Dudes, you are reading WAY into this. First of all, the thread was about whether or not DNF will have ones of those "public beta" tests like for instance ETQW had or TF2 is having now. If you guys remember in both of those cases the public betas started VERY closely prior to the game in question going gold.
Second "way too early" is not in ANY way any kind of objective time measure or any kind of objective statement.
Frankly to me that sounds very much like hyperbole to emphasize a point. Joe was locking a thread, in was in that context he used that wording.
Both 3D Realms in general but certainly also Joe in particular make a point of regularly telling people NOT to read into their statements. To you really honestly think Joe would EVER even consider making any statement that DNF is far away or close or anything like that ?
No, obviously not, he has said that a dozen times. That in and of it self is reason enough to reject that reading of what Joe said.
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but this is consistent with our educated guess that they decided to rewrite at least some of the tech.
Sorry but I reject the notion that those guesses are in any way shape or form educated at all.
What is "atleast some of the tech" supposed to mean ? George has already said that they keep their tech up to date and that doesn't require them delaying the game:
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No reason to freeze, as we have time to trickle in features until the game ships. But it's complete enough now that we could ship with no excuses and be happy.
But just like in Duke 3D, when that engine was done, we still added small features like slopes and went back and retrofit the levels. We will still add things to the engine, as we can, where they make sense, and most importantly - where they won't delay us. We will add things if they are cool and don't impact things, but we will not add features that will cause big delays or mass reworking of exisiting content.
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think 1) we're sufficiently advanced so as to not look dated when we ship and 2) we will continnue to add features until we ship. But they are all fluff features. We have enough to ship now, and that's a great thing for development because we can make the game with no excuse like "We need X to do Y". We don't really have any unknowns right now. We just have a lot of work to do.
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Don't worry. When I say tech complete, I mean we could ship if all the content were done. It's fairly easy to add and update shaders and we do so all the time. The graphics guys area ahead and always have time to add in bells and whistles. Many things like per pixel blur, depth of field etc, have zero impact on game content and drop in, in a few days.
I challenge everyone claiming that they have done any major re-write to the engine to either:
A)Tell me what the lacking feature(s) they supposedly added where, why they needed to add them, why they caused "big delays" or "mass reworking" of existing content and couldn't be added under the policies/guidelines mentioned in the above quotes.
or,
B)STFU.
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a period of 8 months (calculating from now until may) you can call "way to early". Don't you?!
Yeah, you certainly could. There is no objective or fixed meaning to "way too early" but in this context it would certainly not be unusual to call 8 months "way too early".