red pill blue pill choice the blue pill isn't unpopular.

 

Being a programmer doesn't automatically give you foresight in someone else's code. And if that code is for some reason a shitpile.......

 

I expect my new Help Desk support, System admins and network admin to have our environment figured out within a year but it usually takes 2. All of them have experience already but need to learn how things are done in our environment. Dev's are no different.

 

Pushing back the date is symbolic at best. It represents the fact that the game is not ready.

An advertising push would fall flat.

Final wipe is only in place to bribe people into playing SotA is it's current state.

For those that can't see through the illusion it's all neat and tidy. I'm sure we all are aware that it's an illusion and we don't care. Just don't wipe because I'm not grinding again.

My point here is punting the launch of this game down the road is just as bad. The farther from persistence we get the worse it will be.

That and @Lord_SinglePlayerOffline's story is eating the brunt of that punt. If they stuck to the date they'd have no choice but to commit to finalizing they story for Episode 1

 

Well, this certainly isn't the first time they have quietly changed wording on the website and not said anything about anything... until, of course, the community erupts in disbelief. Then, after everyone freaks out, Dallas comes onto the forums and posts a very long post saying they made the change because of X,Y, and Z.

Then, of course, comes the vast outpouring of love from the fans.

 

The wind changing directions makes people upset around here.

 

Need to get rid of single player mode to have any chance of success, and sort out the buggy mess that is multiplayer

 

One could just as easily say get rid of the MMO and sort out the single player mess.

They'd probably have to push back the date for that though

 

Too late for that now. Actually, it was always too late since quite a few people pledged on the contingency that there would be a single-player mode with story. Those people were RG/Ultima fans and this would be a really expeditious way to lose them forever.

Well, since the MMO part is running down the wrong track and we don't know what track the SP mode is actually on, it might be a wiser investment to go with the unknown...but that would require trust and trust is definitely in short supply lately.

 

I'm not sure why there's always drama about the release date.

If they set a target date, should it be something they think is a reasonable target, and should they make all effort to meet it? Yes. Should they take efforts to inform backers directly if they change the target? Yes.

But the more important thing to me is either one of two things are happening,
1. The devs are making steady progress on making a game in the spirit of what they promised in Kickstarter, or
2. The devs are either not making steady progress, or are not making a game in the spirit of what they promised at Kickstarter.

If #1 is true, then I'm happy to show patience and maybe even contribute more at telethons. If #2 is true, then of course I'll be upset, but its not because the release date has been postponed.

Sounds like you think they should have contracted with EA instead of doing a Kickstarter.