Has it Really Been a Year Since a Beta Release?

[Fidd]

Originally Posted by BrendaEM

It isn't a question of how many developers.

The Forest had a small team, too, and look at how they did updates: https://theforest.fandom.com/wiki/Updates

This is likely consistent with many Steam games, under development.

I'm not sure that other games are necessarily comparable, when one considers the sheer number of individual controls involved and the complexity of the systems involved. Aside from a spacecraft, one of the most complicated vehicles in the world - is a submarine!

What's caused this long interval, I think, is simply the scale of the undertaking. Yes a quicker dev-cycle could easily have arisen, but in doing so they'd be completely constrained to much less ambitious content. They'd simply never have had the time to research, plan, code, de-bug and retest what I presume is a vast new amount of code, and to do so in exactly the required balance of providing an interesting new role, making the competent discharge of that role an asset to the wide crew, whilst not wrecking what we expect of the wider game in the process. If the only criticism is that they took a bit long to do it, then I'd say they'd have done very well indeed.

It seems to me to be a little unfair to be criticising the devs for producing content you've not as yet seen, and are therefore by definition, unable to quantify or qualify. I also think that doing so is profoundly unhelpful if the effect of such criticism were to be to dissuade the devs from making ambitious choices in future, on occasion?