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[DaisuSaikoro Nagasawa]

Hail,

PGI is a team that's been around for awhile, from what I understand. While the game they're designing now (MWO) seems to be new to them the company itself is supposed to have years of experience working in game production and design, yeah?

So my question is, considering they made some missteps early on (understandable) and have had to re prioritize how they do things... is this current "all hands on deck" type of production sustainable.

Thankfully, the last "BIG" project seems to be CW and after that resources can be freed up to tackle other issues, but what's to say that CW really will be the last big project?

I started wondering these questions when I realized I purchased 8 seismic modules and I would have a really hard time and waste a lot of time if I wanted to track down the majority of them. This was an issue when we had UI 1.5 though moving forward it seemed PGI's designers just plum forgot that it was ever an issue in the first place (similar to that chat bug we saw earlier).

It'd be nice if there were some real delineation of what the team does and how resources are ultimately managed, though I don't know if this will come. Will it ever be possible to task a person here or there to long standing feature issues (I'm glad we have the new UI but there were changes that were spoken about happening a month after the new UI release that have never materialized).

Not sure if we'll get any answers here, but I've just been wondering... oh and please, this post and thread isn't for people to take a piss in. Try to be constructive or just ignore the thread entirely. Thanks.

[Sidekick]

Economic? Yes. At the moment.

Sustainable? No, not the least.

The current design philosophy is "mecha are content", but this only works if the new Mecha brings something new to the game.
Light Mecha, for example. it is hard to bring something new to the game, because lights don't have that much space for modifying. But this hits all other weight classes as well.

There only so much you can differentiate hardpoints, tonnage, ecm and jumpjets before you hit every possible and playable loadout. You can even see the artificial limitations they use to make new variants of chassis as little different as possible. Compare the versatile hunchback and catapult to the similar loadouts of the shadowhawk and thunderbolt.

The map design shows a different side of the coin, with every map being quite unique and little reusable assets and few possibilities to play them.

So: Mecha design is rapidly loosing it's value while map design shallows too much resources. Last but not least, the key comment of sustainable software design isn't featured. The possibility to create content out of itself, by users is missing. Users cannot change the way maps are used, because the maps and objectives are too limited. And they cannot change game aspects or mod the game to their demands.