No Joke: GOLD Thursday, 9/9 P.D.T

[sdrga]

If you read between the lines on some of tommh's posts (linked above) you get the distinct impression that CA wasn't necessarily pleased with the demo as it was released, either.

I can't remember where I saw it, but it was someone I considered to fairly reliable, either an actual dev or someone like tommh, but the development on the game and the demo was on seperate tracks for about the last 2-3 months of development.

I'm a dev myself, although not in the game field, but the principle is the same: here is what was probably the approximate sequence of events:

1. A beta build is selected to be the basis for the demo.

2. That code is basically butchered to create a scripted subset of the actual game. It becomes its own development effort, usually with a much smaller staff, and usually not the most advanced developers, either: it's a demo.

3 The two pieces of software become progressively more different as time goes on. Which means....

There is no realistic way, without a lot of hassle, to just magically incorporate the changes made as the actual game progresses into the demo.

This would mean that there is 2-3 months of refinement plus additional refinement since the demo release that is not showing up in the demo.

The 2-3 months may be a total WAG, but there is no doubt that the above sequence had to occur that way. Maybe it was 4-6 months, I doubt any less than 2 months.

Why is this important? It totally blows away the argument that "the demo is what's going to be in the game". It simply cannot be true. From a development perspective it's, practically speaking, impossible.

Look to be very pleasantly surprised by the actual game since it's 2 - 6 months ahead of the demo.