I remember eagerly awaiting the release of twilight princess for years and I remember reading some nintendo interviews where they said worldwide releases took a lot of planning and work.

What this probably means is right now they are focused on getting things working the way they want and that they haven't yet started fine tuning things to make them look their best on each platform.

Pre alhpa doesn't mean anything, as well as finition percentages. He just meant that they have a hell lot of work to do, and it's normal for a game 9 month before the release.
And 9 month is a lot in gaming industry. Really. They'll get the job done.

Seeing as how Bethesda are the game making experts, not me, I figure they know what they are talking about :shrug:

Well they already tested every cell in the game and there were no bugs, so that should tell you something

I don't think he meant there were no bugs just that all the cells work and nothing game breaking is there. There could be smaller bugs though. There are "cells" in the other elder scrolls game that function but still have bugs.

The gaming industry continues to grow, it's no longer a profession that you love and make little money. It's now one of the biggest industries in the world, and games like Zelda: Twilight Princess have helped this. Activision, Blizzard, Sony, Microsoft, Square-Enix, Bethesda, (ect) all huge gaming companies that really made a huge diffrence in the way the industry is dealt with now. When a red carpet is thrown down, you make it happen or you lose out.

What?

Not all developers follow the same development pattern and you could find that this game spends a couple of weeks in alpha before hitting the beta stage. The alpha is where everything really comes together, assuming their workflow is efficient and most of their assets are in top-form, then it will be a beta in no time. Some developers spend quite a bit of time in alpha, personally, I never take this as a good sign, everything should come together smoothly. A long time spent in alpha means a long time is spent going back and redoing things that should have been done pre-alpha.

If that's the case, then it makes sense, as the screenshots could have been taken when the game was still in an earlier build, we wouldn't know, but if they mean the game development is currently still in pre-Alpha, then I don't know. I'd have thought that, with a game of this scale, going from pre-Alpha to release in 9 months would be unrealistic, but then again, Bethesda has a larger team now than they did during Oblivion's development, so that should mean they can get more work done in those 9 months than would have been possible with Oblivion. In any case, Bethesda, at least, seems pretty confident in their release date, and since I certainly don't know how far the game is in development better than the developers do, I don't feel that I have cause to doubt them.

From Pete on twitter..." They're gonna hate no matter what I say. But no, we did not release screens from a 2 yr old build. Dunno why we would."

Exactly why I'm concerned.

It's all just a play of words, there is no industry set standard on what amount of content needs to be complete in correlation to the stages of development. You can only get a general sense of what they mean, and the point he is making is that they have yet to apply the final polish to the game. If you wanted to really go by the imaginary standard then since it's only in pre-alpha there should only be concept art and very basic block outs being worked on as it's usually viewed as the conceptual stage. Obviously that is not the case, but they are still fleshing out and conceptualizing idea's even though it seems most of the art and game content is largely created which is why he would still possibly consider it pre-alpha; or it could be some other reason, again there is no set standard so who knows what it means. All I can tell you is that his pre-alpha is not what most probably imagine when they hear the word.

Not really. MMOs such as WoW will still be in Alpha at 9 months before release and they have tons of more variables to work with than a singleplayer game such as archiving player data onto a remote server, having the remote server port issues, chat service for thousands of people simultaneously and the list goes on. There is still many things to do and making a singleplayer game of the magnitude of TES is just as difficult was an MMO but there is far less needed testing time for a singleplayer than an MMO.

If the team at Tripwire can be in a lengthy alpha status (I think they're just swinging into closed beta now) and they plan for a Q2 launch or so, then Bethesda Game Studios with 90 people should be able to solidify alpha in 4-5 months easy.

Not worried at all, if it was any other developer I might be a little concerned but this is Bethesda Game Studios and their past track record is pretty damn good.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle

A) They said they never announce release dates unless they are confident they can make those dates...

B) The Alpha and Beta phases all occur generally within the last 6-12 months of development, give or take depending on the title.

I just hope BGS gives themselves enough time to polish the final product properly.

Another thing to think about is that tweet looks like Pete was saying those screens were from a pre-alpha build, and we don't know exactly how old those screens are.

Skyrim might have been in pre-alpha a month or two ago when they were taken, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's in pre-alpha now.

It would make little sense for them to release really old screenshots if you ask me. You want your game to look good on its first appearance to the public.

As for my opinion on the topic.. being pre-alpha or after-omega or whatever doesn't really concern me. They set a date. If they think they can do it, who am I to argue? They know how much there is to be done, not me. But even if they don't make it in time, I still wont mind, so..

Good sweet jesus, guys.
Reactionary BGSF is Reactionary.

The various development stages are not some direct anology to a percent-complete bar.
And even if they WERE, we have absolutely no real bearing regarding the internals of BGS to even realistically guesstimate what stages would correspond to what percentage values.

Bethesda has set their release date. They have also said they are confident in their release date. They have also had the experience having to move release dates in the past, giving even more incentive to make this release date. And they have plenty of workers doing plenty of game-designey stuff for plenty of hours between now and 11/11/11.

I trust Bethesda to know exactly what stage of development in and how long they take.

Beth has 5 games of experience with these things. Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, and Fallout 3. It's not like they're an overoptimistic new developer who's making promises without any knowledge of what they entail. Beth's done this all before, erego, they know exactly what to expect.

I don't think they're particularly old screenshots, per se, but its not like the magazines and websites released them the day they got them.

For example, Game Informer's Skyrim issue was released around the beginning of January (can't remember the exact date). That means they had to have had the screenshots by at least mid-December, just so they had time to write the article, format it, print out copies, etc. So we're looking at screens that are probably 2-3 months old, and that is plenty of time for Skyrim to have moved from the pre-alpha to the alpha stage. I'm not saying its definitely not in pre-alpha right now, but from the way the tweet looks, it might not be.



Agreed. :foodndrink:

Let me explain the stages of developement real fast. I can easily see how its still in pre-alpha.

Pre-Alpha: You are still making the game, no testing is being done. (Beyond creator testing of course)
Alpha: You are testing the game with your inhouse testing crew, but still making alot of it.
Beta: You are pretty much done making the game, and are just doing inhouse/public beta testing to fix bugs.
Release: You release the game...

I can see how they are pre-alpha. By about 2-3 months from now they should be in Alpha. Then when they finish it up, they will enter Beta with plenty of time to test before it's release.

People always assume it takes either way longer, or way shorter to make a game than it does. You don't spend 9 months doing nothing but Beta testing, but they also wont be doing hardcoe-making of the game up until like 1 month prior. Does that make sense?