Natural Selection 2 的近況.

 自問自己非常喜歡ns這個遊戲, 在當時來說他的遊戲結構算是十分革命性的, 只是這隊development team 的態度真的令人非常不敢恭維.在2009 fall 的事件之後, 今年5月他們給了一個這樣的交待: (留意bold)


We've already responded on numerous occasions to posts like these, but I guess one more can't hurt.

Fall 2009 was an honest mistake. We had some good momentum built up, and really believed we could hit a late fall deadline of a first playable version of the game that we could release to the public. We weren't planning on it being a finished polished version, but we anticipated getting something into your hands by then.

However, development of the tools ended up taking much longer then anticipated, and we had to face some harsh realities of building your own game engine from scratch, with only one graphics/engine/tools programmer. We were also having difficulty finding mappers, we've lost several environment artists to other game companies, and a lot of Charlie's time was eaten up by invester meetings, and the day to day business of running a company. Anyway, to make a long story short, we missed the fall deadline, and shortly thereafter put together an extensive update to the community, in reference to the missed deadline, though I still see people posting that we never informed our community about it.

We've continued to plow ahead, making extensive progress on the game, and trying to work as efficiently and smartly as possible. We use programs such as Pivotal Tracker, to help us make better estimates about our progress. We work some long hours, and on weekends. And still, nothing runs as smoothly as you anticipate. As you can see, just the act of bringing over the engine test to Steam caused a whole host of new problems, which is yet more bugs and issues that the programmers need to spend their time addressing, and not focused on the game itself. Any PR release, blog post, or tools release takes time away from the game development, but we feel its worthwhile to keep our community engaged.

You can't judge the progress of the game off of the engine test. For example, we have all of the alien lifeforms modeled and animated, and in game, (yes, including the Fade) but still need to refine and work out the gameplay. Just because we haven't done a reveal or blog post about something doesn't mean it isn't done. In the case of the Fade we want to do a proper reveal movie, which takes time, and right now we really have our heads down concentrating on the game itself.

We understand that people feel like they've been waiting forever for this game. But keep in mind, NS2 did not go into development right after NS1. It's really only been about a year and a half of solid development time, and most games take at least 2 years with full sized teams, and often can take 3 years or more, if they've developed their own engine and tools from scratch. But since most companies aren't as open with the public with the behind the scenes development of the game, people don't even know there is a game until the publisher decides to reveal it when those games are already quite far along in the development.

Yes, we've missed some deadlines, both external and internal. Yes we feel bad that people have paid money for the game, and are still anxiously waiting to play it. But please have some faith and patience, and bear with us a little longer. We are not vaporware, we are not goofing off with your money, and we have more invested in the success of this game and company then anyone.

There will be some upcoming announcements soon that will help to give you a better sense of the state and progress of things.

Thanks for your ongoing support.

--Cory

這不是很矛盾嗎....?


就像在australian community 的The Flying Fish說,


"if they have only been developing the game for a year and a half that means they started december 2008?  how the fuck could they think they'd have an engine down and a playable game in november 2009?"

還好我沒再給錢他們. 我才不想ns2又出現一輛法拉利.