A thought exercise. Imagine if Frontier had announced this for the 2020 roadmap earlier this year:
CMDR's,
We at Frontier have been so excited to see Elite Dangerous become a viable long term game that we all know and love. We have been learning a great deal along the way and we have come to recognize a tension between incrementally improving existing features within the game while having the freedom to make larger changes that will require more time and effort. In order to balance these two sometimes conflicting goals for Elite we are announcing changes to the way we develop the game.
Alpha team is focused on making the existing gameplay elements better. Your feedback will be essential to helping Alpha team to make the current game more enjoyable. Look forward to a series of upcoming livestreams and forum threads where we will discuss this team's core areas of focus for 2019 which will most likely include:
We cannot officially confirm the existence of Bravo team. But if there were a secret special squad of Frontier developers working on larger changes and new content for the game, you might want to mark the latter half of 2020 in your calendars. However, we can neither confirm nor deny that Bravo team exists. You will be hearing nothing of their work for now, but be assured when it does arrive it will be awesome! (Assuming they do exist, which they may or may not).
We feel that this model could work well going forward. Once the new features are added to the game, (the alleged) Bravo team can move onto newer things while Alpha team works with the community to make these new features even better based on your feedback.
Look forward to hearing more specifics about what Alpha team will be up to this year in a livestream coming soon!
See you in the black CMDR's!
Imaginary CM
Now that we have imagined this beautiful alternate reality for a few moments, who here thinks that model would have been VERY exciting news for the community? Instead of watching streams about flying around with a new CMDR accomplishing little (sorry Will but its true) we could already be working with Alpha team to address the areas of the game we want to see improved while we wait for the new shiny stuff in 2020.
Imagine how Frontier could even build more trust with the community. If a feature doesn't turn out right when it first ships in 2020 it would be less of a big deal because Frontier will have demonstrated that Alpha team will work with the community to address their feedback. Frontier has a reputation for abandoning features in Elite after they are half-finished. This would totally put that reputation behind them for good! At the same time Frontier is free to innovate and create new content in the game without having the community looking over their shoulder the whole time which totally could stifle creativity.
Does anyone else think this could have been a better way to go? I see this approach as a win for everyone.
CMDR's,
We at Frontier have been so excited to see Elite Dangerous become a viable long term game that we all know and love. We have been learning a great deal along the way and we have come to recognize a tension between incrementally improving existing features within the game while having the freedom to make larger changes that will require more time and effort. In order to balance these two sometimes conflicting goals for Elite we are announcing changes to the way we develop the game.
Alpha team is focused on making the existing gameplay elements better. Your feedback will be essential to helping Alpha team to make the current game more enjoyable. Look forward to a series of upcoming livestreams and forum threads where we will discuss this team's core areas of focus for 2019 which will most likely include:
- The new commander experience
- Powerplay
- The Missions system
- The BGS
We cannot officially confirm the existence of Bravo team. But if there were a secret special squad of Frontier developers working on larger changes and new content for the game, you might want to mark the latter half of 2020 in your calendars. However, we can neither confirm nor deny that Bravo team exists. You will be hearing nothing of their work for now, but be assured when it does arrive it will be awesome! (Assuming they do exist, which they may or may not).
We feel that this model could work well going forward. Once the new features are added to the game, (the alleged) Bravo team can move onto newer things while Alpha team works with the community to make these new features even better based on your feedback.
Look forward to hearing more specifics about what Alpha team will be up to this year in a livestream coming soon!
See you in the black CMDR's!
Imaginary CM
Now that we have imagined this beautiful alternate reality for a few moments, who here thinks that model would have been VERY exciting news for the community? Instead of watching streams about flying around with a new CMDR accomplishing little (sorry Will but its true) we could already be working with Alpha team to address the areas of the game we want to see improved while we wait for the new shiny stuff in 2020.
Imagine how Frontier could even build more trust with the community. If a feature doesn't turn out right when it first ships in 2020 it would be less of a big deal because Frontier will have demonstrated that Alpha team will work with the community to address their feedback. Frontier has a reputation for abandoning features in Elite after they are half-finished. This would totally put that reputation behind them for good! At the same time Frontier is free to innovate and create new content in the game without having the community looking over their shoulder the whole time which totally could stifle creativity.
Does anyone else think this could have been a better way to go? I see this approach as a win for everyone.
