We spoke with Paradox and Kerberos about the Sword of the Stars II release which they have described as 40% Murphy’s Law, 30% Chaos, 20% Overambition and 10% wishful thinking.
As many of you know, the game is in a bad state and Kerberos is a small team that is
dedicated to their cause and who love their game. But with a combination of the weekend, some perhaps questionable decisions and bad luck, the game is not what it should be. They know that, they’re working on it, hard. A new patch is supposed to be released today that will help with stability so at least there’s that to look forward to today. However, with a game that has the scope and possibilities of Sword of the Stars II there were bound to be problems. Unfortunately, there were far more than expected including some on the release side.
The game had already been delayed and was in the works for two years, so for a small team, they have come a long way. Unfortunately, they couldn’t predict all outcomes when the code would be released and so now they’re scrambling to make things right.
In a forum post, Martin Cirulis, CEO at Kerberos stated:
So lets set this straight here. When you are dealing with SotS2 this weekend and wondering quite rightly "Who is to blame for this?!!" The answer is me. NOT Paradox...NOT Steam and certainly NOT my team. All of those forces have been exemplary in helping deal with a bad situation. When it comes to who should be at the end of anyone’s fingerpoint, it’s just plain ol’ me.
An admirable admission to say the least.
In regards to the patch today he had this to say:
The first thing you can expect though is stability. There will be an update tomorrow (that is now today) which will set right much of the chaos created Friday in terms of crashing and keeping you from playing that game. What it WON’T do is magically add back in every piece of functionality.
A realistic expectation would be to get the game up and running and not have everything there, so really, that’s no surprise.
How hard and fast are they working on it?
As much as the team wants to throw themselves at this like crazy people, I am not going to ok that. Instead we will go about this in a relatively sane and orderly fashion with regular updates that make sure everything that goes back in is as stable as possible before you see it.
As hard as is healthy I think is what he was saying there. What will that mean for gamers? According to Martin, "at least 2 or 3 updates a week over the next month..." and will, "by the end of this period you WILL have more additional content than you would have under more ideal circumstances. Every update will go out with some thank you for your patience...some badges, extra maps, new nose art, more background entries."