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Well, I'm still off the Civ3 boards 'indefinitely' but couldn't pass up posting this thread. I won't bicker about it or anything but am just posting it here to see what people think. Mainly I'm lurking unless I have something 'new' to contribute.
I ran across something Brian Reynolds said back in 1998 about how the SMAC demo released BEFORE the game was finished helped them a great deal. Now, let's just imagine there are gamers out there not convinced that Civ3 will be anything new or are concerned that player feedback has been, well, ignored or 'covertly listened to': Such a pre-release demo used for feedback purposes could prove immensely inspiring for those in the 'undecided' column.
This assumes, of course, the demo itself is inspiring...
I ran across something Brian Reynolds said back in 1998 about how the SMAC demo released BEFORE the game was finished helped them a great deal. Now, let's just imagine there are gamers out there not convinced that Civ3 will be anything new or are concerned that player feedback has been, well, ignored or 'covertly listened to': Such a pre-release demo used for feedback purposes could prove immensely inspiring for those in the 'undecided' column.
This assumes, of course, the demo itself is inspiring...
Then, it was time to release our demo. We had originally thought of the demo entirely as a marketing tool, but as soon as we released it we realized that it made perfect sense as part of our process: Here was a fairly polished, almost-final version of our game in the hands of the public, and as soon as the thing was out we started getting all sorts of feedback from it. Since the release version of Alpha Centauri was still in final testing, and our actual ship date was more than a month away, we had time to incorporate many suggestions from e-mail and Internet newsgroups into the retail version - much to the game's benefit.
Thanks to the demo release, we could make improvements to the game's interface, add a couple of new features, and fix a few glitches found by demo users that had somehow slipped through our testing process. Most significantly, the design of the game itself was still "in play" during the demo process - we could improve some rules, fine-tune the game balance, and improve the AI, all based on feedback we got from the Internet. Even though we hadn't planned it that way, the demo release really proved to be a perfect addition to our design repertoire.
Thanks to the demo release, we could make improvements to the game's interface, add a couple of new features, and fix a few glitches found by demo users that had somehow slipped through our testing process. Most significantly, the design of the game itself was still "in play" during the demo process - we could improve some rules, fine-tune the game balance, and improve the AI, all based on feedback we got from the Internet. Even though we hadn't planned it that way, the demo release really proved to be a perfect addition to our design repertoire.
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