Radio silence = Crunch time

You know that GGG are in full-blown all-hands-on-deck crunch mode when they don't announce anything for a week and a half. And I say let 'em cook. We'll get a proper announcement of the early access announcement livestream in the next week or so -- they said 30 days on September 30th, which would October 31st, so Happy Hallowe'en everybody! That should put the livestream itself on November 7th, just about a week ahead of the start of early access/closed beta.

That's just 25 more sleeps until Early Access! And it's torture. You can tell it's torture because people are losing their GD minds waiting. The tone on the forum gets more anxiety-filled with every day that passes without some new factoid about PoE2 emerging from, who cares, somewhere. Rampant baseless speculation abounds, with so many people apparently allowing their fears to consume them.

Well, take heart! In just eleven days, we'll know everything we need to know about the early access launch: how to get in, what the cost will be, whether our long-term support of the game will get us in for free, and what PoE's early access version will include in terms of acts of campaign, available classes and ascendancies, and what GGG will be including in this early version of the end game. We'll know whether we want to get in early, or wait until PoE2 is closer to fully finished.

Personally, I've already seen enough, and I'll be jumping in as early as I can. I waited out the original closed beta, only jumping in when open beta started, but I won't be making that mistake again. Even if I have to buy an early access supporter pack, I'll be there. Even if I don't have to, I may buy a supporter pack; it's not like there's point in my stopping now, eh?

So, to those of you with frayed nerves, I say calm your nerves. To those of you wanting to wait and see, I say that caution is a fine approach to any new game release, especially an early access release, and you'll have lots of time to get in later. And to those of you who can't wait to get in the game already, I say get as hyped as you like.

25 more sleeps...

I think I'd rather delay some than crunch. Much as I want PoE2, I'd rather some poor coders get to sleep and see family instead.

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Northern_Ronin wrote:

I think I'd rather delay some than crunch. Much as I want PoE2, I'd rather some poor coders get to sleep and see family instead.

I suppose I should clarify. I'm not saying that GGG have the kind of toxic crunch culture that we've seen in some other games companies. They've historically done a pretty good job of facilitating excellent work/life balance for their team. Outside of the launch window itself, when something like instance or server crashes will have them working overtime, I'm pretty confident that they're being sensible about the amount of time they're keeping everyone in the office.

I don't think we're going to see further delays, though. We'll find out for sure in a few weeks, but it certainly looks like the strategy is to meet their early access date by controlling the scope of what they're releasing rather than by fixing the amount of content and then trying to warp spacetime to make the schedule work.

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Northern_Ronin wrote:

I think I'd rather delay some than crunch. Much as I want PoE2, I'd rather some poor coders get to sleep and see family instead.

NO! THEY NEED TO WORK! I WANT MY POE 2 READY FOR NO NUT NOVEMBER!

Need to sleep? Drink some coffee or RedBull.
Wanna see your family? Organize a video call.
Hungry? Here, have some oatmeal.
Need to pee? Use a bucket or bottle.
Depressed? Have some chocolate.

YOUR CRUNCH IS MY SALVATION!

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Waitubold wrote:

I suppose I should clarify. I'm not saying that GGG have the kind of toxic crunch culture that we've seen in some other games companies.

To further further clarify, I didn't assume they did or intend to claim as such. I'm just saying I'm fine with delays to avoid even moderate crunch. I like the game, and want the people making it not burn out on a pointless deadline that sacrifices both release quality and the longevity of the workers.

Stilled hyped as heck for the release.

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Northern_Ronin wrote:

Stilled hyped as heck for the release.

Likewise, friend.

24 more sleeps...

hope they really read the bug report in the closed beta as the reason of the crunch

GGG is unfortunately in an unenviable position.

I think we all realize, at this point, that they're not ready to deliver what they wanted to deliver when they announced the November 15th EA launch point. Most of us would be understanding and accepting at the idea of another five-month slip - but we'd still be disappointed. We'd still be upset, irritated, and depressed our fix has gone from one month out to six months out. Given they've already hit us with one of those once, people's hype is tarnished as it is. As much as everybody with sense in their heads agrees that crunch is bad and needs to be avoided and we'd strongly prefer they didn't do any of it, there's also only so many times they can hit us with delays before nobody believes their launch dates anymore and there's no way to generate hype.

They are hugely incentivized to have their EA Supporter packs in place for the holiday season, and every time they announce a delay they take a huge bite out of their banked-up goodwill. I don't think they can announce another delay, much as everyone here and anywhere else the game is discussed knows they clearly want to. PoE2's been in development too long as it is, there's already more undercurrent in the community than anyone in GGG should like that the sequel is just vaporware nobody will ever see.

The unfortunate truth is that the answer isn't crunch or delays, it's that the company absolutely must get a grip on the scope creep. The five-month delay we already got was because the introduction of WASD movement necessitated redeveloping the entire game. They can't make another such discovery every five months. At some point they have to accept that they've made the best game they're gonna be able to make in the time people are prepared to give them and let us have it. WASD movement is a game-changer, an enormous deal I will argue was absolutely worth the extra five months of development...but it's hard to imagine anything else being as impactful.

As awful and anti-fun as it sounds? The devs are out of time for Revolutionary New Changes. I'm not sure the marketing situation could survive another big delay. It's time to admit defeat, feature-complete the game, lock in and polish what's there rather than push for more. Any future Revolutionary New Changes may have to wait for Path of Exile 3.

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1453R wrote:

The five-month delay we already got was because the introduction of WASD movement necessitated redeveloping the entire game.

Is there a citation for this? I can believe it added some time to the UX design but creating a twin stick ontop of their existing architecture shouldn't have been the most complex of tasks.

Unless they didn't have any of the animation work done I guess, but surely it was already there? Maybe not.

Either way I'm curious

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Draegnarrr wrote:

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1453R wrote:

The five-month delay we already got was because the introduction of WASD movement necessitated redeveloping the entire game.

Is there a citation for this? I can believe it added some time to the UX design but creating a twin stick ontop of their existing architecture shouldn't have been the most complex of tasks.

Unless they didn't have any of the animation work done I guess, but surely it was already there? Maybe not.

Either way I'm curious

No "here's a link" citation unfortunately because I don't keep that close a track, but I recall Mark mentioning in an interview that every enemy in PoE2 needed to be rebalanced and in some cases redesigned entirely for the new control scheme. Primarily because it turned out that players being able to move while skill-ing meant they abruptly became 100% immune to most melee mobs - the melee critters still hadda stop to swing, and by the time they stopped and swung the PC had moved out of the attack's range.

So they needed to engineer extra movement into every single melee critter to allow them to catch moving-while-skilling PCs, which necessitated looking at all the defensive options and calculations involving PCs again since the whole kiting game had changed and monsters were on the whole more accurate. Which in turn led to looking at gear again, and...

Yeah. Apparently the knock-on effects that chained out from changing to WASD were legion and in many cases totally unexpected. it was similar to all the niggling balance concerns that came up when they eliminated life from the passive tree, except on a vastly broader scale.