[David Watts]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

I know this gets contentious every year but here's the deal:

- If you don't want to pre-order, don't. Nobody is telling you to pre-order. The pre-order is really more there for the people who buy every year sight unseen. The company gets some money early and they get a discount. It's nice for all sides.

- There is of course a cost to not ordering early. You'll have to pay more for the game. Yep. That's how that works.

- You still get that discount if you order within the first week. Within that time, not only will you get all the features, screenshots, and so on that you want, you'll get feedback from the others who have ordered the game.

- If you don't want to pay full price and the first week isn't enough time for you to decide, you can always wait until the All-Star Break.

So, this is the thing about having an exhaustive list of features put out before the final release: sometimes they don't all make it there. I hope I'm not speaking out of turn when I say that if there was any big add that is getting scrapped, it got scrapped very, very early in the development process, well before I joined the beta team. This is not always the case. Head to head play way back in the day is an excellent example of a feature that got axed (jeez I think that was a projected feature before they did the complete rewrite too). Sometimes you put something together and everything seems like it's working but then once it comes into contact with playtesting, you find out it doesn't really work. Sometimes there's some big fatal flaw it causes that ruins other aspects of the game - or it creates crashes, which is kind of a huge deal for a game that people sometimes just leave on for hours on end (and which, I have to say, has been pretty, pretty stable the last couple years that I can remember).

Like I said earlier too, this year the big updates seem to be mostly "under the hood". There's another beta guy who did a crap-ton of work on the multi-year project and I for sure don't want to steal his thunder by going into any detail as to that change (plus, I'm sure he can explain it much, much better than I can) but for historicals IMO it's a real game-changer (which I think will trickle down to fictional/modern day play as well). My experience is that this stuff is also the kind of thing that makes the same people who complain about the devs not focusing on the "little things" that "this isn't really a new version" but I guess we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Ugh, now I will spend all day trying to figure out what the multi-year project is?