The Letter is up

[Delmontyb]

The 2 week delay is a real bummer. I was looking forward to this patch way back in the mid spring.
Now it seems the delay is going to be nearly 3 months.
I seem to recall Yoshi saying the updates would be every 2 weeks for small patches and 2-3 months for the larger ones.

So all in all we are looking at 5-6 months since work on this patch started.
Is it just me, or does it seem like this game is going to take more time to fix, than it would to start from scratch? Well the new animations and changes to that attack system look promising, still mixed feelings about the speed of the auto attacks especially on pug.

It's just you.

Sadly many people think that 5 - 6 months of game design is a long time, when really it isn't. I'm not defending SE here, just trying to put game development in perspective... It takes a lot of time... Start over from scratch (my definition is not using any assets already created) would push development 5 years out on an MMO, typically 3 years on a AAA title.

Right now 1.18 is in that critical stage, testing, and fixing bugs, it sounds like it's going to be a big update, so that means more can go wrong, and sometimes finding bugs is a pain, because they might spend weeks testing and not find a bug that we find in a few minutes. It's just the way things work, changing one thing can have effects in other areas that you didn't see coming.

It's just the nature of game development.

[Gidonoidon_Sur]

Clarify with me. Because I think people are setting their expectations too high for this upcoming patch (or I am setting mine too low, which is possible). This patch will introduce auto-attack, removal of stamina bar, and 2 new dungeons. That is pretty much it, right? Materia, job system, balancing of stats, all that stuff will be later, right?

[Anty]

It's just you.

Sadly many people think that 5 - 6 months of game design is a long time, when really it isn't. I'm not defending SE here, just trying to put game development in perspective... It takes a lot of time... Start over from scratch (my definition is not using any assets already created) would push development 5 years out on an MMO, typically 3 years on a AAA title.

Right now 1.18 is in that critical stage, testing, and fixing bugs, it sounds like it's going to be a big update, so that means more can go wrong, and sometimes finding bugs is a pain, because they might spend weeks testing and not find a bug that we find in a few minutes. It's just the way things work, changing one thing can have effects in other areas that you didn't see coming.

It's just the nature of game development.

i think (i dunno though) that the balancing or skills, etc. etc. in addition to new effects also keeping in mind the further job changes is what makes it that difficult.