2000-04-27: Comments from tOAD

Comments from tOAD

Apr 27 2000 2:55PM

This was originally posted to Development at uo.com.

So I’m quietly minding my own business when someone from the Community Relations department walks in and says, "You have to do comments from the Dev team this week." The words scramble in the air around my office, and by the time they finally hit my ears and transmogrify themselves into understandable sounds they say, "Let’s go to lunch." I like this. Lunch is nice. My office has a nice surrounding nebula of airwaves that transform things that sound like work into things that I want to do. For example, when Runesabre comes into my office and say,s "Sorry, you’re going to have to do a million things deep in the code today." I hear, "Dude, you get to play with the code." It’s a cool office.

Unfortunately, I’m losing it. My office that is. Well, I’m probably losing it in general, but today I’m losing my office. Or tomorrow. Or early next week. The point is, I have to pack up all my books, pens, pencils, little scraps of paper marked ‘important - don’t throw away’ but with no other information on them, two computers, my stereo, and my basketball, and carry it to a new office. This scares me. What if my new office doesn’t have this cool surrounding nebula of airwaves? What if work actually starts to sound like work? This could be bad.

But at the same time it’s like UO (as so many things in my life are). See, UO is changing, and I think for the better. Renaissance is going to make the game, at least in my mind, very different. I’m excited by this prospect in exactly the opposite way that I’m excited about a new office. I think about the new office and I’m worried. I think about the new Britannia and I’m thrilled. The way players play the game is going to change. And don’t get the impression that I’m looking at this through a rose colored monitor, I know there are going to be some problems. In fact, that’s one of the exciting things about it. When someone comes into this office and says "We’ve got some things to fix." I hear, "Grab a coke and some cookies, we’re in for a wild ride!"

So, with some trepidation I’m starting to put things in boxes, label them so I remember which shelf to scatter them about randomly on, and say goodbye to my old home. But things are actually looking up. You see this morning I had to go check the network connections in my new office and I saw Jalek moving into the office across the hall from me. Someone said, "Hey, you guys can throw the football back and forth across the hallway!" And I heard, "Everything’s gonna be all right."

Tough choices	Apr 12 2000 4:28PM  

I have finally been forced to make that decision that almost every game developer has to make at some point in their career. It isn’t an easy one. As I’ve stated since I took over the helm of Lead Designer with Toad at my side, quality and dependability are my goals for this team. I think we’ve done a good job over the last six months of delivering what we’ve promised in a timely manner. Renaissance is a big deal for me. Actually, it’s the biggest project of my gaming career to date.

It is of the utmost importance to me that the UO: Renaissance update is of the highest quality, and that it come within a reasonable timeframe. As you may already know (and as is often the case even when you have a team as good as this one) a bizarre train of events have conspired against our efforts to finalize our testing and we have to make some tough choices about what we can keep and what we must remove from the update to make our dates. In order to meet our goals of quality and timeliness, we have decided to delay The Faction System. The reason for this decision is two-fold. First, The Faction System was not part of the original UO: Renaissance plan. Second, the system is so complex that it would easily add another 3-5 days to QA’s testing schedule. Sure, we could give it the “once over” and boot it out the door... but we won’t. I believe The Faction System can be one of the most engaging game systems in UO, but without the proper polish it would merely turn into a system that only “tried”. You don’t want that. We don’t want that.

However, the positive result of this is that QA can finish up their testing on UO:Renaissance sans The Faction System, and we can continue to work on it immediately after the coming update. This gives us time to make those last little changes that will turn it into something fantastic, when it might have otherwise been merely adequate.

You will see The Faction System return to Test Center immediately after the UO:R update. It will not fall to the wayside. It will not be forgotten. We’re extremely excited about this system. As many of you who were on Test Center know, the basic framework is already in place and working. I’ve seen some great input from many players on it, and we will be considering ways to improve issues such as reputation, rank, combat, and politics.

In the meantime, this team is focused on polishing UO:R and responding to any concerns that arise from it. It’s a tough choice, but we’re down to the wire, and it’s the right one.

Anthony Castoro (SunSword) Lead Designer, Ultima Online

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