snipperrabbit!!
Deity
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I found this article on colonyofgamers.
PAX East review on Colonyofgamers
- Thread starter snipperrabbit!!
- Start date
Sherlock
Just one more turn...
Pre-alpha? PRE-ALPHA? I thought this was supposed to be out in August?
bonafide11
Worker
They never said August, they said fall. Some people have speculated September, but as far as I know, they've never said that either.
Chalks
The blue pieces
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Also, 6 months before launch... what state do you expect the game to be in? We're not going to be seeing 6 months of beta testing or something. Most of the vagueness of the information released so far is probably due to the pre-alpha state of the game - they are probably still finalising the details.
Gre_Magus
Manet
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If it's really "pre-alpha", then it shouldn't be feature-complete. I wonder if some of the major things we haven't heard about (the economic system, the new role for religion) haven't been finalized. I also wonder whether some of things we have heard about may change.
deanej
Deity
How could the game be pre-alpha at this late stage? I would expect alpha, if not beta!
Chalks
The blue pieces
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As I just said, how on earth can you expect the game to spend 6+ months in beta testing?
deanej
Deity
But pre-alpha is still way too early of a development stage. It should be alpha at the very least, but alpha is still an early stage of the development cycle. Also, I don't think beta has to mean beta testing. Also note that civ4 was undergoing debugging since the start, though if civ5 followed this path is unknown.
Chalks
The blue pieces
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Well, all "pre-alpha" really means here is "unfinished". Alpha is internal testing of the completed game with room for refinement significant changes and beta is testing of the completed product to smooth out all the bugs and cross system compatibility.
It seems pretty clear that the game has unfinished aspects so the fact that it's in pre-alpha shouldn't be that surprising.
We've seen no screen-shots beyond the ancient era at all and as far as I know none of the demos have touched on anything beyond this era either. It seems like the only explanation for this is that some aspects of the modern era are so incomplete that they cannot be demonstrated or even screenshotted at this time.
From looking at the road systems that we've seen in the screenshots, it looks like that may be one of the aspects that is holding back the modern era demonstrations, although who knows what else might be problematic.
They have plenty of time though, I wouldn't expect them to start beta testing until 3 months prior to release at most, and all we know for a release date is "fall" so they could even get away with starting beta in august and still ship by mid oct.
It seems pretty clear that the game has unfinished aspects so the fact that it's in pre-alpha shouldn't be that surprising.
We've seen no screen-shots beyond the ancient era at all and as far as I know none of the demos have touched on anything beyond this era either. It seems like the only explanation for this is that some aspects of the modern era are so incomplete that they cannot be demonstrated or even screenshotted at this time.
From looking at the road systems that we've seen in the screenshots, it looks like that may be one of the aspects that is holding back the modern era demonstrations, although who knows what else might be problematic.
They have plenty of time though, I wouldn't expect them to start beta testing until 3 months prior to release at most, and all we know for a release date is "fall" so they could even get away with starting beta in august and still ship by mid oct.
Dale
Mohawk Games Developer
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Alpha just means feature complete (dependent on individual studio definitions of alpha of course). Alpha is the deadline to get all components of the game in the code (doesn't have to work). Beta is to have those features working (meaning tweaking and art finalisation is all that's required). There's usually a small amount of time between alpha and beta. 6 months out is about right IMO, couple months for alpha, couple months for beta, a month for RC's.
Civ4 wasn't undergoing debugging from the start, trust me.
deanej
Deity
Civ4 wasn't undergoing debugging from the start, trust me.
You mean Soren lied?
I guess games and operating systems must go on completely different development tracks. Windows XP was in beta long before it was feature complete.
Dale
Mohawk Games Developer
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It was undergoing the Firaxis iterative development process. They didn't debug near the start as their development process is to throw together components, then replace wholesale till they work, then refine. Debugging came in about halfway.
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