Gothic 4 - JoWooD is Seeking Development Studio!

txa1265 said:

By constantly stressing quality, timeliness and bug-free code delivery, they appear to not only distance themselves from any G3 issues, they create a public image of themselves as the victim.

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To be fair, PB is also doing similar things. With hindsight it appears they´ve prepared their exit from JoWooD for a few weeks through Ralf´s forum posts.

Gorath said:

To be fair, PB is also doing similar things. With hindsight it appears they´ve prepared their exit from JoWooD for a few weeks through Ralf´s forum posts.

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Absolutely - I think there is plenty of blame and subterfuge to go around ...

I'm interested in seeing whether they can find a promising up-and-coming studio to develop the game. Europe is full of game development talent that is just now starting to come to the forefront. Crytek just opened up a new Ukranian studio. Then you've got CD Projekt, GSC Gameworld, and Nival to name a couple others. If a European studio does the next Gothic game, I'll be pretty confident.

I am a system developer - not games - but I know for sure:

Taking over 1.5 million lines of code, debug it and eliminate errors is an impossible task, if you have none of the original developers left.

Maybe, if a good error free game editor exists, an addon can be developed.

Technically, it's not impossible if the documentation is top notch, but it would take longer and cost more than simply starting over. I've never heard of anyone trying to pull it off, it's just not profitable.

Well, one of our (non-game) software suppliers hasn't managed to get out a (relatively) bug-free and stable release since '99 - these guys even manage to bungle their own patches: each bugfix introduced new bugs and reintroduced bugs that had been fixed in earlier patches. The original programmers are still on board, but quite obviously, these guys took on a project that was too big for them. If this can happen to a 'professional' developer of industrial and trade applications, why shouldn't it happen to a game developer?

No surprises there. As much as it may seem counter-intuitive to some, coding and software are as much if not more an art than a science, and probably always will be. And as we all know, the ratio of really great art to mediocre tripe is 1 to hundreds of thousands...

talk about thread killers...!
//Turg