News Powerplay Beta Date Update

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Tinman

Tinman
Morlock5K said:
I personally hope that planet landing is like the main release. We start with it bare bones and they include free expansions to the paid expansion to include all the various different planets.
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That is a possible way of doing it, but it's pretty high risk financially since how are you going to make it clear to the customers when the "cut off point" will be for future updates. Just easier to sell an expansion and say that "this is what you get for the money", with the exception of bug fixes a some minor improvements of course.

If they want to have a steady flow of money into the company without doing subscriptions or going all out with micro transactions they pretty much always will need to have something new to sell. If they would only have two packages (planets, first person gameplay) then that wouldn't be possible unless the cost for these expansions was through the roof (when taking years of future development into account).
 

Philip Coutts

Volunteer Moderator
Philip Coutts
Not that it bothers me but the free updates we have had so far have been to add in stuff that should have been in the game at release anyway. Calling them updates is a bit of a cheek, really they are nothing more than patches. Major updates would be to add planetary landings and walking around.
 

Tinman

Tinman
Philip Coutts said:
Not that it bothers me but the free updates we have had so far have been to add in stuff that should have been in the game at release anyway. Calling them updates is a bit of a cheek, really they are nothing more than patches. Major updates would be to add planetary landings and walking around.
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The problem I have with this argument is that we only know this due to them being very open during development and sharing their design proposals. If they would have followed the "standard procedure" of developing games (AKA keeping quiet) we would have no idea about what would have been or not been in the game. The amount of "not finished" comments would probably have been far less then...

No wonder they've decided to keep things more to themselves lately...have you seen a design proposal for the upcoming expansions for example? Nope and I doubt we will ever see them to be honest for this very reason. ;)
 

Philip Coutts

Volunteer Moderator
Philip Coutts
Tinman said:
The problem I have with this argument is that we only know this due to them being very open during development and sharing their design proposals. If they would have followed the "standard procedure" of developing games (AKA keeping quiet) we would have no idea about what would have been or not been in the game. The amount of "not finished" comments would probably have been far less then...

No wonder they've decided to keep things more to themselves lately...have you seen a design proposal for the upcoming expansions for example? Nope and I doubt we will ever see them to be honest for this very reason. ;)
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Ahhh, but this is the double edged nature of Kickstarters as a whole isn't it? You have to push out a lot of information when you ask for the level of funding that Frontier did. They had to let everyone know what they were planning to get people to part with their hard earned cash! As I say I'm not that bothered but to me calling "Wings" a free update isn't right, it was a patch to add content that should have been in the game. The first proper update for me will be Powerplay as it genuinely is adding a whole pile of new content (at least I hope it is!). Splitting hairs maybe but that's how I see it.
 

Distance

Distance
Tinman said:
The problem I have with this argument is that we only know this due to them being very open during development and sharing their design proposals. If they would have followed the "standard procedure" of developing games (AKA keeping quiet) we would have no idea about what would have been or not been in the game. The amount of "not finished" comments would probably have been far less then...

No wonder they've decided to keep things more to themselves lately...have you seen a design proposal for the upcoming expansions for example? Nope and I doubt we will ever see them to be honest for this very reason. ;)
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I do understand don't get me wrong. We are almost at 1.3 though and the mission system which should be one of the main parts of the game is barely function. We have a passenger ship with no use as well.

Sorry I'm not trying to be negative and I know the dlcs will come in chunks but I'd prefer them to put some furniture in the house before they start work on the conservatory and loft conversion ;)
 

Tinman

Tinman
Philip Coutts said:
Ahhh, but this is the double edged nature of Kickstarters as a whole isn't it? You have to push out a lot of information when you ask for the level of funding that Frontier did. They had to let everyone know what they were planning to get people to part with their hard earned cash! As I say I'm not that bothered but to me calling "Wings" a free update isn't right, it was a patch to add content that should have been in the game. The first proper update for me will be Powerplay as it genuinely is adding a whole pile of new content (at least I hope it is!). Splitting hairs maybe but that's how I see it.
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I agree that wings really should have been in the first release...releasing without it was...interesting.

However, it was an update and it was free...therefore a free update. ;)
 

Tinman

Tinman
Distance said:
I do understand don't get me wrong. We are almost at 1.3 though and the mission system which should be one of the main parts of the game is barely function. We have a passenger ship with no use as well.

Sorry I'm not trying to be negative and I know the dlcs will come in chunks but I'd prefer them to put some furniture in the house before they start work on the conservatory and loft conversion ;)
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Doing one thing doesn't exclude the other.

Remember that they increased the dev team after launch specifically to be able to do both at the same time. Before launch the ED dev team was roughly 70-80 people according to an interview with David. After the increase they are now "100+" according to Michael. I'm guessing about half the company (120).

It wouldn't surprise me if 2/3 of the total workforce is still working mostly on the core game (the same number of people who worked on it for the first 2 years. 1/3 might be working on the expansion.

Purely speculative of course and in reality it's probably a lot more overlap between expansions/core in terms of development workforce...all depending on what the needs are at any given time.
 

Tinman

Tinman
Philip Coutts said:
Patch ;)
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As you said: "Splitting hairs". ;)

And personally I don't think "patch" is accurate when bigger features/ships are added in (no matter if they "should have been there from the start".). "Patch" to me is rather minor affairs, basically the x.0x patches we are getting between major releases.
 
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Cymrygg

C
all good things come to those that wait keep up the good work and looking forward to powerplay

Kiwi's aren't flightless birds anymore
 

Dym

Dym
Tinman said:
As you said: "Splitting hairs". ;) And personally I don't think "patch" is accurate when bigger features/ships are added in (no matter if they "should have been there from the start".). "Patch" to me is rather minor affairs, basically the x.0x patches we are getting between major releases.
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Tinman, i would agree with you 100% but FD canceled the offline mode, do you remember? so wings was a necessary "patch" because of this decision. sigleplayer like me would rather see content updates ;)
 
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Tinman

Tinman
Dym said:
Tinman, i would agree with you 100% but FD canceled the offline mode, do you remember? so wings was a necessary "patch" because of this decision. sigleplayer like me would rather see content updates ;)
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Yes, as I've already said many times, Wings should have been there from the start. That still doesn't change anything IMO since "patch" implies something far less than the scope of these major builds. The term "patch" comes from "patching something up". In other words fixing something already existing that was broken. When it it comes to Wings for example the functionality didn't even exist before that update so there was nothing to "patch". Wings was new functionality added on top of everything else. That is why I think update is more accurate...

At the end of the day this discussion is totally pointless though since it's just schematics. ;)
 

Distance

Distance
I do agree with you Tinman just chucking out some opinions :)

We all know they don't have the artists and designers moved to fixing code bugs or tech support ;)
 

Distance

Distance
Tinman said:
"So say we all." :D



Well...we can at least hope that is the case! :eek:
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I've been reading the old newsletters from the start and there's a lot of things that are designed but haven't been implemented yet :

Pantherthreequarter05_copy.JPG

:)
 
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