Thursday 9 April 2009

Six months on and are we now ready for release?

Well we're now six months or so into the life span of WAR and we can pretty much now stop with the "Well it's just new" excuses (not that anyone really did recently). We finally have the missing careers but sadly no sign of our missing cities. Is WAR now at a stage where you would release it or was it released on time?

I think everyone agrees that the release was decided by EA to get in before WoW's expansion regardless of the state of the game and while it went relatively smoothly all things told, the game overall was still very rough around the edges. I'm guessing a lot of what we're seeing is what was planned in the background before it was cut.

The game itself is starting to feel as finished as an MMO as it can be, the big bugs are getting squished and the game itself is feeling more responsive and less clunky. There's still silly little things that can be added i feel (characters weight for example... as a Black Orc in full heavy armour when I jump and land on the ground I make the tiniest little skip and noise on the ground, the same my shaman does, characters seem to lack substance to them). Of course we wouldn't have the same level of testing *coughs* as we've had over the last six months of the game had it still be in closed beta for longer then a couple of months of open beta.

I do feel that we're finally starting to get somewhere with WAR, we might be a couple of patches away yet, but WAR is almost ready for public release... Six months after it was released