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Spore to Ship 'When It's Done' And Not Before
Citing the sheer potential of the title, EA executives John Riccitiello and Frank Gibeau stated in a conference call yesterday that Spore will not ship until it is finished. Next Generation reports: "'It's one of those breakthrough products that might come across the industry every three, five, seven years ... We could not be more bullish for the potential of the franchise as we are right now,' said Riccitiello. He said that he still expects the game to ship in the 'March, April, May' 2008 timeframe. However, Riccitiello said, 'We will make the choice of shipping a better game than an on-time game given the high potential for this franchise.'"
"Spore will ship when it is actually fun to play, instead of feeling like a session of tweaking a very complicated spreadsheet."
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Coming soon the Duke Nukem forever and Spore Double Pack
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
Well, the delays for Spore are starting to get frustrating. On the other hand, after all these delays it better be a pretty freaking good game... which it won't be if they rush it to put an end to the delays.
Obviously no game is ever perfect, so it is up to the developers to decide the proper balance between time spent improving the game and delays before release.
That said, nobody wants another "Duke Nukem Forever." If you spend too much time on the whole "revolutionizing videogames" someone will take the lessons presented at all these talks Wright does and actually *finish* a game that heavily utilizes procedural generation or whatever before Spore comes out, and it won't be revolutionary anymore.
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
For example, from Epic, Blizzard, and a few others who are now the big names of the industry for it. It turns out that, surprise, more people buy a game which is finished and polished than something shoved out the door to meet an arbitrary deadline. Much as a couple of publishers still hope that if they believe the opposite really, really hard, it will somehow become reality.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
First thing I did after clicking "Read more..." was CTRL+F, "duke". I knew there would be results!
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Everyone is always bitching about how many patches and bugs are in games, and now we've got someone who actually wants to build a great game and the SAME people are bitching.
Um... hypocrisy anyone?
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
That's right. It's in the article. They refer to Spore as a franchise.
So what, Spore 2010, with updated rosters and some tiny new feature? Repeat formula next year?
Most games must be done start to finish within 2 years. If you write a game and it takes 5 years, then the game is usually obsolete by the time it comes out. The longer the development cycle, the more difficult it is to target the hardware that will be available when you ship the game. And as the code base grows in complexity it becomes harder to maintain, test, fix bugs, etc. I think too many people say "Will Wright knows what he is doing!" and conclude everything will work out. But history shows that when a game is ambitious, overhyped, and delayed multiple times -- that the odds are not good.
I really hope Spore works out. But I think they may have become subject to high expectations and scope creep.
A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever. - Shigeru Miyamoto
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
I'd like to get back into Eve-O again when I find the time. In no other game have I truly learned the power of leadership on such a visceral level. Even working with just 2 other guys requires someone to step up and take their leadership skills to a whole other level. Ten & higher puts you in a whole other league of understanding. 50+ it gets even wilder. Training and processes, reconnaissance, pre-combat calculations and planning, combat orders, Feints and parries, laying traps, avoiding traps, tricking your enemies, delegating responsibility, taking responsibility... it's wild fun.
;)
Anyone who plays eve-o and has stayed in Empire thus far, get your jump clones up to date, hop into a non-implanted one, trick out a cheap rifter or a stabber and go start shooting at people in 0.0. Start teaming up with people, and take recon positions whenever possible. Then try leading small ops. Within a month you'll be having so much fun that the 'spreadsheet life' of Empire will make you feel like a fool for ever enjoying it
- DaftShadow
PC gamers are an interesting group. They're willing to spend a lot on their hobby and don't seem to expect a lot of quality in return. I can't explain why they put up with it.
Amen.
A friend recently hassled me into picking up Battlefield: 2142 for my PC, and I've never had a worse gaming experience:
- The user registration was a pain in the butt, since almost every nickname imaginable is already taken and it doesn't give suggestions for unused ones. (It also doesn't accept some for random stupid reasons; I couldn't use "18 Rabbit" because you can't start a nickname with a numeral. Of course it doesn't TELL you you can't use a numeral, you have to get the retards at EA customer service to say it.)
- Trying to get my nickname changed through EA's customer service site is like pulling teeth. I had to make 7 requests, saying the same thing over and over, before an agent that knew what the hell he was doing actually replied with something helpful. It's still not resolved, because it's impossible to pick a new unused nickname without creating a new account using their retarded account system.
- It won't run on my widescreen monitor, instead just setting it to 1024x768 like a moron. When you put in a customer service ticket for this, they reply that the game was not tested on widescreen monitors. WTF?! The game came out in 2006, when widescreen monitors have never been more popular.
- You have to give it admin access and "allow" it on the firewall, because it also wasn't tested on Windows Vista, thus opening up security holes in your system as you're running an internet capable app with no protections whatsoever against malware.
- Even when you do that, PunkBuster will still randomly kick you from games, because apparently PunkBuster *also* wasn't tested in Vista. (How long has Vista been in public betas? All of 2006, for sure. Why the hell hasn't anybody tested in it?!)
- The buddy list in the game works maybe half the time. Maybe. It's hard to say because occasionally it'll work with one person I know, and show the rest as offline (even when they aren't, and even when I'm playing on the same server they're on.) Or, even worse, it won't show them as online OR offline, they just don't show up at all.
- Trying to outfit your character is extremely annoying, as the outfit tab will randomly change to the "pick a team" tab... even when you're in the middle of a drag-and-drop operation!
- Oh, and to cap things off, there's no auto-updater: You have to actually go to the website to find updates, and manually install them. Tribes had an auto-updater over a decade ago, what the hell is so hard about it?
- (Not specifically about this game, but all PC games): Why do I need a serial number AND the CD in the drive to play? Why can't I just have the disk in the drive like on Xbox, or Playstation 3, or Wii, or any other gaming system? Hell, games for consoles are more expensive, if anything they should have more copy protection.
It really, really made me miss Xbox Live. I really hope Microsoft's Games for Windows initiative catches on to save us from this stupidity.
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