He who fights dinosaurs must be careful, lest he become one himself.
Today Steven Sharif, the Creative Director for the upcoming MMO Ashes of Creation, announced an extension of the game’s Non-Disclosure Agreement. They moved the lifting date for the NDA from June 1st through to July.
They extended the NDA because of newly implemented features like siege warfare and a rework of how combat works under the hood. All of this new stuff needs bug testing before the community can have a field day with it.
This is fantastic news! The more time the company spends bug-fixing its features the better the game will be. These days a terrible game might be fixed, but by the time it is no one will care. This also tells us that Ashes of Creation developer Intrepid Studios really is interested in making the best game it can. These days that’s an important thing. Many gamers are skeptical of upcoming new releases on general principal, and winning them over is hard.
Blessed are the bug testers.
Sharif gave two other reasons for the delay. The first is that they moved up the timetable for their development teams move back to the studio. Because of this he believes lifting the NDA on June 1st would cause a bunch of problems, including the developer’s being unable to deal with any issues that came up.
The last reason that expansions for other online games, such as The Elder Scrolls Online: Blackwood and World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Classic, are also happening on June 1st. This means bigger games would crowd out Ashes of Creation’s launch, and the game would generate less buzz.
But for gamers looking forward to Ashes of Creation this means there would have been fewer players when the NDA lifted. As a result, there would be fewer people test the game in its early alpha state and would to a worse product overall.
High Level raiders might be cursed though.
In Sharif’s words: “We estimate roughly 25% of our current testing pool are active players across these titles combined. This fact presents us with forcing our testers to choose between participating in our testing environment (which will be a long and arduous responsibility), or playing an expansion with their friends in other popular titles.”
Sharif previously announced a delay on the NDA release on March 12th, from May 14th to the 21st for the Alpha Preview, and to June fist for the Alpha itself. Sharif’s tone in today’s delay was much more somber that it was in the previous announcement. Hopefully Intrepid won’t hesitate to delay the NDA release again if the development team feels the game needs it.
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Ian Magruder
A long-time lover of video games, Ian has played them since he picked up Pokemon Red at three years old. A history grad student, fantasy fan, and daily jogger looking for the next game with great characters, fantastic gameplay, and a well thought-out setting.
