Since some of us here tried the demo and determined it was broken, I just thought I would pass this little tidbit along:
Someone close to the project (who wants to remain anonymous) informed me that the Tron 2.0 demo that got out there was never supposed to see release on the 'net. It was made for a European magazine cover disc and it’s got bugs that they’ve already fixed for the REAL 'net demo release in a few weeks. Major stuff like a big networking bug that was causing lots of lag, the disc not auto-arming, the crash on joining a server, power-blocking problems…
So anyway, if you wanted to like it had lots of problems, the good news is that you can try it again before long with an updated demo.
Errr like they thought this demo would never get on the net? Come on Monolith everything gets on the net eventually. Usually sooner rather than later these days.
Who would greenlight a buggy demo for a magazine CD in the first place? It hardly seems like good publicity. Is it a disconnect between PR and the dev team or would the devs simply be overruled on something like this?
That seems a whole lot less likely than “Uh, you guys hated the demo? Um, that wasn’t the REAL demo. No, see, uh, it wasn’t supposed to get out. Yeah. There’s a BETTER demo coming soon. Really!”
From another source at Lith: apparently the TRON2 team wasn’t allowed to say anything about this. It’s supposedly a build of the game from before E3, and doesn’t reflect the current state of the game very well at all, though I suppose the damage has already been done.
The decision to release the demo was made by the publisher, Buena Vista Interactive, and they’ve never published a game before and seem pretty clueless about the whole thing. Their rationale for releasing was “It seemed like a good idea!” D’OH.
I’m not sure. Maybe Disney just isn’t used to this kind of thing…they’ve certainly never made games that fit in with the same crowd as Tron 2.0 (except possibly Kingdom Hearts, a PS2 game).
What JP said… that’s the story I’m getting. Now I don’t even know what magazine it goes with. Perhaps Disney reasoned that by throwing this publication a bone with an “exclusive” multiplayer demo they’d get a really glowing preview. I have no idea.
Long story short is this… the demo that’s out there now is a poor judge of the “release” game’s quality, and you’ll have a better judge of it before the game hits shelves in the form of an official 'net demo.
I wasn’t trying to post this as some sort of insider conspiracy stuff. More like a PSA for those that are interested in Tron and tried the flawed demo.
