Can we get a quick show of hands indicating who likes logging into a familiar MMO and finding out that every one of his or her character’s skills has been reworked into unrecognizability? Yep, that’s a big showing of absolutely no one. A recent post on the state of Project Gorgon explains that the designers are well aware of that, but the nature of the game’s current testing phase is that it’s all but inevitable, as much as the people involved would prefer to avoid it.
The short version is that with the game in its early test stages, the devs must make balance decisions that will sometimes wildly alter the overall course of the game, and the testing period is exactly when all of this stuff should be done. Players should expect a certain amount of instability. The bright side is that unstable skills now mean a better game in the long term. Or, if you’d prefer the whole thing in a more direct format, alpha testing is subject to change without much warning so that the launch game doesn’t have to undergo the same sort of wide-scale rewrites.
