[thefatcat]

Originally Posted by Ben E Lou

It's safe to assume that at this point, some pieces of FOF9 are ready to roll, or extremely close to being so. Some other things, including MP, either need more work or haven't been implemented at all. Just for the sake of discussion, let's say that MP is the #5 priority on their list of things they want to have in the game, but haven't completed yet. (That's just a number I'm making up; don't read anything into it.) The fact that the dev team has said that MP may or may not make the initial release would mean that they're confident about that they'll have time to add, say, the first three features on their list, iffy about getting to features 4-7, and doubtful about 8-10. (They've promised a 2018 release, so they're dealing with a timeline, too.) To hit the deadline, they can either release a solid version with features 1-3 only, or they can rush to add 4-6. Because they're rushed, those would be the features most likely to be buggy.


(The ordinal nature of this is an oversimplification, by the way. It's always possible that priority #9 makes it into the initial release list while priority #4 doesn't, because they estimate that #4 would take 200 hours of development time and needs 2 extra weeks of testing, while priority #9 is a smaller feature that can be added with 8 hours of dev time after the beta has already begun.)

I quite understand what your saying, but if it's true then it is all about the money as they need to get it out by their deadline which obviously has to be for financial reasons. Believe me i know how this works I think we're all keen to hear what Jim says and if we have no MP initially how he sells it to us.