Pushing the release date forward

[drizzan]

I read the news about this today, about not being able to release the game at the intended timeframe and pushing it forward atleast another 6 months.

To me that is really amazing news, that means you people care alot about your own work and don't intend to publish an unfinished product. That also shows a great respect to the fans aswell.

 

Please, take as long as you need, there has been so long since a great CRPG was relased, we can all wait a little longer.

Take as long as you need, and put your whole heart into this product and create this amazing world that I can get lost into again, it has been way too long now since I last had that feeling in a game.

[Monte Carlo]

Definitely. Take your time. I can wait, to be honest, as long as it takes.

[Metabot]

Not to be a douche, but it's been known since the kickstarter that this wouldn't release until the end of 2014 at the earliest.

[Monte Carlo]

^ Not a douche Sawyer said as much himself. It's just those KS rules.

[barakav]

I waited so long for such a game to surface  again that I don't mind waiting a little bit longer if the game is going to be more complete.

 

Take your time devs and even raise more money if you need to.

[xTTx]

What's another 6 months when I've been waiting for a game like this since I finished Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn?

[Pandamaniac]

What's another 6 months when I've been waiting for a game like this since I finished Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn?

I hope that you at least played the expansion, Throne of Bhaal..... if you haven't, go get it and play it NOW! Since it was the remains of BGIII once it was (sadly) canceled, it is the meatiest expansion I have ever played for any game, ever.

[HardRains]

Not a big deal. Broken Age, Elite: Dangerous and Wasteland 2 should be enough indoor activity for spring/summer. Then with Pillars, Torment and Star Citizen (38 effing million dollars) following up later '14/'15.

 

Good God, I'd almost given up on gaming completely. Crowd-funding is awesome.

[Sir Chaox]

OH, you mean pushing the release date back...

 

*puts flamethrower away*

 

[ManifestedISO]

^ Not a douche Sawyer said as much himself. It's just those KS rules.

 

 

Well I missed it, wherever it was said April was off the table. I saw the Eurogamer thing today and was genuinely surprised. Not annoyed or disappointed, just surprised. Okay maybe a little. 

[Lephys]

Yeah, I think April was the initial "if we meet our funding goal, our general game plan should be done by April" assessment. Then, when they got roughly 400%, and got through their pre-production phase with that new budget, they went ahead and pushed it back 6 months. I think it's still an estimate, but they knew it wasn't going to be April anymore.

 

Granted, they didn't really announce it, specifically. But, the information was available to possibly be read/discovered.

[makryu]

It would have been nice if they said it here first, but still no one could possibly expect that they would start and finish a beta in time for April at this point.

[Metabot]

It's been mentioned only a thousand times that April was not realistic.

[Death Machine Miyagi]

So long as the delay is used in service of polish and turning out a superior product rather than used as a desperation tactic from an incompetent developer, delays not only don't worry me, they positively encourage me. I would rather have a highly polished game many months from now than a buggy, forgettable piece of crap today.

 

I have very strong faith from what I've seen from Obsidian that the development is all-in-all proceeding quite well, so yeah, take as much time as you need to wow us when the day of release finally comes.

[Endrosz]

Rest assured, they won't take forever to make the game. There's this thing called "money" that IT developers cost you.

 

Fargo said in an interview that a good estimation for an IT developer's total monthly cost** is about 10 thousand dollars, IIRC. I don't know how accurate is that, but I'll take it. A quick math based on that:

 

- Pre-production needs only a small team (10 or less), full production a larger team, including the outsourced work (30-35), so the average team size on the Pillars of Eternity project is somewhere between 20 and 25 in my estimation.

- That's 200-250 thousand dollars for a development month.

- 4.3 million dollars (the KS total) is enough for about 22 or 18 months with the lower and the higher team size estimation, respectively. With the additional money Sawyer mentioned, 1 or 2 additional months.

- Even 22 months is less than 2 years -- that's August 2014 starting from October 2012 (And that's not including the pre-production work for the Kickstarter! That KS pitch video and the world design that was detailed in the updates took quite a bit of work before they went live, I'm sure).

- Obsidian can, of course, invest money from elsewhere into Eternity, from one pocket to another. Given their history and the very fact that they went to KS to get funding for a game, I'm not sure they have money to reassign.

 

 

** Note "cost", not "salary". Cost includes all the fees you need to pay to the government, healthcare and dental care program fees, a powerful computer to work on (upgraded regularly), electricity, heating, cleaning, workplace comfort like soft drinks for free from vending machines etc.

[Lephys]

** Note "cost", not "salary". Cost includes all the fees you need to pay to the government, healthcare and dental care program fees, a powerful computer to work on (upgraded regularly), electricity, heating, cleaning, workplace comfort like soft drinks for free from vending machines etc.

I dunno about you, but where I work, vending machines require money to function. Which is why they aren't called "beverage dispensers."

 

(Mainly being silly. Nice assessment/breakdown, ^_^)

[Death Machine Miyagi]

Rest assured, they won't take forever to make the game. There's this thing called "money" that IT developers cost you.

 

Fargo said in an interview that a good estimation for an IT developer's total monthly cost** is about 10 thousand dollars, IIRC. I don't know how accurate is that, but I'll take it. A quick math based on that:

 

- Pre-production needs only a small team (10 or less), full production a larger team, including the outsourced work (30-35), so the average team size on the Pillars of Eternity project is somewhere between 20 and 25 in my estimation.

- That's 200-250 thousand dollars for a development month.

- 4.3 million dollars (the KS total) is enough for about 22 or 18 months with the lower and the higher team size estimation, respectively. With the additional money Sawyer mentioned, 1 or 2 additional months.

- Even 22 months is less than 2 years -- that's August 2014 starting from October 2012 (And that's not including the pre-production work for the Kickstarter! That KS pitch video and the world design that was detailed in the updates took quite a bit of work before they went live, I'm sure).

- Obsidian can, of course, invest money from elsewhere into Eternity, from one pocket to another. Given their history and the very fact that they went to KS to get funding for a game, I'm not sure they have money to reassign.

 

 

** Note "cost", not "salary". Cost includes all the fees you need to pay to the government, healthcare and dental care program fees, a powerful computer to work on (upgraded regularly), electricity, heating, cleaning, workplace comfort like soft drinks for free from vending machines etc.

 

Obviously they're limited by their budget, like any other company making just about anything else. And, assuredly, releasing the game because they've run out of money would be a much less pleasant outcome than releasing the game because its been finished properly.

 

But both are preferable to intentionally releasing an unfinished game in the short-sighted pursuit of immediate profit, ala KOTOR 2. The blame for that was on LucasArts and not Obsidian, but still. 

 

I have no real fear of such a thing happening, though, since an existing company that starts a Kickstarter is basically laying their very reputation on the line when it receives the money they requested. Obsidian obtained the money they have based upon faith, a trust built up between themselves and their fans. If that faith is violated and the game feels rushed or subpar, their brand name will suffer for it forever. Of all the people in the world to find that an undesirable outcome, Obsidian itself tops the list.

Edited February 6, 2014 by Death Machine Miyagi

[Bryy]

It's been mentioned only a thousand times that April was not realistic.

 

And to be quite honest, this is how a dev cycle works. We were just "lucky" enough to be able to see the cogs in motion. This does not make them better or worse than any other dev team. 

[Endrosz]

I forgot to account for one thing: Early Access -- the recent Eurogamer interview has confirmed it.
 

When Pillars of Eternity finally does near completion, an Early Access release is very much the plan. "We are going to be having a [beta] section of the game that the players can play through to get a feel for all the mechanics and style of character interactions and all that kind of stuff," said Sawyer. "Yeah, that is planned."

 

Early Access is another form of pledging money for an unfinished game, and I'm sure that getting it on Steam will reach untapped crowds who will put down some additional money for Eternity. Hard to guess how much, though.

[Lephys]

 

It's been mentioned only a thousand times that April was not realistic.

 

And to be quite honest, this is how a dev cycle works. We were just "lucky" enough to be able to see the cogs in motion. This does not make them better or worse than any other dev team.

 

True that. Most big publisher-made games don't even give such a precise estimate of their release, simply going with "look for it, 2015!". Then, when they get closer, things end up getting more precise, and sometimes STILL get pushed back, as in "well, we thought it'd be December of 2015 at the latest, but it turns out it's going to be like February of 2016, so..."

 

So, yeah... this whole "pushed back" thing gets an unnecessarily assumptive negative connotation. As if the game was somehow inherently supposed to be finished by April of this year, rather than simply being an educated guess based on the limited empirical knowledge of development time at the time it was made, then a more accurate one being made later on that's closer to the actual amount of time it'll take to do what is objectively required to complete the game's production (which just so happens to be later than the initial estimate).

[Bryy]

 

 

It's been mentioned only a thousand times that April was not realistic.

 

And to be quite honest, this is how a dev cycle works. We were just "lucky" enough to be able to see the cogs in motion. This does not make them better or worse than any other dev team.

 

True that. Most big publisher-made games don't even give such a precise estimate of their release, simply going with "look for it, 2015!". Then, when they get closer, things end up getting more precise, and sometimes STILL get pushed back, as in "well, we thought it'd be December of 2015 at the latest, but it turns out it's going to be like February of 2016, so..."

 

So, yeah... this whole "pushed back" thing gets an unnecessarily assumptive negative connotation. As if the game was somehow inherently supposed to be finished by April of this year, rather than simply being an educated guess based on the limited empirical knowledge of development time at the time it was made, then a more accurate one being made later on that's closer to the actual amount of time it'll take to do what is objectively required to complete the game's production (which just so happens to be later than the initial estimate).

 

 

It sounds like they want to make this the biggest Kickstarter game yet, so I don't blame them. 

[ManifestedISO]

It's been mentioned only a thousand times that April was not realistic.

 

Where, when, show me even one of the thousand.

[Lephys]

 

It's been mentioned only a thousand times that April was not realistic.

 

Where, when, show me even one of the thousand.

 

*Points to OP of this thread*

 

 

What... you said "one."

[txfeinbergs]

Honestly, I expected up to a year delay... and I am fine with that. I expect the same thing with Star Citizen. The scope creep that occurred as a result of the game far exceeding its original backer target funding is going to make for a much better game, but that game will take a lot longer to complete. I will be here patiently waiting.

[ManifestedISO]

 

 

It's been mentioned only a thousand times that April was not realistic.

 

Where, when, show me even one of the thousand.

 

*Points to OP of this thread*

 

 

What... you said "one."

 

 

Yes, exactly, today's eurogamer news is the first time Obsidian has said April is no longer a launch window.