Under the Rug

New features and announcements are always great for games. Hype drives this industry more than most anything, and PGI knows it. Five million dollars was raised for MW:O through the founders program, many of whom bought in in order to join the closed beta. That means that a fair chunk of the five million dollars was raised by people who had no idea what they were actually buying, only that it was MechWarrior, it was going to be free 2 play, and there were Atlai. That is the power of a little hype.

However hype can be dangerous, while it is great to announce this grand new thing, sometimes things don’t work out quite like they supposed to. In that event a development team must come forward and inform people about the error, or never mention it at all, and hope for the best. Sadly, the later seems to be a fairly common strategy, even though in a day of fanatic bloggers with little to talk about such things rarely go unnoticed.

One thing is true about the transition to open beta, PGI has become far more focused on the here and now, and have all but lost sight on the future roadmap, at least publically. Many of the things that came out of the first open beta patch were simply to address the concerns of the moment, with disregard to long term objectives. This is compounded by the fact that we have gone from a roadmap that laid out content up to three months in the future, the majority of the discussion has shifted to a one to two week scope. Part of this is because the player base has become so impassioned about things, and so demanding on the one week cycle, the addressing concerns is taking up a fair chunk of the development cycle. Another cause is likely the flurry of stuff there is to talk about now, almost makes looking forward moot.

However, throughout this process it has been easy for PGI to allow things to slip away, and vanish into the aether. This gives them the ability to drop the feature, or take their time outside of the three month plan they originally established. In some of these cases the playerbase have lost sight of it in the midst of LRMs, Gauss, and DHS issues. With others however, a small sect of the player base have continued to meddle, and ask about things “best left alone” and PGI have responded with deafening silence. In the midst of AMA’s and Ask the Devs, one question continues to be asked, but never addressed, and I feel that this is a valid time to add my voice to the call for the answer to the question of Doctor Who? Direct X 11.

Little history lesson: At some point in late September it was asked on the forums “When are we getting DX 11?” This question was responded to by PGI with “October 2^nd.” Now for those of you who can remember, October 2^nd was the day that the monster patch was originally designed to release (the one that was latter to be referred to as “Patchmas”). Nearly a month went by before that patch finally was released, and with it the new CryEngine. However, no DX11 was anywhere to be seen.

So where did it go? Was the report that it was coming a mistake, confusing the new engine for DX11 support? Did something go wrong? Clearly PGIs understanding of the new engine has been incomplete (it takes them over two weeks to tweak bloom levels). Is DX11 coming or not? These are all fairly straight forward questions, especially for a feature that was matter-of-factly announced for a month ago. And yet, in spite of it being asked on several forum posts, and in nearly every Ask the Devs, no one at PGI has addressed it, or mentioned it, even once since that post stating it would be ready by the 2^nd.

It isn’t about what is talked about; it’s about what is being avoided. Please PGI, release information about DX 11, your updated roadmap through the end of the year (at least the features already listed in the now outdated upcoming features/content threads), and demonstrate to us that your vision has not faltered, in spite of recent road blocks.  

Update: I often say that I am pessimistic so that way I am either correct, or presently surprised. Less than 24 hours after I posted this, PGI announced the following:

After integrating CryEngine 3.4 we noted a number of issues with the DX11 implementation that we didn’t feel were acceptable to push out to production. We have worked with our partners to address the key issues, these have now been resolved and we are enabling DX11 internally for testing. Once it passes QA it will be enabled on production, we appreciate the fans patience while we work to ensure the DX11 renderer is just as stable as the DX9 renderer.

Reference: http://mwomercs.com/forums/topic/68360-into-the-lab/page__view__findpost__p__1389491

This perfectly answers this question, Thanks! Now please continue to be communicative and work with the players who are trying just as hard as you to make your game great! :)