kuroari wrote: what do we wanna see more? R2 come out officially or a Master Forager title
(though i agree some rewards would be nice)
-awaiting a smart-aleck reply,
Here's my smart aleck reply...
The problem is that we get mixed/noised messages. The titles change was announced a while ago. At the time, it was stated that it was a relatively easy task, involving side modifications, XML files and so on. Later, it was said that there were technical issues with them (I guess, it wasn't that easy, translation problems, etc. so it was put on hold)
While I am aware that after the several lay-offs Nevrax has a very reduced number of developers (most of them may have gone) and they need to focus on specific tasks, one gets the impression that any "apparently easy" task becomes an herculean one, spawning months.
As an imagination exercise, sometimes when I see a player suggestion, I try to evaluate the manpower and schedule it would take Nevrax to implement it. There are awesome suggestions, e.g. regarding OPs, extensions, etc. that would make me go "whoa, I wish it was available!" in other circumstances, now I rather say "there's no way Nevrax could implement this, and if they happened to, it wouldn't be live before 2008, put it on the 'not for the moment, but something we would like to consider' folder".
The future seems to be a) the ring Q2-2006 if not delayed -- almost all features have been delayed at least once -- b) Spires, bugfixes and minor modifications TBA and c) who knows, prolly in 2007.
Nevrax manpower seems to be nowhere were it was, nothing to do with the original team, and if you look at the feature set implemented in the periods 2001-2004 and 2004-2006 there is a huge difference. Starting with a budget of (for what I read) 15M and tens of developers, they conceived an awesome world with dozens of creatures, skills, craft patters, ecosystems, gameplay aspects, animations, etc. The features we got after (spring clean, bugged mounts, EP2, simplified outposts and barely nothing more) seem soo pale compared to the original game.
By the way, "Don't forget Jena is coming from the skies with her army of Karavan in orther to save us from the souleater".
I'm focusing on simple gameplay, features and extensions, and I would not even echo the frustrations of amazing Roleplayers I know that are frustrated by the lack of inmersive aspects, incoherent and reduced lore of the Atysian society and so on.
