IWD2 any info on when?

[john]

I havn't seen anything on a release date for IWD2 lots of info on NWN but I'd really like to get IWD2 ..Any info? Thanks John

[Spanner_razor]

electronics boutique says it comes out on the 30/8/2002 for uk people.It should kick ass!

[JDubya]

There has not been an official release date from Black Isle, but EB is saying 8-23-02. Until there is an official word, I will expect it then

[Larry_OHF]

J.E. Sawyer (Lead Designer) Release date issues: Why aren't we done? The game is very buggy. We fix bugs and more bugs arise. 3E implementation and testing took longer than we expected it to -- much, much longer. This, in turn, also affects area testing. Does it frustrate you? Boy oh boy, it certainly frustrates me. Why is there no new release date from Black Isle or Interplay? Black Isle and Interplay are not in control of when the game is released. Vivendi Universal is. They will distribute the game sometime after the game is final. Exactly when that date is -- that's still unknown. When Feargus tells people that he's trying to get a date, that's really what he's doing. He's not sitting around trying to magically craft one out of the ether. He's trying to find out when our distributor plans to ship the game. BTW -- FC1 is scheduled to be submitted on Thursday. Hopefully that gives you an idea of where the game is from a development standpoint. FC1 = Final Candidate 1. It's the first version of the game where we say, "We believe this may be ready for release. Hammer it." QA then smashes through the game. As the FCs get rejected, we refine the priority of our bug fixing. We start by leaving D-priority bugs alone. We then leave C-priority bugs alone. Then, B, and finally, only A-priority bugs can prevent the game from shipping. When there are no A bugs, QA typically signs off on the game, and it is ready for duplication. On IWD, I believe FC5 was the winner. I am not a programmer. I am the lead designer. I ask for things that I believe will make the game a better product. The programmers are not under any obligation (or even any implicit "threat") to do anything I ask. I will always ask for changes that I believe will make the game better. When programmers tell me that something cannot be done, I ask for reasons. Often, they explain the situation and that's that. However, when I'm told that all changes can be done in a given amount of time, I typically accept that just as easily. However, please do not revise history. I never said that these changes would be easy. Rumors are leaked that BIS is developing IWD2, and that it's on a four month development cycle. You know what? That wasn't far from the truth. We didn't have the chance to begin the implementation of 3E rules until after the impossibility of a sub-six month dev cycle was made painfully clear. In the meantime, we get slammed for using dated technology to make a quick, cheap, rip-off game. So, we finally get a more reasonable dev cycle. We decide that the quick, cheap road isn't acceptable. We make the game as 3E compliant as we can. We revise the entire interface graphically and functionally. We design and re-design areas in an effort to avoid all of the things people disliked about IWD while enforcing everything they seemed to enjoy. The game's length winds up being twice the original estimate.

[Hayashi]

I hope they take their time to iron out all the bugs. The last we need is (yet another) buggy release!

[Memnoch]

Don't believe anything you hear from retailers like EB or Egghead - they are just guessing like everyone else. Until a game goes gold (is pronounced bugfree and ready to ship) as communicated by the designers, there is no way to tell when it will be released.

It's a safe bet to say that Bio would have been hoping that IWD2 would have gone gold before this though - with NWN set to ship at the end of this month I wonder how many people will buy IWD2 (which was supposed to be the "tweener" (inbetween) game to bridge the BG2 series and NWN. I'm sure they aren't happy about it...

[Azred]

I don't think they can stall the release of either IWD2 or NWN, even though it looks like they will both be shipped almost on top of one another. I suspect that their sales will interfere with each other; what a shame.

[zakharak]

Ive heard many rumors about Warcraft 3 coming out here this summer, but nothing too final. One person said, it had supposed to come out two years ago.

what might happen is like when IWD came out the same day as Diablo 2, right? For this to happen again would be saddening for the releasers of IWD2.

later

[Micah Foehammer]

According to latest info on the BIS boards, IWD2 is now at FC4. However, its more likely that the release delay is NOT a matter of debugging the game at this stage, but is a distribution / sales issue given that Neverwinter Nights and Warcraft 3 are hitting the stores NOW. NWN is going to BREAK the 1 million units sold barrier based on current forecasts of retail store orders. Given THAT type of competition it doesn't surprise me that the release of IWD2 is being delayed.