While I feel an instinctual revulsion to the very idea of complaining about the release schedule for Dwarf Fortress, on an intellectual level I must agree with Aqizzar's skepticism regarding the necessity of staggering releases so much. This sort of long delay made a lot of sense for the transition to 3D, as it's easy to imagine much of the game was broken by the transition and had to be rebuilt, often from the ground up, to support the new system. In this case however, I don't see the need.
It feels very ungrateful to complain, so I don't want to come across with that tone; I just want to emphasize that I don't think Aqizzar is wrong in his points.
Trying to get it out any faster than it needs to be seems to me to be risking lower quality and even more bugs than we already anticipate. So I don't see pushing for a quicker release to necessarily be very profitable, to be honest.
There are two separate issues here: Rushing development, and releasing features separately. Rushing development means you take shortcuts to get to the destination faster, thereby compromising quality control. Releasing features separately means take the time necessary to do everything right, but don't wait until you have five things done before releasing the first four. What you're saying here is a criticism of rushed development, but that's not really the issue at hand.
I agree with what you're saying for a commercial release structure, because if a feature set doesn't come out when the game is shipped, it's pushed back to an expansion pack or cancelled entirely. If a commercial game is delayed to pack more features into the big release, then let it be delayed. But for a game that is being incrementally released for free and is donation-supported, the model is quite different from this. In an incremental release structure, it's not necessary, and potentially counterproductive, to delay a release to add more features to it.
Creating a stable and (more or less) balanced release for every separate feature would take a LOT of work on Toady part. Right now he can just add features to the mess and then balance them all together at the end of the long developpement cycle without worrying about alienating players with broken/buggy features. Small incremental update would make sense with a proper team, but Toady work alone on this, he cannot let someone else take care of release and maintenance while he work on the new stuff.
In a free game like this, players generally appreciate new features more than they're concerned with strong quality control. That isn't to say quality control isn't important, but if it alienated players the way you say, nobody would play Dwarf Fortress for all the the overpowered elite bowmen, killer carp, mandates for things you don't have, and so on.
In practice, the fastest way to
do quality control is to get the game in the hands of players and collect the most common feedback then quickly iterate on it. When fifty, a hundred, a thousand, or more people are all playing a game, you very quickly are able to determine where it's working best and where it needs work. You are essentially outsourcing half of the bugfixing and balancing process, thus getting the polished product into the hands of players faster than it would otherwise. I'm speaking from experience with Liberal Crime Squad releases here; there are times I've pushed a release out specifically because I wanted to balance a feature, or because I've done some substantial amount of work and I know there's going to be a handful of game-breaking bugs that I just haven't been able to track down. This draws players into the development process, and if you make no bones about the prediction that there are going to be issues and are quick to work on problems that arise, people tend to be very receptive to it.
I imagine getting sidetracked all the time by bug fixing, balancing and other things would make adding new feature even slower than it is now.
The saying "It's not the destination, but the journey that counts" applies to this kind of development. Even if it's true that feature X is released two months later if feature Y is released four months earlier, the net result is that players get to play an intermediate feature set for six months instead of an early feature set for four months. If we were to create an enjoyment calculus to weigh these options, then unless feature X was
far more awesome than feature Y, the incremental release schedule would come out as the more powerful of the two options.
Also, for save compat, I know many of you don't care, but I still like to break it the fewest times possible. If I'm ultimately encouraging people to "play the world" or to play many games in the same world, it's important for me not to get in a pattern of tossing saves each time I update.
I can understand this, but I feel that Dwarf Fortress doesn't
yet give players a very compelling reason to keep their world across many games. The game as it stands now plays essentially the same if you generate a new world rather than continuing to play the old one, and in fact there are several reasons a player might prefer generating new worlds on a regular basis, whether it be wanting to redo a particularly juicy site from scratch, trying particularly extreme environments, or wanting to restock the world with megabeasts for their dwarves or adventurers to battle.
I think the concept of playing the world is great, but from a practical standpoint, I feel the game needs to give the player strong incentives to do so before it becomes important to ensure saves are compatible for that reason. Artifacts from previous fortresses, your old dwarves from your last abandon coming in with an immigrant wave, releasing fortresses to the AI and then having caravans from them arrive bearing goods produced at your last fortress, things like that. The Army Arc may contribute to this, especially if you can interact with your previous sites (send a squad to scavenge your old ruins to recover artifacts or powerful weapons for your new fort?), but it could also make things worse it you end up killing off hostile sites, thereby making the world less interesting over time, rather than more interesting.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items (Read 3663691 times)