3 Tage nach Release öffnet der Public Test Server (PTS)
Feiern nach dem erfolgreichen Wildstar Release? Nein Danke.
Man hat ja bekanntlich Großes vor, wie man aus dem Interview von Jeremy Gaffney entnehmen kann und wurde auch mehrfach an anderer Stelle betont.
Bereits 3 Tage nach Release wird der Public Test Server eröffnet werden.
16 folgende Patches warten auf die Veröffentlichung. An ihnen wurde das letzte halbe Jahr fleissig gearbeitet und Feinschliff betrieben.
Es sollen monatliche Updates kommen und auch die Raids müssen getestet werden. Immerhin dauert es mehrere Monate, solche zu entwickeln. Mit dem Feedback der Tester geht dann die Feinarbeit der Entwickler los.
Man darf gespannt sein, ob der Plan der Entwickler aufgehen wird. Denn laut dem Interview sollen dem Spieler Inhalte im monatlichen Rythmus geliefert werden. In der Vergangenheit folgten auf die großen Versprechungen leider oft keine Taten.
JG: Two or three days after launch we’ll get the PTS (Public Test Server) up with Drop One. We call them Drops and we have Drops of various sizes queued up. One nice thing will be having the PTS up and that’ll be nice from a stability standpoint, because the Drops will get a month of testing. Drop One is already actually locked and it’s going through localization and all that kind of stuff now. I walked with the development heads through the next sixteen monthly updates in game the other day—they’re not done of course, or we’d just ship ‚em. You have to have pre-pro(duction) on all of this stuff. If you don’t, you screw yourself.
One of the biggest fallacies in our business is, “Oh, you can just launch and then use a patch and just stick everything in there.” No. If you want to do a raid, you better have it in concept long before it goes to generating the assets, the room layout, the encounter layout, before you bring your first round of testers who then tell you everything sucks and you tear out half of what you did in the first part. Then there’s the iteration stage where you then tune it, and itemize it, and deploy it – that’s an 8 month process. People think you can just stick stuff in, but you pay for it if you do that.
JG: We’ve spent the last six months on monthly updates. We haven’t had a lot of hoopla about it because we wanted to make sure we could do it. We don’t like promising stuff we can’t do and I’m sure somewhere we’ll screw up and it’ll be five weeks or something like that. The long and the short of it is that A, a lot of it’s in process and B, half the team is reactive and they’re there just to make sure that existing stuff gets better. If you’re committed to taking your worst elements and turning them into your best elements on a monthly basis, I think that’s a pretty good algorithm for making a decent game over time.
(entnommen aus: WildStar Interviews: Countdown to Launch With Jeremy Gaffney von MMORPG.com)
