Posted March 16, 2019
high rated
I was afraid I'd have to wage war against hate posts and random accusations. I suppose we deserve some, but I'm really happy that it's not that. We decided that the only good way to go from where we are, was honesty and thorough explanation. Thank you for your kind words. I'd like to add some more info on this one:
They asked how long would take us to actually polish the game to match Steam version. We estimated around a month, in reality it took a week or two longer than that. They said they'd rather have us release a properly polished, full version. So since the last update on Steam (January) we've been working on this build full time. Then GOG QA team internally tested the build, returned it to us with some issues that we had to fix... and here we are ;)
So long story short, it wouldn't be that much faster here and it was decided that giving you anything else than a fully working build wouldn't be okay. Having a worse build here might've actually make people feel second class, I suppose.
rjbuffchix: Maybe I am not the target audience but the cross play wasn't a big feature to me. It was more about the singleplayer. I can't imagine I am alone on this. I think that's what was really difficult for some of us who pre-ordered here. The fact that multi was being worked on didn't explain to us why we couldn't just have singleplayer content, with multi arriving later.
We thought of that. However GOG did not want a "partially working" game (to put it bluntly, they didn't want to have a half broken game on their platform, which is understandable). So for the single-player side we also had to do several things - achievements, user login, all the regular policies they have etc. We worked on both single and multi at the same time. Then we had a single player build working and some barebones multiplayer - without dedicated servers, spectators and the more fancy stuff, but the most basic things worked. Unfortunately, it was very buggy due to all the changes to low level networking code. We had to modify the engine in several places which always causes some changes higher up the code-chain. They asked how long would take us to actually polish the game to match Steam version. We estimated around a month, in reality it took a week or two longer than that. They said they'd rather have us release a properly polished, full version. So since the last update on Steam (January) we've been working on this build full time. Then GOG QA team internally tested the build, returned it to us with some issues that we had to fix... and here we are ;)
So long story short, it wouldn't be that much faster here and it was decided that giving you anything else than a fully working build wouldn't be okay. Having a worse build here might've actually make people feel second class, I suppose.
d3vilsadvocate: One word of advice: the experience you‘ve made by porting a game to gog and allowing for cross-play is probably worth gold. I suggest writing down your experience in a short programming book 50-100 pages and the selling this as well. It would help gog and its users tremendeously I think.
I think we'll keep at it and one day manage to release a 4 platform cross-play (Steam + GOG + Live + PSN). Just the certification nightmare for consoles... but some people in the team would really like to pull that off in the future ;)