To answer your question frankly, we made a couple of mistakes and failed on this count. I'm not looking to make any excuses but would like to give you the background so you can understand that it's not out of ill will, but a coincidence of unfortunate events and constraints that caused the delay on the German FOV patch. I can assure you that it's caused quite a lot of frustration and sleepless nights on our side too.
Here's the background: Originally, all versions of Flames of Vengeance were scheduled to be released almost at the same time and we were working towards that, so there was no intent on first releasing the German version and the rest later. Then suddenly we found ourselves in the situation that there was going to be a two month window between the German and international releases, and that the international releases of FOV were going to coincide with the release of DKS. There were more issues involved in this but I cannot comment on them for contractual reasons.
Our initial idea was to release the German FOV patch when we mastered the international versions (some weeks later), as those would have the benefit of a longer development cycle and we wanted to keep all versions up to date. But as we were busy also on DKS, we ran out of time and had to move our development schedule forward. That meant that those some weeks suddenly became a longer period, because the release of the international versions of FOV needed to coincide with DKS.
Because of the changes made over that period , the job of patching became more difficult which is what caused an even bigger delay. Many versions were made of the German FOV patch, including several hotfixes, over that period, but bad luck and probably a too small team were responsible for it never getting through QA, so we couldn't release them. It was sufficient that one major issue popped up (which is easy in a large game like this) for the patch to be blocked. The mistake we then made was that every time we restarted the process, we wanted to include all the latest changes, so the entire patch creation scenario had to start again, and every time we were hopeful that this was going to be the good one, but as indicated, Murphy struck multiple times on this one.
Maybe also worth mentioning in this context is that over the same period many changes were made to our distribution structure and that one of the the upsides of it is that we can now more or less release the patches when we want and feel it's required as we're more and more taking matters in our own hands. It's easy for a invisible publisher to not release a patch because it loses interest, it's a lot harder for us who interact with this community regularly, though obviously we have constraints also.
Regarding the German versions of FOV and DKS, the one big advantage of this patch and the approach taken above is that it's now at the same level at as all other versions so should we in the future require to release another patch/update it can happen at the same time as all other versions.
