Has it Really Been a Year Since a Beta Release?

[BrendaEM]

Has it been a year since a Wolfpack beta release?

My friend and I were going to try Woldpack at a point, but I don't know if we'll still be around for the next release.

[Onkel Neal]

Take your vitamins, get more fish in your diet.

[BrendaEM]

It appears that you have so many people beta testing the updated the game, that you may have forgotten that the other faithful people who bought the game--might have been overlooked, as well as, yes potential buyers.

Isn't a year, a long time for in-development Steam to have between updates?

It's strange because, it's not like you aren't doing work--you aren't getting credit for it, nor are players getting to enjoy what you worked so hard for.

I think I get that there are a lot of nonindependent connected things in the game, but it's also normal to have milestones in game development.

Not to pick on it, but for instance, adding a submarine pen is cool, but if it isn't playable, in other words, if the player can't walk out and climb into the sub and ride it into the sunset, then perhaps it could have waited until you have a milestone release.

Just commenting on the Emperor's clothes.

[Fidd]

Personally I agree about the sub-pen, it seems to me a deal of work that ultimately served very little useful purpose. On the other hand, the scope and complexity of the changes made in the game proper are breath-taking, particularly on the engine-side, which greatly exceeded my expectations given the very small dev team. Frankly I'm astounded they've got as much done as they have. I realise that being told this will likely not assuage your frustration at the interval, however, the complexity of the changes and all the inter-relationships between different aspects of the diesel and engine operations, and of the bots sometimes operating them, has meant a truly formidable amount of bugs and unintended side-effects to deal with - and I only came into testing at the very tail end of it. Suffice to say, the content that's gone in since the beta will assuredly surprise and I think please you, and that if you're left with one or two questions, it'll be "How did 3 or so devs get all this done in the time?", and "how is this much new content still included in the original purchase price?".

I'm not sure, how much as a tester one is permitted to talk about, but I believe testing is available to all who apply - though in my case it took 6 months of writing to get approved - but I'd urge you to try, as the nearer the patch gets to release, the more likely it is I think that testers will be taken on board. I do think that as players learn to operate the new engines, there will be 3 weeks of utter mayhem on the lobbies, as captains adjust to the new realities of response-times from human operated engines, and the miscommunications that will inevitably arise. That said, as the player-base and captains shake-down the process, and drills required, the extra players on the boat will really add to the game experience, especially in games such as Frost and Duyfken.

Keep the faith!

[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.

[Jebberwocky]

I have been a software team lead for a while now and release trains can be a lot more complicated than meets the eye. Depending on how code is managed it's fairly easy to work yourself into being totally dependent on a major feature to work relatively bug free in order to release.

Once code works it's way into an integration branch (where all changes are more or less merged together in order to test) it's very hard to take it back out. For example in this case if the diesel engine implementation still has a lot of bugs you may simply be prevented from promoting code to release until those issues are solved.

This is especially true on smaller dev teams. It can be nearly a full time job to try and manage a project in order to meet regular cadence releases, and roadblocks causing significant delay are nearly a matter of course.

That's not to say there aren't plenty of ways to solve those problems, and perhaps the dev team could work to increase release frequency - however, it is usually at the cost of speed vs quality.

Do we want a stable game that is perfectly playable in it's current state, or a more rapid release schedule at the cost of more bugs in the release version of the game? The answer probably varies from player to player.

My thoughts (read: ramblings and assumptions) are - it might be a good idea if the Wolfpack dev team was to open up the beta test branches to steam in general. Steam's beta features are quite well implemented and it would satisfy the people that want to play the cutting edge as well as those who want the most stable experience. It also eases playing the beta multiplayer experience as there is no manual forum process to "opt in" to play with your friends.

Re: sub pens - on a complex project many devs are specialized. Some may be modelers, UI engineers, implementers of mechanics, animators, etc. When hung up on a major feature you may only have one dev capable of (or specialized in) working on a specific feature. It's way too easy to have too many cooks in the kitchen when coding - so in this case it's great to have other devs working on other features.

In this case the modelers may be free because all models are complete. So now that we have free time for our modelers lets get sub pens out of the way! This is how software gets done in a timely manner almost across the board.

Just my 2 cents.



Cheers to the dev team, love the game!

P.S. I would still like more frequent releases too!

[Aktungbby]

Jebberwocky! Nice first post.

[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?

[Lignite]

Which it will be ready, when its ready.