Dersen Lowery
Narwhals Ate My Duck.
Narwhals Ate My Duck
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Posted - 2014.07.28 14:15:00 -
[3] - Quote
Who's been tagged to fill your old position as Senior Producer? Or are you folding the two peer positions back together and giving the role to CCP Ripley?
Since there's some confusion about this: A 6-week development schedule doesn't mean that any team has 5 1/2 weeks to develop and test a feature before it gets packaged up and shipped. It has two implications:
First, it frees the teams up to take as long as they need, because there will always be a release coming up when they're done. Releases are opportunities now, not the drop-everything-and-ship-what-you-have deadlines that they used to be (see the delay of the industry revamp from Kronos to Crius for example).
Second, it makes iterative development much easier when the iterations come quickly.
The second point is much more important. As popular as it is to talk about "turning EVE over to the players," what that means in practice is much more delicate planning and design and lots of tweaking and rethinking after release, because designing around scripted NPCs is much easier than designing around unscripted players. The exact thing that makes sandboxes exciting when they work makes it very hard to build a working sandbox. Just look at, say, sov nullsec. The essential problem is that you can make what seems like a big change only to see a relatively modest effect (say, the first nullsec ore rebalance), but what seems like a tiny change can have huge repercussions. Or maybe not. The only way to say for sure is to release the change into the wild and watch.
If you think PVE has no role to play, I would point to the transformation of lowsec by the introduction of Mordu's Legion NPCs, and the sudden value of their agents. The fact is that red-cross PVE puts ships in space, and it puts them in space in places other than the predictable stations and gates. It offers terrain in the form of gates, NPC ships and LCOs that varies according to the NPC spawning rules and the kindly attentions paid to NPCs by the guns of player ships. This is a powerful tool in any sandbox developer's tool chest.
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