Release of Shroud of the Avatar postponed again

They did some wipes of the code-base that is re-writing everything with new ideas and for the expansions. This is required as the code base was never intended for what it was being used for at the time. They hacked in a lot of features that broke other things and did not have plans in place to handle some of the things they wanted to do. This was not the loss of dev but the expanding vision of the game. This is standard in the development of software for almost any project. The project needs direction and firm guidelines to be coded and that is the issue with the current dev of SotA as they keep changing development priorities and systems are not written out before hand.

 

I just wanted to point out that most of the details and issues about programming etc within this game can be fully read in the Dev+ forums which I can't of course post here. If you would like to support the game and get into those types of details you can go to the game store and the Dev+ access can be acquired in any bundle above $450.00 you also get tax free lots and a bunch of other things with your donation.

 

We all have to look in the mirror as us backers helped contribute to the scope creep of this project.

If you suggested something new or modified congratulations you helped make the game better but it costed some time from the original time table.

I am guilty as one of my ideas became to light - a ring of stones house was my suggestion to Starr at the second Duke VIP + meeting at Portalarium. I suggested more ideas that never came to fruition.

So in the end I know we all want the final game now. We have to wait longer.

 

Dunno.

 

The 2 world builders are hired to replace ArrrMatey (sp?) and also to help speeding up zone building. The QA guy is the new additions. The 2 tech guys are the new additions to help speed up the tech building (notice auto stack is back and much faster?) and also to allow Tassilo to go on vacation.

 

To respond to this message and the previous. I have noted in the past 2 decades of managing IT people that 95% overstate their ability in IT and are usually terrible at it. For people that dont know, its utter insanity for a person to say they can walk into any responsibly sized *real* environment and be 100% up to speed on how they do things in 3 months. At the 3 months mark, I would expect them to know 75% of the jobs and be able to take on all of the low hanging fruit.

On the NWN side, I still solo created (using C#) one of the ten most popular NWN1 persistent worlds (hall of fame top 10). I spent 5 years on it, developed an entire UO style crafting system (based on D&D Rules), persistent story system, persistent alignment system (real actions in game effected your real alignment, something our SOTA devs still have yet to do), D&D rules diety system, etc... etc... etc... in it that servers over 200,000 people and had 5 shards around the world. I was offered a position by Bioware/Obsidian/Atari to move to Southern California to actually work *on* NWN 2. I Didnt take it since they weren't offering crud for salary (especially for California).

Yet... Im not a "dev".

 

One of the upsides of not having traditional investors, alot more flexibility with hitting deadlines.

 

We just changed the date from 2016 to 2017 and left everything as it was to keep Steam updated, that was all, you can rest easy now . The change was made a couple of months ago when the very old date of 2016 was past and we had already announced it wasn't going to be the official launch date elsewhere on our websites, so it didn't make sense to keep it up just on Steam.

"Beta" was an old term as well, and is only left up there for new players to better clarify the game is still in development. Nothing on our end in terms of development, timeline, and expectations has changed recently. We are still in Early Access, and will be in this mode into the next year.

If another update is made to focus in on future dates, we will do our best to inform the community sooner, and will be certain to announce an official Launch date when we are ready for it! Thanks everyone for your feedback on the monthly changes and progress we've made up to this point.

Also on the new hires, we have been overall adding to our team. There have been a couple that have moved on, so over the last several months we've added about half a dozen with half of that number leaving. The new hires are all an effort to ensure we complete the game to expectations. We hope you are enjoying the world builder's new work mentioned in the weekly updates!

Going to close this thread, now that the mystery has been clarified.