Originally Posted by basti
In other words: I understand how agile development works. This thread is not a "DO THIS SOE OR I RAGEQUIT", more of a suggestion, with added discussion.  |
You understand how agile development works? Like how there is reduced quality in agile projects vs software engineered projects? How the developer-centric projects continually are "developed' into a corner because they dont' fully understand the complexities of architecture, proper testing, and proper documentation.
Hey I bought into it for a while myself, but the Agile movement is simply too chaotic for a longterm, sustained, lifecycle project.
Which is why I've always said that PS2 is simply a testing ground for ForgeLight. I don't believe that SOE even cares about the fate of PS2 in relation to EQ:Next. Some suckers are paying for this development (read: testing) and the EQ franchise will reap the benefits. Smokejumper is no fool and he and Smed are cashing in on all the FPS kiddies that wanna play on a huge arena map to fund his bug squashing before his project rolls out. I mean it's paid for testing.
I mean come on, look at all of the sweeping changes that have been made to this engine in such a short time. Right now, its a different game than Release, which was a different game than Beta, which was a different game than Alpha. Does any studio publish a game that takes on this many fully distinct mechanics? They're using the speed and flexibility of an Agile development model to push a wide variety of complexities into the enginee to see how it behaves, to push it (ForgeLight) to its limits. Not because they care about PS2 - they wanna run this horse (PS2) into the ground so they know what its capabilities are for EQ:Next. While in the background they're using a moderately paced and properly sized development team and functional QA staff for EQ:Next.
Sub numbers don't lie. How much money is EQ:Next going to bring in and with only 2 games running ForgeLight, which one do you thing will have more subs?