What happened to Beastmaster?

[Menriq]

Deadlines are important. You know this if you've ever so much as gone to a place of education. Without deadlines, humans often just kinda, don't do stuff. Since there is no pressure to get it done. Even if they don't release the deadline publicly, they have an internal one (we usually know what it is because we know when they released comparable content in every other expansion ).

It tends to be completed months before that deadline normally. As you said, they wouldn't set a deadline they were not certain they could make, so if it's a new content type they don't always put an exact timeframe.

Anyone who has played Blizzard games remember the saying "It will be done when it's done". This was because they released it when they felt it was ready to ship. However, shareholders, like everything else, don't see things the same way. This is why things get released when they shouldn't, not because the developers think it's ready.

Quality Assurance. As a developer you must know how prevalent bugs are and what games are like if they are released riddled with bugs like Cyberpunk was.

See my quote above. If they felt the game was ready to go, they wouldn't have been in crunch time. They were timeboxed, like I said is an issue when you give a date and are forced to meet it, instead of giving a date when it's ready.

As you said, factors like concept art/story design > models/textures > placement of those models in a world to design the world > designing and creating the story and quests - you're looking at what is something like an 8 month process (this was mentioned in dev panels) and they also have to QA it to iron out thousands of bugs. So the bulk of it is taken up by that time anyway and would only be made faster by, say, a few months where they skip QA and let you play it riddled with critical bugs.

Faster by a few months is a pretty big order of magnitude. We've also seen with so much QA, bugs are getting through anyways that should be caught pretty quickly in QA. So either QA isn't doing well, or the timebox is causing issues. Pick your poison.

Where there are no critical bugs, there is value in a consistent schedule. It keeps it consistent, not just for developers but also for players who can predict the cycle and plan ahead when the subscribe. I personally like this, and many others do too.

Every 2 weeks or every month is a consistent schedule too.

[Jeeqbit]

Anyone who has played Blizzard games remember the saying "It will be done when it's done". This was because they released it when they felt it was ready to ship. However, shareholders, like everything else, don't see things the same way. This is why things get released when they shouldn't, not because the developers think it's ready.

While it's true that a developer would usually say "it'll be done when it's done", once you've made the content before and have a good system for it, you can at least predict the max time it will likely take.

It's also true that there are companies that will say "release this content on schedule" even though it's not ready. That happened with Cyberpunk, obviously. It also happened with 1.0 of this game (many developers did not feel it was ready). Both were obviously a disaster.

But what I meant was the scheduling is very generous... they are done MONTHS in advance. In fact, when 5.0 was about to release (Shadowbringers), they said 5.1 was done! They actually said the first patch, due to release around 4 months later, was done! And that prevents the issue altogether.

Faster by a few months is a pretty big order of magnitude.

But as I said it prevents the issues that happened with Cyberpunk and 1.0.

We've also seen with so much QA, bugs are getting through anyways that should be caught pretty quickly in QA. So either QA isn't doing well, or the timebox is causing issues.

Their dev panels explained they reduce bugs from thousands down to a small number. The small number remaining is due to the timebox, otherwise they'd obviously have fixed them instead of listing them as "Known Issues". But most likely if they were given an extra month, they would still eventually find a new bug, because people always find bugs in software even years after development is complete.