Something interesting from Comic-Con announcement

Colinwhitworth69

The designers said they were working on stories, characters and plans for 2020 already.

Comments

Demonzfyre

They work on content up to 1 year in advance so things like AQ Season 5 could have been developed 6 or more months ago.

Eb0ny-O-M4w

Yes they commented last year that they have plans until 2020

DNA3000

Demonzfyre wrote: »

They work on content up to 1 year in advance so things like AQ Season 5 could have been developed 6 or more months ago.

Sometimes even more. It probably takes at least four to six months to make a champion. There's concept design, concept art, modelling, 3D modelling and animation, sound and VFX, and powers and abilities. And those things can't happen all simultaneously, they tend to happen in a pipeline. Now imagine you're working on new content that involves new characters. The concept and ideas for that content have to be developed before those champions are designed, and depending on different external factors any or all of these plans can get tweaked or modified during the process. The pipeline gets deeper and deeper. And suppose during the concept design for a champion you decide you want to give them an ability the game engine doesn't support. You then have to queue up programmers or systems engineers to implement new game engine features. This generally also takes months, and adds to the total calendar time it takes to implement something.

It isn't surprising to find MMO developers whiteboarding ideas two or even three years in advance. Of course, not all of them eventually get implemented, but some sort of roadmap has to exist, even if they decide to take detours off of it down the road.

Buttehrs

will-o-wisp wrote: »

Yes they commented last year that they have plans until 2020

Last year they stated they had plans up till 2025 already.