CVG: Roper on the Ropes
Computer and Video Games website has just published up the full version of the interview with Bill Roper where he talks about the mistakes that FSS made with the game.
Bill Roper talks about things like taking on too many things at once, as well as a lack of testing.
“As for development issues,” continues Roper, “we simply tried to do too much with the game. Vista, DirectX 10, being both a single-player boxed product and a multiplayer online game, a simultaneous launch in seven languages across Europe, the US, and South East Asia, and creating our own fully-featured online destination on top of all that.
“We’ll take the blame for not getting enough testing done while working to meet our committed ship date. There were so many issues that came up just before launch that just compounded the things we were working on, right up until the game launched, that we didn’t get fixed. Or that we thought had been fixed, but came up again when we had tens of thousands of players online concurrently.”
Issues like items for level 70 characters being dropped by mobs, when the level cap is 50 - as if the loot’s taking the piss out of you - was one example of the maddening wrongness that riled players into such a frenzy they coined the scathing term ‘flagshipped’, and the hypercritical ‘fansite’ www.flagshipped.com.
Bill also talks of whether they were pushed into the release date.
“Yes and no,” claims Roper. “We made a commitment to ship the game on a certain date, and that decision was made jointly between us and our publishing partners. We wanted to stay true to that date because of all the marketing and sales work that had been put into a timed launch.
“We also thought we could get everything completed by that date. In a different situation, we could have said, ‘Let’s delay this until we get these last things hammered out.’ But that’s not as easy as people think when you don’t have the hundreds of millions behind you that a publisher’s development team does.”
Enjoy 
