We always see impossible predictions and doomsday prophets each year but did VR get as far as you had hoped in 2022? What do you expect for 2023?
If that sounds familiar you may wish to look back and laugh at everyone who got it wrong last year, except Dorotea... tell us what you see dorotea the prophet. My own hopes for the 2022 were drastically off primarily on the network stack. I am reminded of the life changing words words of my old roommate, "Its plumbing, how hard can it be?" This was of course in the pre-flood era of my life. Previous peripheral work on enterprise level network stacks gave me the wrong expections. The work remaining is still critical to the framework for alpha, but I clearly don't know how to judge how much is actually left. I had also hoped to get one new hire for animations, but am thrilled we got so many new people for the brute force side of game development.
With a new year we have the perfect time to measure our expectations. Swirl those tea leaves, polish that crystal balls, or go big and start pouring your molten lead. What do see in 2023?
While we are objectively closer to a launch, I feel alpha is further away. I assume given the monthly PA tests the MMO basics will be built as soon as the network stack is capable of cross zone communications. Guilds and LFG to improve the community aspect of frequent PA testing will hopefully be completed early Q1 and from there I think we are in for a grind year. The flow of art, animations, and mechanics to follow for the year.
I am always somehow surprised by the scope VR is aiming for with the marketable alpha, but in the end it will make alpha a shorter phase overall. For better or worse my expectations for the Pantheon alpha have shifted to what I expect from a games beta, as in, feature complete but not content complete.
I think the biggest revelation in 2022 was my understanding of what work was needed and still needs to be done. Following Pantheon has been a huge eye opener on the scale of a project like this. It seems to me that a lot of the foundation of the game is close to being finished and that has me very excited for 2023. With a solid foundation and the addition of new hires I expect a much more noticeable progress for 2023.
Looking over the roadmap to alpha it is hard to judge the time it will take to complete. So many of the items are endless without more refined goal. Some examples are Art: Zones, NPC Models, and General 3D Assets.
With all that said and with no risk at all for being wrong I expect Alpha to be announced next year.
"While we are objectively closer to a launch, I feel alpha is further away."
After investing 2k+ in 2018 on pledges participating in nearly every alpha. I don't even think this game will come out anytime soon(next 5 years) lol and when/if it does will be dated simple due to time required to make everything or so small of a world it won't have enough content to hold the average mmo player. But hey would love to be proved wrong.
I didn't really have any predictions for 2022 other than we weren't going to see alpha.
For 2023, my guess is that while a lot of progress will get done, we wont see Alpha and might not get a date for it nearing the end of 2023. It seems to me that the bottleneck is still VINL, and will need all features to be complete before we can get class mechanics finished which I think will affect enemy dispositions. I'm going to guess that ViNL will be feature complete in 2023 though. When it comes to the alpha checklist I think by the end of 2023 we'll be more than halfway complete.
This year was really great to see all the new hires though and I hope that continues into 2023. If I had to choose what positions to hire I would like to see another programmer on the team, maybe with their sole role being to squash bugs so it doesn't detract from other programmers tasks. Would also like to see another 2 designers join as well as a couple more artists.
Overall, I think VR will still make good progress in 2023, looking forward to what they'll show =)
" tell us what you see dorotea the prophet."
There is no profit in relying on me as a prophet because I have always been too optimistic.
Unless they reel in a major backer (investor, producer or both) I foresee slow and incremental progress. Pre-alpha will finally end around the middle of the year. There will be a lengthy process of preparing for alpha which they will still view as a public presentation, NDAs or not, and will want to be very polished. They will shock and surprise us all by rolling out alpha in December - beating the consensus predictions of 2024 or later.
Anyone looking at hirings they announce as a good sign - you are half right. It is better than not having any expansion. But it means far less than the casual observer would think. Do not think of a full-time employee in an office - think more of a remotely located consultant working as few as 5-10 hours a month and your evaluation of progress is likely to be more accurate.
I stopped trying to predict things and rather just started accepting any progress as a positive, no matter how slow.
What I do find ironic is how all the predictions from 2017/2018 of "alpha 2023" or "alpha 2024" which we're meant mostly by "OMG just go away troll if you don't support the game" ... would be happily accepted by us now.
Anyways. I'm around the world away from home for Christmas, so I got nothing better to do at the moment. Happy Holidays !