2008-05-14: More From Cal

More From Cal

Calvin Crowner

14 May 2008 12:25:25 EST

I’ve seen the slew of questions that arose from my last post, so I wanted to take the time to respond to a smattering of them:

What is the size of the team?

I will answer this as I answered the post to 4gamer.net: "As many as we need, but not as many as I'd like." I will tell you simply, I really enjoy the team as it is. The team relates well, plays well, and everyone enjoys their job.

Raining down fire on malcontents, or contributing to a legendary tale of good and evil that's lasted longer than any other community … yes, we do love our jobs.

Along with this subject, you may know that we lost a few folks in the transition from Redwood Shores. Fortunately we've been able to find other talent who both love the game, and are passionate about being part of the team. So what are we doing with these new people?

Three things: Fixing, designing, and training.

I will tell you we recently had to figure out where to put some new team members coming in next week without sitting them in Draconi's lap.

Next:

Why don't you tell us what's on the schedule?

Simply because the schedule is subject and subjected to changes every six hours to six days, and in the case of the Epic event ... six MONTHS. We discussed the content for the Epic Event last October, and had to postpone it. We are still on target for the bulk of the content by late May, and it's going to be a prelude to something realm-changing.

Some of the team saw the new art last week, and the Art Director himself was quite impressed. Our concept guys leapt at the chance to create this new content. Look for it in June.

"Hey! Wait a minute! You said in late May!" I just proved my point.

Why does it take so long to provide ?

We are constantly going through levels of refactoring while we're implementing fixes and content. Often, problems we expected to take several hours can extend to a couple of days. To make something worthwhile, and to fix more than we break takes time. We've actually been getting the Evil Eye from QA a lot the last few days. So we would rather make sure it's fixed -- when at all possible -- before releasing it.

In many ways you have all provided your own answers: "I've seen this for years and it's still broken." Historically, and presently the constant demand for content sometimes outweighs the time and resources to fix old features and systems. We'll try to do our best.

Not only for the community but also for the respect and love of Ultima itself, that’s what keeps us pressing forward. I'll try to avoid the kumbaya moment, but there is so much behind the scenes that we can't share and at times we tend to draw blood from our bottom lip because we can't.

I know you have all been very patient with multiple iterations of the Ultima Online team concerning bug fixes and content delivery. All I can say is thank you, and bow respectfully.

Finally:

What about KR? What about SA?

As far as Kingdom Reborn is concerned – We have a couple of fixes going in this publish: walking as a ghost across the bridge in the Wind dungeon, and a legacy toggle issue with pink tiles around cave entrances. I’m not a fan of the color pink, sorry about the delay on this. There are a few others, but know we’re still working on more goodies. Also, we’re still investigating most of the topics discussed here on the boards. To this end, in the near future we’d like to do some server load/stress testing. We’re discussing between 20-25 players chasing a few devs and GMs around. Please be prepared to share frame rates, machine and OS specs.

Also know all new content will be updated for both Kingdom Reborn and the Legacy clients for the Epic Event.

Sighs. So much for the light publish.

Begins to walk away...

"WHAT ABOUT Stygian Abyss?! ..." He pauses slightly, without turning, a mild chuckle pressing the corners of the room, “We announced the expansion over a year ago, and you should be hearing more news about it soon.” He continues a slow shuffle into a dark room, most likely to be eaten by a grue.

Door closes ... footsteps fade. Following you open the door to discover a beach at sunset. There is a blue page here.