Final Verdict - Release Date?

There will be an announcement next week.

There will be an announcement next week.

Woo-hoo!

Good to hear

There will be an announcement next week.

Probably to late too influence the debate. But u never know, so here goes...

How about releasing Dark Avatar before xmas, lets say Nov. by polishing up all the work that has been done so far, so its releasable, thus allowing everyone the opportunity to play DA and u get to collect the cash now.

BUT with a guarenteed promise that this isn't the full expansion and further updates to it will be made upto Feb. 2007.

The beauty of this way of doing things is u end up being in the same place u want to be by Feb. 2007, yet everyone gets to play over xmas period. Also stardock get the dosh upfront, DA stays current, new for 4 months ie...Nov. - Feb., it would then be complete. All those new characters from the civfanatics comp. would still end up being in DA.

Everyone is happy and lives happly ever after (if only)  

Good suggestion, Bob, and seems reasonable since it is an online only release so everybody can be made fully aware of the situation before buying.

Finding the bugs must also be much easier with a large base of testers...

Finding the bugs must also be much easier with a large base of testers...

Sifting through the complaints of people who have no idea what a beta is to try and find ACTUAL bugs is annoying and difficult enough already. Release an expansion pack early would make this worse, whether you said it was the full version or not.

They will know when and they will know how and they know all

Sifting through the complaints of people who have no idea what a beta is to try and find ACTUAL bugs is annoying and difficult enough already. Release an expansion pack early would make this worse, whether you said it was the full version or not.

In addition, the release version of a game/expansion is the one that gets the review. Very few games will ever have thier initial review changed in light of updates, patches, etc. So if they release a version that way, it will get aweful reviews, which will drive away scores of customers both from it, and from GalCiv 2 (as they will be less willing ot purchase a game that they thonk the designers aren't supporting).

Sifting through the complaints of people who have no idea what a beta is to try and find ACTUAL bugs is annoying and difficult enough already. Release an expansion pack early would make this worse, whether you said it was the full version or not.

So think up a way to make it work!

One possible example; have a restricted forum. People post the outcome of any bugs they find on this forum, one bug per thread only and no other discussions permitted on the forum. Others post to the thread *only* to confirm the bug. Then once a thread has received "x" number of posts, a dev comes along, locks the thread and asks for the relevant debug reports if needed.

Any person who does not follow these rules has their posting rights to that forum either removed or suspended for a period.

I take the point about reviews though. There'll always be sites that would refuse to honour a request not to review the game before a certain date.

YES. Now i got my credit card lets go buy DA

BUT with a guarenteed promise that this isn't the full expansion and further updates to it will be made upto Feb. 2007.

Bit of a slippery slope that, you will get some people who expect more to come than they're going to actually get and feel short changed. Releasing unfinished products sets yourself up for alot of grief, either put it back to get the extras in or release with the already promosed features and release extras later - but dont make guarantees tht could be misinterpreted.

They've gone ahead and (effectively) done it despite the concerns of people on here. Yay!