Major kudos for not wanting to release a buggy game. It gives them 31/2 more months to polish up, hopefully everything will work out for them. 

Dammit. I knew they were gonna pull this crap.

There will never be an end to the polishing...the game is never going to be perfect, and waiting for it to be perfect means delaying the launch forever. I'd rather play it now than wait.

They need to pull a Spore and release a character creator. One of the few MMOs where it would make sense. I'd even lay down $10 on one if it acted as a downpayment on the full game.

Guys Im in the beta on this one, and let me tell you it is worth the wait. That and it needs the extra time.

I really can't say more due to the NDA. But I will say I am already very impressed and that is rare for when I am beta testing.

Originally posted by Slackerboy

Guys Im in the beta on this one, and let me tell you it is worth the wait. That and it needs the extra time.

 

I really can't say more due to the NDA. But I will say I am already very impressed and that is rare for when I am beta testing.

I know, and do not ask me how I come to know.

Champions Online is a must buy for me.  Decision made.

Originally posted by Brain-dead

Dammit. I knew they were gonna pull this crap.

There will never be an end to the polishing...the game is never going to be perfect, and waiting for it to be perfect means delaying the launch forever. I'd rather play it now than wait.

I'm also not thrilled about the wait, but i'd rather them get the launch right and not have alot of people screaming "failcom". And i'm currently not playing anything waiting for CO (mostly because everything i've tried I havent liked).

I'm glad that they had the guts to pushed the release back. However, from the lack of feed back it didn't realy seem like it was going to be ready for a july launch; so then stupidthing is what made them think that it was ready in the first place.  How hard is it toconclude if a game is ready for launch? I imagine pretty hard if the people in charge hardly play their own game.

I'm not in the Beta for CO, so it's hard for me to make a judgement about what this means, but I think we're going to start to see the current MMO development model collapse.  Development is taking longer and longer, and the market means that new MMOs are less and less likely to be "successful" (however you judge that.)  There's only so much time and money a company can invest into a game before they reach the point where no amount of revenue accrued from sales and subscriptions will allow them to break even.  At some point, the escalating timescales and development budgets have to level out.

CO has a leg-up on most in that it's built on a modified version of a previous game, and I think that that's where the market as a whole needs to head.  It's hard for a company to invest in both systems/engines and content, so I forsee a shift in the market towards a few companies creating engines or systems that they then on-sell to content builders.  We've already seen this with systems like Kynapse and SpeedTree, and MUDs benefitted from the same general structure (though of course it's hard to draw close analogies between MUDs and MMOs.)

Ultimately, I think that'll be positive for the gaming market, and for gamers.  Consumers will know that MMO X is built on the Sillyputty Engine, with content developed by the team from MMO Y with an IP license from film/book Z.  That'll allow the development cycle to shorten, and for testing and bugfixing to be partitioned out-if you get a number of robust engines on the market, content developers only need to worry about holes in their story, not in their code.