<div id="post_message_551354"> Quote:
Originally Posted by Utnayan
Brad, will you promise that you will never outright lie or cover up topics in your game involving content, and discipline employees that do?

It's a simple yes or no answer.


I promise that I personally will never outright lie or cover up topics in Vanguard involving content, and discipline employees that do.

I'm also just saying though that we will make mistakes, although we'll try to make less and learn from the past. And I'm also saying that I can't control every person and guarantee someone won't lie or cover something up. But if I catch them doing something like that, I absolutely will act accordingly.

And, like I said in my other post, we'll always be up front about what we think we will ship with, might ship with, and what will be post-launch. And I'll emphasize that the strength, not the weakness, of MMOGs is that they are never technically 'done' and that they can be patched. What is important is that you are up front about what will ship when you know about it and that you don't intentionally mislead people in the name of marketing a game. The danger of this is even talking about topics that *might* make it into the game, or that *might* be in the game after launch can and is often misquoted or used against you and considered a promise that it *will* be in the game. An example would be when we told people there would be 5 continents at launch at EQ, and then even though *months* before launch, I told people that we would instead launch with 3 but they would be more filled with content (e.g. the content would be less spread out than if we did 5), I was still reamed for that. The fact that the first batch of EQ boxes had old information and said 5 continents (an honest oversight, *not* a lie) didn't help, even though I explained what happened.

All that said, I'm willing to take the risk and talk about what *might* be in the game, or what we're planning later. What I'm not willing to do, though, is lower an NDA before the last phase and let out work in progress, systems that aren't done or that might be changed, problems that we need to fix but that people don't need to know about lacking perspective and not being part of the development process, etc. The final phase of beta, beta 5, is fine for releasing the NDA -- doing so any earlier just opens a can of worms because people post screenshots and movies and previews depicting problems or issues or assuming there is a problem or issue *without* the perspective of it being a beta, which phase we are in, what we still have to fix, the priority of what is going to be fixed, the schedule that outlines what and when we are going to address and how, etc. That lack of perspective, which you simply don't have unless you are part of the dev team, is one of the big reasons to have an NDA, especially if you are like us, Sigil, and believe in long beta periods and how valuable opening up the game early is to testers to get their feedback.

For example, take Diplomacy. It needed to be revamped a few times. It's a LOT better now. It's still not ready to ship and needs a lot of content to support it. I am confident we've made the major tweaks to it now, based on working with it and getting feedback in betas 0-2, and people are enjoying it.

But I still wouldn't release the NDA for people to talk about it because it still lacks polish, tweaking, the content it needs for people to truly see it's potential. Again, without the perspective of being on the dev team and without knowing the resources we are going to commit to it and the long term plans we have for it and how much content we're going to have at launch to support it, the reactions would be mixed, have misinformation in them, incorrect information, and incomplete information.

That is a great example of why to keep the NDA up right now in Beta 3. And there are many others, including not letting competition see the game, keeping some content back for covers and other special coverage by web sites and game publications, etc.

Weiterlesen...