What stage of development are you on at this point? Are you still designing content, or is it mostly polish now? And, if the latter, is it tempting to over-polish – to tweak every last thing relentlessly because you’ve already put so much work into the project, and anything less than perfection could be viewed as a failure?
Carlos Montero: There’s been a lot of speculation that we have been doing nothing but polish for the last year or longer. This is simply not true. There were and are still parts of the game that we are actively developing, because the game isn’t done yet. It is true that over the last year we have put a ton of polish into the game, but this has largely been because some members of the team are less needed on the forefront of development and have taken to polishing old things and trying to achieve quality and consistency across the board.
There is also work that some may casually classify as “polish” that is really more about making sure we are hitting the quality bar we want. If we are examining level flow, pacing, weapon progression, puzzle challenges, player intuition, where people get lost, or stuck, or confused, is that polish? Perhaps it is, but often I think many people are specifically thinking we are sitting around remaking the same assets over and over a little better each time, or trying to find and fix every bug so our game can be “perfect”. This couldn’t be farther from the truth.
This hasn’t been about polish for polish’s sake; it’s been about learning all there is to know about how to make great games, and using it to make a great game. There aren’t any shortcuts there. We just had to learn by doing, by making mistakes, by screwing things up and starting them over again. Sometimes along the way we have learned things that fundamentally changed our way of thinking, and sometimes we have gone back and fundamentally changed parts of the game to reflect that.
So no, I don’t think it is tempting to over-polish at all. We are all eager to get the game out. We are dying to get this game out and show everyone what we’ve been working on, but we aren’t so eager that we would sacrifice our values and what we believe will make this game great. We aren’t going to put out something that isn’t good enough for us.
You’ve just spent an entire interview telling me why making promises and circling dates on calendars is a terrible, terrible idea. I am, however, a bit thick, so can you – in any way, shape, or form – narrow down some sort of release window? If not, do you have a release window for any sort of playable demo? Basically, when will people be able to get their hands on the game in some form? Soon? Soon-ish?
Carlos Montero: We’re working very hard to get something out to our fans in the soon-ish timeframe. I really won’t say anything more than that.
Carlos Montero: There’s been a lot of speculation that we have been doing nothing but polish for the last year or longer. This is simply not true. There were and are still parts of the game that we are actively developing, because the game isn’t done yet. It is true that over the last year we have put a ton of polish into the game, but this has largely been because some members of the team are less needed on the forefront of development and have taken to polishing old things and trying to achieve quality and consistency across the board.
There is also work that some may casually classify as “polish” that is really more about making sure we are hitting the quality bar we want. If we are examining level flow, pacing, weapon progression, puzzle challenges, player intuition, where people get lost, or stuck, or confused, is that polish? Perhaps it is, but often I think many people are specifically thinking we are sitting around remaking the same assets over and over a little better each time, or trying to find and fix every bug so our game can be “perfect”. This couldn’t be farther from the truth.
This hasn’t been about polish for polish’s sake; it’s been about learning all there is to know about how to make great games, and using it to make a great game. There aren’t any shortcuts there. We just had to learn by doing, by making mistakes, by screwing things up and starting them over again. Sometimes along the way we have learned things that fundamentally changed our way of thinking, and sometimes we have gone back and fundamentally changed parts of the game to reflect that.
So no, I don’t think it is tempting to over-polish at all. We are all eager to get the game out. We are dying to get this game out and show everyone what we’ve been working on, but we aren’t so eager that we would sacrifice our values and what we believe will make this game great. We aren’t going to put out something that isn’t good enough for us.
You’ve just spent an entire interview telling me why making promises and circling dates on calendars is a terrible, terrible idea. I am, however, a bit thick, so can you – in any way, shape, or form – narrow down some sort of release window? If not, do you have a release window for any sort of playable demo? Basically, when will people be able to get their hands on the game in some form? Soon? Soon-ish?
Carlos Montero: We’re working very hard to get something out to our fans in the soon-ish timeframe. I really won’t say anything more than that.
Sure, there are other questions that were asked and subsequently answered. However, the key question of when exactly we'll get to actually play the mod that has been in development for the better part of a decade was met with a vague brush off.
Perhaps it's just me, but it's also quite disappointing to hear that after seven years of being in development that it's still actually not completely finished yet and simply being polished for release. Given this, don't expect to see anything regarding a release until 2013 at the earliest. We may even see Half-Life 3 before we see the release of Black Mesa.
To say I'm a bit skeptical about this long in-development title might be an understatement. It would take a lot to impress me about Black Mesa at this point given the years of waiting we've had to endure.
(via, part 2)