Behold! The Rare & Powerful Twilight Magus!

[Mania]

[Karathyriel]

This is the first glitch I ever saw that wore equipment...

[Mania]

I think the body texture didn't make it into the data files. But I thought it was quite cute. Especially as he beat on me in angry futility.

[Karathyriel]

I really wonder why Blizz is doing this.

I don't have beta access but I never saw any game that looked so unfinished like Cataclysm.
I'd bet they never make it 'till november.

So many things they announced and never made it into the game and still they seem to be unable to finish it.

Maybe Robert Kottick took to much fun out of making video games.
Or they have everything working for their next gen MMO and don't work full steam on WoW anymore? That'd be stupid...

[Mania]

They'll be done enough to launch, but probably not up to their usual standards. And they might still delay, although I believe that delay is less politically feasible here than it was when Burning Crusade launched.

But I can tell you why this expansion is kicking their butts:

1. The team (which probably means the various team leads) decided that they wanted to clean up the old world because it sucked too much.
2. They convinced the higher-ups (which probably means the exec producer or higher) that this could be done relatively easily and would increase new player adoption and retention.
3. The higher-ups aren't dumb - they also demanded new high-level content, and the team agreed.
4. The day-to-day team oversight - probably a producer but maybe the exec producer - either:
   • Didn't have enough day-to-day knowledge of the work to know that doing both old and new content on this schedule was not feasible, or
   • Knew that the time estimates for doing both old and new content were not feasible but didn't have the authority to push back against both the team and the higher-ups at the same time.
5. The team ran into expected and unexpected delays, both of which had been carefully hand-waved over in the initial schedule in order to keep it slim enough to get approval for all of this work.
6. As each decision about what to cut had to be made, it was more beneficial to cut a single feature which hadn't been started yet, and that would take a lot of development time, rather than a lot of little features, many of which were already in progress.
7. Cutting a single large feature only works if you can convince your higher-ups that you only need to make this one cut and then the schedule will be fine. But it's politically difficult to admit that you made up all your time estimates, so this 'just one cut' probably happened several times.

And here you are!

Edit: Ack! I just derailed my own thread!

[Karathyriel]

Yeah, you may be right.
You're the one with experience.

But still it feels like "We do this! Oh, sorry, canceled. And we're giving you this. But we canceled it. And now we are working on this but it is already cancelled."

Some new zones and flyaing mounts in Azeroth is about all that seems to be in Cataclysm.

Oh,m why do I care, I don't play anyway.

[Mania]

It comes down to the same thing either way. And I'm just a cynical cuss.

[Karathyriel]

*sigh* I only wish there was some interesting MMO coming up that said "no" to social networking.
But even "Star Wars: The old Republic" is like that and, even worse, publisher Electronic Arts is worst of them all.

Were did those good old times go when you just played a game without any worries?
When you played for fun and nothing else?

[Undra]

immersion be danged, though, I'd run the other direction if a neon nightmare came at me with a knife.

[Kalliope]

*giggles at the OP*

The derailing part is fascinating, though. The real question is "how many of these features will actually be developed and added after the release of Cataclysm?" Not that any of us has a crystal ball to answer this right now, of course...

[cowmuflage]

BEST MOB EVER.

[Ariamodasu]

Man this looks like whenever I try and play L4D2. Aaah textures.

[cowmuflage]

what did you do to your l4d2 to make them do that lol

[Kaleos]

Mobs always get the cool armor, I'm green with envy! (horrible pun)

But if I remember right, a lot of the dev team are pretty new also. Not to mention WoW has become a beast of a game. Starting at 4 GB back in vanilla and now up too, *checks HD* 20ish GB. >_<
Hopefully they don't try and cram everything in half assed though and give it a good polish, there is still about two and a half months until their projected release date. If other xpacs are any clue of date.

[Mania]

But if I remember right, a lot of the dev team are pretty new also.

I don't think they are necessarily new -- although any MMO team has an astonishing amount of turnover. Their leads are probably pretty experienced in games and possibly even in MMOs in particular.

But I suspect that very few of them have developed Cataclysm before. And I'm not trying to be deliberately obtuse - I mean that at this point in the history of MMO development we don't have very many good theories on how to make these things work well, and we haven't even accumulated enough history as an industry to build pragmatic working theories either. So each project - each game, each expansion - is effectively one-of-a-kind.

Right now, all MMO teams are winging it, all the time.

[Ariamodasu]

what did you do to your l4d2 to make them do that lol

My graphics card is a taaaad dated so if the torch goes on them I get bright neon yellow/red/pink/blue infected running around which then gank me as I can't tell what they are Hard Rain is nigh on impossible as the water texture is a solid white too.

/derail

[Saturo]

Have you tried updating your drivers? What card are you running with? Nothing short of a device invented about 1998 would react like that.

[Twila]

Also keep in mind they started on cata BEFORE wrath, who knows how fare back into BC they started this.

[cowmuflage]

oh ok then sorry just being nosey XD big l4d2 fangirl lol

[Nick]

Bahahaha xD