The life of a developer can be arduous. As we've explained in the past, players (and bloggers!) have a habit of scrutinizing every public utterance of a developer, real or imaginary, and conjuring up all sorts of elaborate doomsday scenarios. Developers who have the cajones to brave the forums with any regularity really have to bite their tongues, lest they say something that will really get the players into a panic. So imagine our surprise when
Warhammer Online designer Mark Jacobs openly posted in a thread stating that
he wouldn't be distraught if he had to ship a game minus a couple of classes if it meant they could hit their target date.
And then, in the same breath (or whatever the forum equivalent of a breath is),
he says that Mythic and EA are committed to shipping the game when it's ready,
citing Blizzard's model for their continued success. It's all a bit confusing. For my part, I take more comfort in the philosophy espoused in the second post. As much as it would pain me if they did, they're not going to lose players by putting off the release date a month or two. You
will lose players if they buy your game and find it is less than they were expecting.
