Rethinking Quarterly Game Updates
While it was never officially announced, you may recall that Game Updates shifted from monthly to a 3 month cycle in the beginning of 2009. The game-breaking Fighter Revamp was stripped from Game Update 51, which was eventually cancelled. Its features were released as two small hotfixes. So it was up to the massive Game Update 52: Monument and Might to finally kick off the current 3-month release schedule in May 2009 with 3 new dungeons, 80 new quests, player-written books, Research Assistants, and a rework of Spell Naming.
It was hoped that a 90 day release cycle for Game Updates would lead to more testing and larger updates, but this has not always been borne out.
SmokeJumper has suggested that we may see a return to monthly updates:
I don’t know why anyone promised you 90-day updates. That’s a rigid structure that imposes a three-month drought between updates. I’d much rather come up with a system to constantly move content out to Live on a monthly basis so that there’s always something new to look forward to…and we’re discussing implementation details for that now. (No promises that things are changing yet, but it’s the way I’d personally like to move toward.)
Tags: game update 52
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Comments (12)
foozlesprite
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This would be a pretty smart move.
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Geo
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Update the game when needed, when things are ready to go live… makes sense to me!
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Murfalad
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I like the idea, very intrigued to see how the game can make the content update at a faster pace, the rumoured plans for Qeynos and Freeport might have something to do with it.
Its very interesting also to see SmokeJumper putting his mark on the game, while the last few months have been focussed on things we don’t like he’s pushed (like F2P and Marketplace), but he’s got a lot of other ideas on what should be in the game very different from his predecessors, yet he seems to be a fan of some old school EQ1 gameplay (such as corpse runs).
For example he’s commented on preferring one big server that supports all players as preferable to multiple small servers we have now. I remember at the Fanfaire Smedley commenting that implementing such a server (a shard server) would be “easy” with the current technology they have their but he preferred the server communities that grew up around the EQ1 model.
I may be reading too much into it, but there is either a difference of opinion or ideas are changing at SOE as to the best solution (SJ also has put a lot of importance on the games social community in his posts, even experimenting with non-broker trading with EQ2X etc).
Combined with that PR comment from Smedley about a possible Catacylsm style change for EQ2 and I wonder if there is renewed interest in seriously developing the EQ2 IP (I know he’s probably saying something since its free advertising, but the comments are still intriguing for the future of EQ2, especially after EQ Next finally releases).
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Starseeker
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Once upon a time in a land far far away, they used to do monthly game updates. Then they changed it to 3 month cycles cause they said it would give us more content, now they are switching it back to monthly, or “when ever it’s ready” updates…wow that’s vague. Out of all these posts I get the feeling they aren’t too sure what they are doing.
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Maytera
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Whats the point of monthly updates if they are equally bare bones? I hate that I’ve become so cynical in regards to SOE Devs, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
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zerigo
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The latest game updates, on 3 month cycles have been very weak… i have a hard time seeing how they will push anything of value in 1 month cycles.
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zerigo
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I really don’t see how changing from 3 to 1 month cycles changes anything at all. Wanna push more content, hire more devs. After every update something gets broken, just means stuff will get broken 3x as often. Maybe i just hate smokejumper to much to see the positive in anything he dose these days.
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Ondten
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Honestly, I would love to see a shardless everquest 2. I think it would do great things for the game once you got past people being grumpy over names.
I do find it very ironic that he wants to move back to the original schedule though.
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Dethdlr
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I *think* this is what he meant about the 3 month vs. 1 month cycle for updates. Lets say they have 20 things planned for the next 9 months that aren’t part of an expansion. If you’re on a 3 month cycle, you may have things that are finished sitting around for a couple of months before we see it just so they can save them up for the big 3 month update. With 1 month updates, whatever is ready goes live each month (or whenever it’s ready). If it takes 3 months to develop on of the 20 items, then it won’t come out for 3 months. But it won’t be holding up the other items from coming out. That’s what I *think* he meant.
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Kneecracker
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If Smokejumper really doesnt know why the update schedule was changed to 3 monthly, I would be surprised. He only has to ask colleagues or read the official fora. It was changed after a poll of users showed that EQ players, having been asked the question by Sony, PREFERRED it that way.
I have no view either way as long as the content is properly tested and is meaningful. I just wish the spin would stop.
EQ2Wire keep up the good work though 🙂
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Prrasha
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There was a SoE poll before the change about exactly this… the options being something like “keep going with piddly 12/year updates as they are” or “switch to 4/year schedule with Big Meaningful Updates”.
The poll results were in favor of the bigger infrequent updates.
In reality, we got 4/year updates with not much more actual content than the old 1/month ones, and the devs had more time for battlegrounds/minesweeper/sparkly Stationcash items/whatever.
At least certain bugs can be fixed quicker this way… “art” issues never get hotfixed, so dumb-butt changes to art that broke something on live had to wait another 3 months for a fix…
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Feldon
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Game Update 52 was huge, but that makes sense since it was in May, and the last update had been a whopping 5 months earlier. Most of the subsequent quarterly updates were on the small side.
One of the huge, relatively unknown drawbacks to the 3 month updates is that EQ2 devs continue to make changes to the client without much in the way of performance testing. When we saw crashes and performance problems in the client after certain Game Updates, it was a LOT harder to track down the cause since it was not 1 but 3 months of code changes to trawl through.
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