I think the whole idea behind the devs working on these graphics updates is to improve first impressions. I imagine a lot of newbies see the somewhat dated graphics and make up their mind about the game before they really get into the meat of the gameplay (which is a shame, because once you actually get to VO's pvp its hard to go wrong). Brining the graphics up to a more modern standard alleviates that somewhat, which means more subscribers and more money for the devs to work with in the long-term.

I've no doubt that the devs are working on the "real" content concurrently, but implementing such things are generally, as inc is fond of saying, "non trivial". Even when they're not working on comparatively simple stuff like this graphics update, they've got to fix bugs and maintain the game. Given the amount of coding, testing, and optimization that needs to be done for the more demanded features (like Capships), its hardly surprising that the eta is still "Soon™" after all these years.

I don't know about the rest of you lot, but I'm willing to wait a very long time for such features. Even if it takes half a decade, Guild Software will implement it; they're not a bunch who give up easily. And capships or no capships, I intend to re-sub as soon as I have a budget to speak of. They need the dough, and I feel guilty enough just freeloading off the forums.

Whether or not the game is going to be here in 3 years doesn't matter. People who play any game like VO are here to have fun. If they like it, they stay and play, if they hate they leave. If it goes away in 3 years, I know plenty of people would be sad.

A lot of times people will keep playing regardless of constant content game additions. While yes, it drives new people in a lot faster, it's a much smaller development team than other MMOs so it's going to be much harder to do such things. So I recommend instead of complaining about no new content and that the little stuff is the only thing that seems to updated...suggest ideas in the suggestion forum, come up with your ways how you think VO could be better. The devs absolutely love to read what people come up with.

Personally I love the little things, its what makes a game worth playing IMO. An MMO could have endless amounts of content but reject the little stuff, and I can tell you, there will be plenty of posts on that MMO's forums about the little stuff that was missed(I could name a few MMOs right now sadly).

Lastly, you speak of a popular, successful game. Why does popularity have to do with anything long the lines of success? Personally, any team that manages to pull out a game, whether it be an MMO or just a single player game is quite the accomplishment. If people love playing it, and keep coming back day after day, then it sounds successful to me. Screw financial, even if it would be neat to see VO with a lot more people in it.

VO has evolved many times and while I've seen a lot of it's evolution(excuse the break ahem), I don't think I ever expected it to look like it does now compared to what it was back in 2002.

I'll second that SF.

Why does popularity have to do with anything long the lines of success? Screw financial

While not disputing the fact that putting together a functional game that ~30-50 people are enjoying together at any given time is an impressive feat, there are a whopping four guys involved in this, all of whom are doing VO as their day job and apparently none of whom are independently wealthy/looking to live a life of VO-focused asceticism. The "even if it takes another half-decade, Guild will get it done" view seems to be missing something.

I'm curious because, in my opinion, there's not much point in sinking serious time into building a character in a world that is soon to become nothing more than a (hopefully impressive) line on a resume. Maybe this view is just another difference between the Space Quake crowd and those who wish VO had a point to playing it beyond the minute to minute fun of mixing it up.

The update does not play well on older GPUs. After a month noone will notice it. Its eyecandy plain and simple....

In the current economy Guild is not going to get by on pvp alone. People just simply dont have money to spare on a game this lacking of content.....

They covered the older GPU issue here: http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/1/21564 and we pretty much all signed off on it.

I wanted new ice!

I have a craptacular video card, so I'm not seeing much benefit for the new ice and roids. Some, though. The bigger issue for the devs, I think, is the fact that gamers are fickle assholes. The FPS genre has traditionally been a race to the best graphics and looks because Every Single Iteration is basically the same. The ones that last have niches that they fill. People still play Starsiege: Tribes because it fills a niche with the jet-pack (and damn are people good at it after 10+ years). CS had a strong following for many years because it had a single-death round concept. VO is still played (as opposed to Freelancer, TIE series etc etc, I think, because it is fully 3D space combat.

All that said, however, you get new players with eye candy and there's at least one major game in development which will attempt the 3D space combat thing again. If VO doesn't have decent enough graphics to hold a candle to the newer, larger development team games, it'll be tough to grow or, possibly even maintain, the player base. So while I'm kinda "meh" about the new graphics updates, I think I can appreciate some of the reasoning that might be going into it.

Prettier asteroids are a shit-ton more worthwhile than a new ship model, or a new string of missions, or an new idiotic escape pod system. They improve the first impressions of new players, which means they are more likely to spend the time they would need to spend in game to see the new ship model, the new string of missions or to appreciate the new idiotic escape pod system.

Then again, I'm just an inept member of the space quake tribe, so who am I to argue with the allmighty brain of the grand roleplayer of Dr.MegafirmDrone.

Edited to be more insulting.

I think VO fits the: "I have a 2 year old Mac and a crappy internet connection and love blowing things up in space" niche quite well also. :)

Man do I miss Tribes though! Now that was a fun game. Disclaunchers rock, that noise still makes me happy when I think about it.

Genka, I never would have guessed it's the space quake aspect that drew you to VO: you're terrible at combat.

As for BigLaw, don't knock it 'til you try it. I can think of far less pleasant and remunerative ways of riding out the recession. Hell, they even bring me free food just for working late! Even if the main reason I'm there late is because of a 2 hour gym break. What's not to like?

Except for this memo, plus the protective order draft, plus the 10,000 document privilege review and log mess, plus the .... ugh.

My. Look at all the dramatic hand-waving.

Look, people, "making content" is not something that always occurs on a convenient weekly-release schedule. Plus, Michael moved apartments this past week, so we were down a person. If we get to a point where we know we won't be able to release our main project, then we drop in something we already have that isn't super time consuming.

We've had the ice shader for awhile (like, a year?). It needed some tweaking, compatibility testing, and me to rework the models a little, but it seemed like a good thing to drop in towards the end of a week, to be sure we had something to release.

Releasing something is important to our business model. We get a lot of new players, every week, from MacUpdate, Freshmeat, and the like, and we can only push out to those sites if we have a new version that actually has something worth mentioning. This is part of the reason why we go out of our way to release something, even if it isn't the "big picture" stuff we're spending most of our time on.

The irony, of course, is how this pisses off some of you guys. You think because we released new ice, instead of nothing, that we're totally deluded and not working on gameplay content. The reasons in defense of new ice are much as people state: it gives a better first impression, our number one negative commentary on sites like MMOsite (promo) or whereever is "blah the graphics are dated, I'm not playing this".. so if we can help improve that with a couple of hours, as an alternative to not releasing anything at all, what the holy hell is wrong with that?

I'm also planning on making a trailer for the game, to go up on GameTrailers and Apple.com and so on, and hopefully be a bit more marketing. We've never had an official trailer. I would kinda like to have some graphics updates in place before I make that. Otherwise it will serve as something to keep people away from our game, regardless of whatever "awesome" gameplay I try to show off. There is just a certain constabulary that is interested only in "modern" looking games, and if by dropping a few bits in here and there between other projects, I can make our title look a little more "modern", that isn't a bad thing.

As far as what I said in the previous newspost, that graphics update did wrap up back then. But there will still be other things happening, whenever time or resources are available. I still haven't compressed the Leviathan textures, which will save a lot of memory, and the "bone" asteroids still don't have detail textures. I'll be doing that stuff, and other things, whenever I get around to it. That does not mean the "a couple of weeks" stretched into like the next.. forever.

As another part of that last big newspost, I mentioned the universe redux, and elsewhere on here I've mentioned that I would like to add more "truly gigantic" objects to the universe, and that they would probably be ice. When I do this, I would prefer if they did not look like ass. Soo.. as far as I'm concerned, considering all the priorities we're juggling and the relatively small amount of time we spent, this dovetailed nicely.

The Main Thing that Ray was doing last week is actually mentioned in the "Dynamic Warfare" section of that last lengthy newspost. We created a new mechanic that allows us to "do something" if a given special unit is disabled in some way. This is the whole "attack the satellite" thing I mentioned, it could start a new DW instance, or it could flip the alignment of a sector, or it could piss off the Hive and bring them in fighting, or it could be defended against enemies, or any number of other things that could result in any number of sector-specific changes. I think this is a good thing, it has a lot of cool ramifications for many types of gameplay. It could be a special ship that has to be escorted, or a station to be defended, or either of those being attacked.. who knows. It's also the first step towards station and capship conquest. But it wasn't finished yet, and we had nothing to release.

I appreciate how people want to see new Gameplay, new Content, new.. Major Game Stuff, I really get that. But there is more to juggling game development (personnel scheduling, marketing, bugs, acts of god) than just doing whatever is planned. Flexibility is key, and we try to make the most effective use of whatever time we have, with the idea of forward motion and staying in business. Sometimes it's ice, sometimes it's a Suggestions forum thing, or an old ticket that's been bugging us, or whatever.. but we need to do weekly releases, and we make the best out of that as we can. Yes, I know I should keep you all a bit more informed about this (which also takes time); but how about you guys lighten up, as well?

Thanks Inc.

As a player, I also wanted to point out and ask the rest of you this question:

When have the Dev's ever put minor things like detail in front of content when they had a choice?

They never have. Have some faith in them guys and girls. They know what their doing, and have created a game we all clearly enjoy playing, because we're all subscribers and active enough with it, and caring enough, to be mad/happy about ice textures.

Give them some slack. Everyone.

Agreeing with Pyroman_Ace here all the way. Great post Inc.

Thanks for explaining the implications of ice and relating the excellent use of Ray's time. I will have more faith!

"My. Look at all the dramatic hand-waving."

You know, I suppress my comments to avoid creating strife. I love this.

I suppress my comments to avoid creating strife

Hey, we're not picky about your reasons, Whistler--we're just happy with the outcome.

/me waves hands dramatically...

I haven't seen the ice, but it looked pretty cool in the screenies.

Are those "jazz hands" Leebs?

The ice is really cool up close, I should make a video or something..