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How are is the staff so fast?


adormitul

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A common misconception, not supported by facts.

 

I suppose not countered with facts either. I wouldn't full on say they ignored "major issues" of the game, but a few semi big ones? surely. How long has 16 man big bugged? how long did it take to fix chapter issue romance flags or letting characters finish it? IE imp agent chapter X? Letting a major economy exploit go on for 6 weeks? etc. etc.

 

Maybe im wrong anyway, that preview glitch prevents people seeing what cartel market items there buying so that's surely a major issue.

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First off like others have said, they didn't start two months ago.

 

Secondly,

 

By ignoring all major issues in the game.

 

I laughed my butt off when I came back and in the first 10 minutes of playing I got the dead enemy frozen standing upright bug that I first encountered at launch 5 years ago. Not saying that's a major issue, but a sign of the general quality and polish this game has become known for. At this point they've taken out all of the good and complex elements out to give us a mediocre single player experience.

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I suppose not countered with facts either. I wouldn't full on say they ignored "major issues" of the game, but a few semi big ones? surely. How long has 16 man big bugged? how long did it take to fix chapter issue romance flags or letting characters finish it? IE imp agent chapter X? Letting a major economy exploit go on for 6 weeks? etc. etc.

 

Maybe im wrong anyway, that preview glitch prevents people seeing what cartel market items there buying so that's surely a major issue.

 

I meant nothing by it... it's a quote that GO-TO from KoTOR 2 says.

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Hey, this is Bioware Austin after all...

 

While I did laugh at that, it's not a matter of whether it is smart, but rather what is actually feasible

 

It takes many months for a new developer to start becoming reasonably productive on an existing system like that, probably on the high side already due to the mess the engine is in. And that is with a whole studio of people around to educate them. They might be able to have senior developers working remotely, as they are already competent but to outsource an entire team would be very difficult without very fast and effective communication between remote teams (and we all know how BW does with communication). And believe it or not, but the cheap software houses out of India and China are even worse at it than BW in general.

 

If you want to know what it takes to run multiple remote teams, check out Star Citizen. They have 4 offices around the world, and the amount of tool integration, data transfer etc. they got going on is incredible, with an extensive production and devops crew just to make sure everything gets where it needs to go.

 

This is far beyond the demonstrated abilities of BW Austin.

 

Some stuff can be outsourced, like CS or forum management, but the core developers? I can't see it.

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Outsourcing software development on a proprietary (more or less) engine?

 

Not a chance. Doesn't even make sense.

 

I'm assuming you're not a developer. There are many aspects of a release that can be created independent of the engine. Consider that the graphics and audio elements are very time consuming, probably more so than the actual coding. And there are tools to add these visual and audio elements together into a composite scene.

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No way it was 2 months.

 

But I give them some credit anyway... they do seem to be pretty good at pumping out story and I think they proved their efficiency in doing that with the chapter a month phase.

 

That said, it's hard to deny that most other aspects of the game have been pushed aside in the process of their story focus. When SWTOR eventually dies, they should take a bunch of the story guys and have them make single-player RPGs. They'd probably be great at it and that's not even meant as a snide comment about the state of group content in SWTOR. Single-player storytelling seems to be something their staff is good at. Combat mechanics are a little rough, but I've never been huge into MMO combat in general.

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They probably made all the chapters at once, and just split it up, so that it would seem like a new expansion. I still think it would have been smarter to give us one chapter a month, so we always have something new, and thus buy themselves more time to work on more. Now, who knows how long we'll have to wait for new things. It'll be like old times, where we get a new thing, finish it in under a month and then wait for 9 or 10 months before they announce something new.
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