Ron Saueracker -> RE: Magazine explosions (11/7/2004 3:10:14 AM)
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ORIGINAL: Joel Billings Ron, I understand your feeling about not being able to redesign parts of WitP. However, I think you're overstating it about no Alpha phase. The game was in testing for over 18 months IIRC and we made tons of changes based on tester comments. It's very true that we chose not to rewrite many/most major systems as way too much work (in terms of code time, bug fixing time, and balancing time) versus the benefit, but I very much disagree that we weren't influenced by UV player and WitP tester comments during the 18 months of alpha and beta testing. I can't make you agree with me about the importance of the things we did change relative to those you wanted to change, but relative to other games I've worked on, this had a longer test cycle and more user/tester suggested changes than most. Hi, Joel. I should explain that a bit. I attempted to convey that UV, being the precursor, is the meat behind WITP. UV was designed much earlier obviously and the main elements and design approaches were basically written in stone at that time. WITP adopted these and any major changes, which Alpha normally can accomodate, could not for various reasons for WITP as you stated above. Any major design changes would have had to come during UV's Alpha phase I think, right? UV had the main Alpha, WITP had a more specific one to deal with the scale and such to translate UV to WITP. So a lot of us betas who joined midway through UV development did not have an opportunity to be in on the ground floor so to speak. That's what I meant by no actual alpha. That and it is such a huge project that a lot of things which normally would have been streamlined or whatever with smaller projects are just being realised now as user play level increases. I don't think many devs and testers even got to mid 42 as changes always required restarts etc. man this puppy is big. Tons of fun in any case. Now if my PBEMers would send me turns while I battle this flu. Canada sucks sometimes.[;)]
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