We made a decision early on to release iterative progress on systems instead of waiting until systems are done for a number of reasons. It gives you reassurance that development hasn’t stalled when, every month, you can load up the game and see new iterative changes that generally improve upon the previous build. It also has the effect of allowing us to get feedback on the direction we’re going because most of our systems are at least somewhat unique, so we need to do some amount of field testing on them as we go.
AI programming.
One of the downsides to this process is that an unfinished system can often seem worse than the lack of the system entirely. I always picture this somewhat like giving people early access to drive a car as it’s being built: Some things feel very much like a car right away, but then you’re driving around without safety features and it can feel like you were better off before the engine was put in. At this point the analogy breaks down a little because we’re not actually putting your health at risk by testing how a car would work without airbags, but you get the idea!
