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Joel Billings -> RE: 3 vs. 36 (5/16/2005 5:54:23 AM)
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Just to clear up some things:
1) Oleg's statement about Mike Wood not working on GGWaW is correct. His time has this year been going into War in the Pacific, War in the East (our Eastern Front game) and last I heard War Plan Orange (although this is supposed to take very little of his time).
2) GGWaW has in fact already outsold WitP to end users, but that should be no surprise to anyone. There are some good points listed above as to why the forum totals are what they are.
3) The reality of GGWaW vs WitP as far as future support goes has much more to do with the status and complexity of the code base as it does the sales of the game. Yes, it's always easier to justify doing work on games that are selling more, but that's only a part of the picture. WitP, as many critics and lovers of the game have pointed out (sometimes the same person is both), is very complex spaghetti code. In some ways I'm amazed that it works as well as it does. Any work on it has a greater chance of creating new bugs than it does of fixing the original bug. As we can't afford to have programmers work on it full-time forever, the more time that goes by the harder it is for the programmers to remember what they were doing in the code (making it even riskier to do work). Now if all Mike was doing was fixing bugs, it would be tough enough, but as you've probably noticed there are always a million new features that people want. And Mike has responded with a sizable number of new features. There are also endless arguments about things that some insist must be changed due to unhistorical results. Some fine points, but also many that are impossible to get just right (even if you all could agree on what that is, which this forum often can't). I have been arguing for some time that additional WitP work should focus entirely on bug fixes until any remaining major bugs are corrected (of course that day may never come). As for AI work, forget about it. The AI is as good as it's going to be. Gary couldn't improve it now without devoting many months of his time, and even if he did, it would only get marginally better (or it might get worse).
In comparison, GGWaW was written with more modern coding methods and is much easier to work with. Also, as mentioned, the game is simpler and given that the scope of the game is so much smaller (27 turns versus 1500), any work on the game including even the AI is much more manageable and productive.
4) Mr. Frag is compiling information and saves for some of the critical problems with WitP 1.50. Hopefully we can fix these problems, but it's too soon for me to say anything about what can be done. We'd certainly like to fix the major problems and get the game to be as stable and bug free as possible given the realities in item 3 above.
5) WitP is one of a kind. We think it qualifies as one of the 10 wargaming wonders of the world, bugs and all. [:)] We think it provides tremendous play value for anyone interested in this topic and level of detail. It may be harsh (and not something any sane marketing department would ever admit), but if it had to be anything close to bug free, it would never have seen the light of day. Also, I think the activity on the WitP forum is fantastic, although there's so much of it that I can't see how you guys keep up with it.
6) I'm surprised to hear a WitP grognard complaining about the poor combat animations in GGWaW. Not that we don't agree that the combat animations in GGWaW deserve some criticism, it's just that I wouldn't think that someone that plays WitP would put an emphasis on this. In GGWaW we saw the combat animations as something that would be used by a beginner to learn the flow of the battles, but would then be quickly turned off as something that slows the game down for no long term purpose (it doesn't give you any information you can't get in the combat report screen). Our art budget didn't allow us to put more effort into this part of the game that we thought was just to be used the first game. Of course, it just shows how important first impressions are, and how important graphics and a graphic payoffs from a battle well fought can be. We can appreciate the desire for more eye-candy, but we did the best we could with what he had to work with. In the end, once you play the game, we think most people will be happy to turn off the animations and won't miss having what would truly be just eye-candy.
7) In the next few months we'll be looking into various options for WitP support going forward.
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