read the Winterpatch notes... dedicated servers were slated for 2.0.
I assume this was meant for Sylen. I didn't say anything about when dedicated servers were slated.
I am glad TFP decided to honor the weather side of Storm's Breaking, but, it is last minute decision to cover their ass, that is extending the timeline of this game development. I know, We disagree about that, I still think NOW, is not the time to still be @%$#ing around adding unannounced new things instead of meeting the roadmap.
This is games development how it really happens, often behind closed doors so you don't see it. Someone notices that an implementation is lacking, not fun, not balanced... in some part. IMHO it is nice that we can informally talk to the developers and sometimes get something that we notice changed before the experimental is released. I mean, we want a good game as well as the developers.
If something gets noticed management of a games developer either decides that it gets fixed immediately so players have a better experience. Or instead management decides that release dates must be honored and a worse product is thrown out at the correct time. We disagree about that management decision, I would take the better experience any day. Now sure, there is the danger of feature creep, but in this case I would say it definitely isn't.
Console waiting for the ability to share games with a party just like the PC version is not the same as waiting for game features, that is a false equivalence. This is a relaunch to console without the basic content for console on launch. keep waiting we'll give you rwg...keep waiting you'll get poorly performing crossplay...but, not dedicated servers, nope, those you have got to wait even longer for.
What about dedicated servers is a basic content? I am sure everyone has his own priorities and this might be top on yours, but what exactly is it that you expect from it?
The old telltale game had AFAIK not even a plan to make crossplay or dedicated servers a goal. And it was bought and played for years without any of those features. Dedicated servers will not magically make your game 10 times faster, there never will be official servers (AFAIK). What it will bring is maybe a higher limit of players. Though that could be achieved by peer-to-peer with a potent PC as well already if the game had a way to make that limit dynamic. And maybe better PvP, but especially that is just a hope and depends on hardware limits, and what Sony and Microsoft allow.
Let me stress this point: There is practically no difference in performance (or features) between peer-to-peer with a potent PC as server and using a dedicated server (with the same CPU).
About Sony and Microsoft: They are IMHO not necessarily the evil guys in these events, they are just a black box. They have other priorities, some of them people might not agree with or deem selfish, but from their standpoint they do reasonable things to protect their bussiness. Absolute priority for them is keeping pirated stuff from their consoles and that makes them very strict about what they allow. At the same time it seems they don't want to show their hands how they guard their console or on the other hand restrict new ideas by too narrow rules, so I am sure it is very similar to how Apple handles it: They don't give out exact rules what game developers can or can't do (except maybe in general terms). So developers practically need to guess what is exactly needed in each case. A developer then submits a game he thinks conforms to these rules, and then waits for the surprises happening. The game could be accepted at the first attempt, could need a week of work, could need months of work or could need a complete rewrite of major parts. And networking/multiplayer is never trivial, any change there is more likely to take months than weeks. Also fixing what is complained about is not a guaranteed win: The console companies might not deem the fix good enough or find something new to complain about, something they didn't see the first time.
If someone makes a simple multiplayer shooter with servers run by the company itself there is a certain level of knowledge what to expect from the acceptance procedure, but the case of 7d2d is a special case (user-operated servers, high level modding with XML) and that might also contribute to surprises on both sides of this process.
Programming is a very slow process in general, also such approvement processes done by Sony/Microsoft or Apple can take a lot of time PER submission. 8 months or more for changing multiplayer, submitting, waiting for the result, and doing it all again? Reasonable I would think. It certainly doesn't work like in the movies where a programm is written in hours, I always cringe inside when I see this. Ultimately it is very improbable that TFP and Sony/Microsoft won't reach an agreement and TFP can add dedicated servers, but as a bean counter I have to mention that there is a non-zero chance that it won't happen at all. Nothing can be certain, except death and taxes
Much thanks!
