Hello everyone, the title says it all, however, I am also wondering what this next patch will bring.
I, myself, really hope that they fix the hag quest and other quest related bugs. I am expecting a patch next week.
What about you guys?
Ok, I don't know how much you know about software/game development, but it is only one right answer to this:
when it's readyI don't want to be rude or something like that - but it's the only right answer to that question.
You could be right - but that's just a pure guess.
People expect new content, frequent patches etc. and they forgot that this is EA, and we are just 1 month in.
I strongly believe that EA will be more than 1 year - the game is massive and everyone agreed that there is a lot of work to do.
During that time I expect 3-4 major iterations so it could be like a big update - so some huge improvement/change to the game every 4 months - but again this is a guess! We know nothing about plans at Larian.
About game development? 0. About software development? A lot, as I have 10+ years experience in it. I also know, that most development companies work with sprints and a sprint normally takes about 2 weeks. It was just a question, nothing more. And btw, "when it's ready" is a customer thing, and not how it works internally. You can't tell your PO or PM: "when it's ready" that simply does not exist.
This, most software houses, regardless of medium, will be working in an Agile methodology these days, typically in Agile they'll have looked at the issues that have come in and the features they need to develop, the features will be story pointed and depending on the standard team velocity, only so much can be achieved in a sprint, defects will also be taken into a sprint, possibly by a separate team with a separate sprint, I imagine Larian is large enough to have one team (or more) working on features and a distinct team for squashing bugs.
The things that go into a sprint are typically expected to be refined, developed and tested during the sprint, although different companies will have different deifnitions of done.
So yeah, things get sized, things get planned, things do slip, the outward message is "when its ready" but internally, that simply isn't how it works. Realistically if they're working to sprints, it's actually not unreasonable to expect a patch once a fortnight during the entirety of early access. Equally, it's not unreasonable for them to start pooling their sprints and working toward slightly larger releases made up of multiple sprints worth of work, releasing larger patches monthly or longer, or even to go the other way and for hotfix patches to come more frequently.
p.s. yeah, developer here too, also not games, but development is ultimately, development.
p.p.s. for everyone elses benefits, features are typically broken into stories, a story is a clearly defined piece of functionality that adds something to the end uesers experience, that story should be able to be developed and tested and merged into their development or main branch ready for release, however if there are multiple stories in a feature (not unusual) there's also a good chance that they'll feature flag functionality so even if it's released, it isn't available to end users till they want it to be.
