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That's the goal, but sometimes Andy Sites is an optimist. Either way, we want to make sure its ready, which is why we have started the closed testing process for feedback and will be ramping up as needed.
Wrel is an optimist, too.
Andy Sites said it will be on 31 Jan or earlier...
That's the goal, but sometimes Andy Sites is an optimist. Either way, we want to make sure its ready, which is why we have started the closed testing process for feedback and will be ramping up as needed.
You think some day we will understand how much money it actually takes to run this game? I have spent thousands of dollars and I realize that it barely funds a coder for a week or two.
Live games die when they can't cover their overhead. So many companies will shortsightedly have small or skeleton teams to maintain the game while still trying to develop new features to grow or at least attenuate player loss. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy since they will never invest in a team that will actually grow the game . At least that's been my experience with Garena / Heroes of Newerth and Daybreak / PlanetSide 2.
PlanetSide 2 was UNCONTESTED in it's market. It's a F2P PVP FPS with Massive Scale. No one else does it. The game's potential is so high. I wish the current team the best of luck, but they're playing against a stacked deck until they can get a publisher to actually fund them.
Can you give us the REAL tale of PS:A’s development?
We all have our theories of mismanagement, but what actually happened?
Near as I can tell it was pretty much what I said in my tweet:
game designs were dictated from on high and we were forced to work on a BR clone that had literally zero marketing.
It was never a dialogue. It was always "we're doing Feature X now" despite there being significant dissent from the team.
As an illustration of the mentality we were dealing with: After the second round of layoffs we asked them what they learned from H1Z1 and the answer from Ji was something to the effect of "If we have a BattlePass at $10 players won't spend more than that". Like that's what he learned. Nothing about Production structure, feature targeting, contracting external companies, communication, or understanding what players want/need... it was "our battlepass had too much value".
no, that was Drew. Paul got laid off but from talking to him he saw the writing on the wall and was already looking for the exit.
Can confirm. I had just come back from a 2 week vacation to discover that I hated my job and realized nothing was going to change. That and I saw how PS:A's launch was handled and knew I had to move on. A week later we got laid off.
Fortunately I had reached out to David Mendelsohn and am now working with him and Ben Jones at ZeniMax Online. Drew Matte works here too, though he is on a different project.
Dude lasted what? 6 months?
About 3.5 years all told. For about a year I was the only active programmer on the team.
I'm happy they have more resources on PS2 post-PS:A, but I'm sad at how much potential was lost due to lack of resources.
I'm quite sure that names were invented by someone from one of dev teams (people who play games), then presented to upper clowns (who do not play games) and they didn't caught reference.
We came up with the name. Daybreak was not involved in the decision.
I do like the idea behind that - but why absolutely dismantle veteran employees before doing so? Who even is "close to the project" besides Sites and Wrel now?
The PS2 team has nearly 3x the devs than just a couple months ago. Majority of whom were part of the PS2 launch back in 2012 and some from the original PS1 launch in 2003. But most worked on PS2 prior to needing to move over to H1 back in 2017. Everyone that is part of Rogue Planet is all-in for Planetside today and its future.
So I can say with 100% certainty that we did not "dismantle" veteran employees.
I remember PS:A having some super hyped closed-beta testers, and we all know how that turned out.
I'll remain a little bit sceptical until I see the content for myself.
You're right. Roadmaps, hype and talk is great. But we know we need to deliver to get skeptics to believe.
I am at once excited and terrified.
If the letter is to be taken at face value, we're finally getting what we wanted: DBG is going to stop putting its dick into the PS2 team's design and let the devs do what they think is right.
I'm guessing we're going to find out real quick whether or not that's true, and whether or not it's going to have the effect we thought it would.
Edit:
I know the devs are on radio silence because of the impending reveal of super secret content, but it would be really cool to hear from one or two devs on details not covered in the letter so that I can be more excited than terrified.
There are many reasons for the decision to branch into the separate studios, but one is being able to commit and focus fully on the individual franchises/games...
First, the team and I didn't win the lottery/rob a bank/etc and purchase the Planetside IP - Daybreak is still our parent company and publisher.
That said, let me provide an example of what I mean by commit and fully focus...
Over the years, as projects at DGC required additional support, often times devs (programmers, artists, designers, production, etc) would be pulled from one project and moved over to the other for weeks/months/indefinitely. Sometimes devs wanted to be moved onto the new project, sometime not so much. This is fairly common practice in game development, so nothing new. But it hit us (the Planetside team) especially hard starting in early 2017, when H1 was setting the world on fire and they were in desperate need of reinforcements. While it helped H1, it was at the co...
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