Smart move by ArenaNet?

[Rife]

There is only one thing that can kill a good launch and that is an unfinished product.

All of the big launch no-no's stem from this, such as:
- Shipping the game without things promised/sighted during pre-release.
- Bugs
- Poor performance/optimisation/stability

I've seen enough MMO's crash and burn (or alteast underperform) as a result of these things, usually a combination of them, to know that they're damn important. I think Anet is doing the right thing by waiting until they have their ducks in a row before launching.

There are always going to be bugs with launches. There should however, never be server/stability issues or undelivered promises. It's when an MMO ships with a few of all these things that each make the whole look much worse than it is.
Take SWToR for example; it shipped with very little, very bugged endgame content, poor performance, poor stability, lacked optimisation, shipped with much poorer graphical quality (no hi-res) than promised and without any patch on the horizon for months. It had an auction house that was so obviously rushed and terrible that many people just refused to use it. It also lacked many features that were promised, or at the very least expected (from any game in the last 5 years) like being able to pick your warfront or UI scaling. These rushed or incomplete things take 10 times longer to patch into a live game than to a product about to be shipped.

It's all the little things that shouldn't be there in the first place that are the result of rushed/sloppy work that add up to underwhelm players. I'm extatic that Anet appear not to be doing this. They could have pushed the game 6 months early to make Christmas sales which is what I felt SWToR did or even rushed one real beta weekend instead of a press beta, closed beta weekends, load testing etc to get to an earlier release but they are not, and I'm grateful.

[Blackout15]

You do realize diablo3 has been in production even longer right? And they just recently changed half the game features....after like 7 years....

[Ethas]

You do realize diablo3 has been in production even longer right? And they just recently changed half the game features....after like 7 years....

More time investment means more expectations about game. And honestly I'm starting to think we won't get what we expect from Diablo 3. The beta gameplay has been boring for me. Hope this is just a small and most uninteresting part of a game. Also my beloved class (sorcerer) became really strange with all this "new" magic skills.

[DrakeWurrum]

There is only one thing that can kill a good launch and that is an unfinished product.

Bad marketing, as well.

[Ethas]

Bad marketing, as well.

This. Also I hope they will be advertising their game properly, so it won't end up like all wow-clones =(
Especially it would be sad since GW2 is absolutely not another wow-clone. The game needs to be shown on wide public so people can actually see next-gen MMO without wow(EQ)-standards in it.

[DrakeWurrum]

This. Also I hope they will be advertising their game properly, so it won't end up like all wow-clones =(
Especially it would be sad since GW2 is absolutely not another wow-clone. The game needs to be shown on wide public so people can actually see next-gen MMO without wow(EQ)-standards in it.

Thankfully we had Curse, TB, and Yogscast marketing it to a wide variety of MMO fans.

[Himora]

id rather the game was "polished" and worked before it went on the market, after experiencing the abortion that is Swtor id prefer to get my moneys worth from the next game.

[iCandy]

Swtor was in development for 6 years. That didn't stop it from sucking balls.

Exactly.

Inexperience and cockiness is why it sucked. Something ArenaNet has none of.

[airea]

Games like GW2 rely upon expansions for continued profit. If you make a game with a subscription, it's easier to be constantly changing it and adding new things to make it appeal to whatever crowd you're serving at the time. You can release it when it isn't perfect, because you'll be making enough money from subs every month to continue to work on it every couple weeks for however long it takes until the initial vision has been realized. However, with GW2, it can't change very often. Because of this, the game has to be near perfect before it ships, because if it doesn't meet player expectations, they'll drop it and not pick it up again for quite a while, if ever. Every initial game release and following expansion for Arena Net's B2P series sets must be top notch (in their opinion), or else they'll lose out on a lot of profit.

So in a way of speaking, it's not only a good idea, but necessary.

As far as my personal opinion goes, I'd much rather wait another year or two for an amazing game which will change the way I think about a genre, than get a game that's just another copy/paste version of something else with shinier graphics at the moment.

[Vlad Morbius]

I keep throwing my wallet at my monitor but they just won’t take the money! All kidding aside, as excited as I am for this game to finally go live I also want this to be as refined as possible so It’s a hit and has a long life span.
I am tired of jumping from game to game trying to find something that fits my play style and if that means my wait time is extended a few more weeks it is well worth it to me!

[terrahero]

Just glance at TOR. A modern day MMO with years of development and a budget that reached to the sky. Yet they launched their game riddled with bugs, some not so bad and some pretty damn big. Heavy performance issues, which has rendered their "world pvp zone" virtually unplayable. Unless you enjoy looking at a slideshow of AoE abilities.
And besides the voice acting it didnt really bring anything innovative or big to the table. All the major features are being released in 1.2. Legacy system, gear customization, guildbank, pvp rankings etcetc. In my eyes they simply released the game atleast 4 months to early, maybe even 6. Not to mention truely some of the most horrible customer service (ingame and irl) i have ever had the misfortune of seeing.

Its not a horrible game, but this has bitten them in the ass. And Arenanet seems to not want that, no one should want this. And they make the game untill they are happy with it. I cannot imagine anyone at Bioware was happy with releasing the game in the state it was, but it was no doubt an executive descision for the sake of profits.

I'd rather take a really good game over a crappy game but 4 months sooner. Anyone who disagree's is not really a gamer imo, hell id question your general sanity.

[Deleted]

I'd much rather wait till GW2 be polished before i play the game than end up as dissappointed as some SW:TOR playesr have been if things are rushed/incomplete/still in "beta" phase.

[Grable]

All the games that I played lately have been far from finished on their release (looking at you SWTOR), so I'm glad they are taking their time.

[Rife]

Bad marketing, as well.

True. Bad being either lack of marketing presence or promising more than is delivered on release.

[RumlyD]

I'd rather they take a long as they need in order to feel they have a solid product, which they feel meets their vision for the game, than simply dump it out without anything like as much polish as it deserves.

[Rife]

Just glance at TOR. A modern day MMO with years of development and a budget that reached to the sky. Yet they launched their game riddled with bugs, some not so bad and some pretty damn big. Heavy performance issues, which has rendered their "world pvp zone" virtually unplayable. Unless you enjoy looking at a slideshow of AoE abilities.
And besides the voice acting it didnt really bring anything innovative or big to the table. All the major features are being released in 1.2. Legacy system, gear customization, guildbank, pvp rankings etcetc. In my eyes they simply released the game atleast 4 months to early, maybe even 6. Not to mention truely some of the most horrible customer service (ingame and irl) i have ever had the misfortune of seeing.

Its not a horrible game, but this has bitten them in the ass. And Arenanet seems to not want that, no one should want this. And they make the game untill they are happy with it. I cannot imagine anyone at Bioware was happy with releasing the game in the state it was, but it was no doubt an executive descision for the sake of profits.

I'd rather take a really good game over a crappy game but 4 months sooner. Anyone who disagree's is not really a gamer imo, hell id question your general sanity.

Agree with this wholeheartedly. Swtor made enough mistakes to be the guideline of "DON'T DO THIS" to all other gaming companies out there for the next few years.
- Don't spend hundreds of millions of dollars on content that is only current for a few weeks while leveling.
- Don't tie that huge budget to such a terrible linear questing system and boring kill X and collect Y system.
- Don't buy crappy game engines because they're on sale and then drop millions on the less important areas of the game.
- Don't announce launch date after launch date that gets pushed back again and again.
- Don't have TERRIBLE customer service.
- Don't ship a game with crippling bugs that make content actually impossible to complete.
- Don't advertise things like world pvp and pvp zones and then ship your product with 2 zones, 1 that performs terribly and the other that is a ghost town.
- Don't advertise PvP diversity and many warfronts etc when the entire empire side plays 95% of their games in one map.
- Don't create a carbon copy of a game with the intent of "being number 1" when you're only bringing ONE new thing to the table that doesn't effect endgame and while missing dozens of important things like being able to scale your UI, play large scale PvP, using addons or being able to pick your warfront.

I don't see Anet doing any of these things. They arn't even the same genre as far as I'm concerned. They're making the game as they want it, from the ground up instead of taking a stale model and moving a few things around and then acting like they've got something new and innovative.

If anything I think the reception GW2 receives because of this change will be overwhelmingly positive simply because almost every MMO gamer out there today has a mindset of expectations based around an EQ/WoW model. Everyone who picked up SWTOR judged it based on WoW or something similar and instantly picked out the extra's SWTOR had and the things which were missing or not done as well. This won't be the case with GW2 and people are in for a treat, regardless of qaulity, just because it's something new, and we havn't seen that in a long time.

Excuse my long winded rant-filled posts. I've got to do something while I'm at work

[Varyk]

I'm not sure where you're coming up with a release date in November from. And yes, the Press Beta looked polished - that is, to clarify, the level 1 to 30 experience for Human, Charr and Norm. That leaves level 31 to 80 for those races, and level 1 to 80 for Sylvari & Asura that we haven't seen yet, and cannot judge "polish level" on. I'm not saying they're not mostly complete etc - but we haven't seen them.

In answer to your question, you're really asking "Do you want a completed, tested and polished game, or a game with potential bugs and issues" - if you boil down what you're saying (and discarding the time frame comments).

It strikes me one does not need to be Leonardo Da Vinci to come to a logical conclusion as to what product us gamers would rather be playing - just take a look at the QQ on other forums when a game/expansion/patch is released with bugs (not saying that some level of upset isn't justified, but some of the QQ you read is over the top).

Let's not act like this game won't have multiple bugs and issues. It's impossible for it not to.

[Roose]

Let's not act like this game won't have multiple bugs and issues. It's impossible for it not to.

It will have bugs and minor issues, but will we be waiting over 2 months to be able to drop quests????

The bar has been set incredibly low for releases now. Of course people are wanting to be pleasantly surprised by a smooth experience. First part of that nice experience is having high enough expectations set upon developers to not release buggy crap that will not be fixed for several months, if ever.

[Rife]

It will have bugs and minor issues, but will we be waiting over 2 months to be able to drop quests????

When developers intend to deliver the leftovers that didn't make release as soon as possible after release, the bug fixing gets put on the back-burner and forgotten. This is why rushed releases suck.

It takes months to fix simple things when everyone at Bioware is focusing on bringing out the things they said they were going to ship with release.