Note: Since there really hasn't been any typically cliche attempt at asking this question lately, I decided to be a bit bold.
A release date had been given half a year ago which was way off the mark at a time when giving such a release date may not have been appropriate. But now, with various detailed playtesting videos and much more extensive visible progress, it seems it would be very appropriate to give some sort of ETA, i.e, end of summer, fall, winter, etc. I'm sure with the amount of progress and the priority seemingly focused less on foundational things (i.e manipulating tools, creating code environments, etc) it would be much easier (and more appropriate) to gauge progress than it was a year ago and thus provide some semblance of a 'release date'.
I hope this goes over well. And if the Devs feel withholding from posting a release date is still more appropriate then delete this post.
Keep up the extremely hard work guys! I hope my nagging is only one indication of our enthusiasm! :-D
I'll be quite honest and to the point here and I'll probably be demoted for talking but I want to make an official statement here to clarify some things.
We have a date in our collective minds and it's discussed at every meeting.
There's a few key issues we want to address; namely stability. We're still adding new features, code and animations every playtest. The way we have it set up is that we are connected to a central database, and everyone uploads their work for testing. We have a core group of testers right now that are acceptable for our current testing procedures.
Due to the influx and implementation of new things every single day we tend to make changes immediately to address issues. The way this is currently set up means we'd have to pack a build of some kind for a large group of testers and release it via download methods quite often. This is time consuming. Changes happen so fast and so often that certain things people play with in a weekly playtest are changed for balance purposes, sometimes even during our large playtests and crash analysis are debugged and fixed on the fly.
The reason we don't have an influx of hundreds, if not thousands of people playing MWLL right now is because we are going to release it when we're ready, as soon as possible, and within the guidelines we've set for ourselves. A few of those guidelines are stability, balance, game-flow and level design. If these do not maintain a consistent standard of quality (not perfection) they will not be released as a package. We know everyone and their grandmother is going to judge the entire game within minutes, if not hours of playing and base their opinions on their initial impressions. Those impressions have to be good, and to do that, everything has to be constant and consistent.
We're not half-assing this game and we're not going to release unfinished. buggy, glitchy, unstable software to the masses. When we feel we have a solid build packed and ready to go, you'll all be the first to know. We apologize for the inconvenience of you all having to wait while we create the next generation of Mechwarrior. Believe me, it's just as painful to see you all -not- playing, as it is to wait for us to finish making a solid game.
