Cubit
4301
^ Yep, that is pretty much what happened. Glad the vacation is clearing Brad’s brain up a bit.
10 thumbs up to Brad for that. Honesty is refreshing.
JM1
4303
That had to happen for the game to stand any chance of becoming decent. Good stuff.
Darn, I didn’t call this in a post soon enough for Internet Points. I figured we’d get a replay of Demigod and Warlords Battlecry III, where Brad digs his heels in until he finally understands the problem and then gets to work. It’s kind of his personality at this point.
Hey, like “Brad Wardell: I was wrong.”
Wow is right. That’s an amazing post to read.
KevinC
4306
I’m curious what the “consequences” are he’s referring to. Obviously (and he pretty much states this) there needs to be another group in place that gives a launch a green light.
It’s all very interesting to me, though. I’ve never worked on a product so closely, or been so passionate about it, that I was so blind to obvious problems. From the tone of his post it sounds like the reviews really opened his eyes. I’m curious what his plans are for addressing it, both on an organizational level as well as how to “fix” Elemental in the short term.
If he’s saying the launch is more of a disaster than people realize, and Elemental his baby, what is he going to do to save it? At the end of the day, Elemental still has a lot of elements (bada-ching!) that I like a lot, at least conceptually. Now that they’re acknowledging the problem, I think it’s a game that can potentially be saved (at least as far as gameplay goes, I don’t know about sales).
I’m going to write more about this but not only did we think v1.05 was ready for everyone but we felt v1.0 was too. That’s the level of disconnect/poor judgment on our part we’re talking about.
Does anybody actually believe this? I for sure don’t. I feel like I did something wrong when I read it, that’s how bad it is.
KevinC
4308
The question is, what is the point of lying about that? Why not just say “You’re right, in hindsight we should have held off until February”?
JM1
4309
He stated on this forum that he felt it was ready and that it was great work etc etc. Of course Tom’s got me in a spin over whether Brad meant what he said or if only the insulting bits are the ones we should ignore :)
I believe it. It’s not hard to believe, really. Brad felt so strongly about this world he wrote a (fairly awful) book. He was active in every aspect of it, it seems, and then when it came out in a terrible state and got savaged, he lashed out, got overly defensive, and more or less made an ass of himself. That screams “too close to the project.”
He gets away, he clears his head, and then he looks at what’s happened from a distance, both physical and mental. He doesn’t like what he sees, both from his game and from the creator/CEO.
I’m impressed that he’s that open and honest. I hope by “changes” he means “my employees are going to lock me in a closet during revisions,” too.
Really? You don’t understand what the fallout would be from saying “we knew the game wasn’t ready and we released it anyway”?
Mordrak
4312
Taking some personal responsibility is great, but I am really curious about the consequences bit as well. I hope nobody gets shitcanned because of his lack of objectivity.
Personally, some of the features that seem superfluous (after listening to G4 interview prelaunch) are pretty integral to the lore (like dynasties). If he really wanted this idea of these magical heroes breeding to create super families and managing empires, the timescale the games should be operating on seems at odds with the rpg like exploration and adventuring he wanted to meld into the game.
I have the same fear. I’m hoping, at least, that his employees aren’t freaking out while Brad’s finishing up his vacation. I don’t think so, though – if Brad is this open with the public at large, you’d think (or at least hope) he’s even moreso with his employees.
Yeah, I hate to say it, it sounds like more coverup. They didn’t blindly release v1.0 with all of the bugs in it. Parts of the game literally didn’t work.
There is no reality where you claim all of the v1.0 bugs were just Stardock being blinded by love. Unless it was so blinding they couldn’t read QA bug reports anymore. Or it was so blinding they let the entire QA team go. Or it was so blinding none of them ran on ATI cards. Etc.
Brad is the master of retroactive history. This, imho, feels more of a they figured us out, so we’ll claim we released in the state it was because we loved it so much! Bleah.
edit: they blinding released it without multiplayer? They loved it so much they couldn’t see that feature wasn’t done yet? I call bullshit.
“We had no idea it was crap! That’s why we didn’t send any review copies out to the media!”
I don’t know why so many people have a problem admitting a mistake? It’s really a very simple thing to do(and imagine the world we could be living in if more people had the balls to do so). Anyway good on Brad, i hope it is sincere and not just the ‘answer’ from some damage limitation think tank, and we can all move on and see if this game can become the potential it promises.
So…erm…does this new ‘news’ mean the dinosaurs are on hold?(I wouldn’t have posted again in this thread after my(borrowed+doctored) dino pic…but this is news worthy i think)
If they thought that the 1.0 Gold Edition was ready to go, why didn’t they just turn that live for the pre-orders when street date was broken, rather than rushing a hybrid patch?
they did always say that single player was the focus and nothing multiplayer related would delay release so that part doesn’t bug me. A lot of the other stuff does though.
Well, they should have. When you have reviewers like Tom and Troy - who clearly (like most of us) really, really want to like the game - unable to even give the game a tentative thumbs up in its current state, something is badly wrong.
Not surprised by the postponement of multiplayer, btw. This is not a multiplayer-ready game, with the current game/world creation mechanism, given that any multiplayer contest is pretty much going to be determined in the first turn. The player starting next to food, materials and gold mines = winner.
