Author: John Merlino
Date: 14:50:04 10/09/00
Chessmaster 8000 is still on schedule to be finished early next week, and be in the stores by early November. Unfortunately, I have some news which some of you will probably find upsetting. So, just so you can't say that you weren't warned.... CM8000 IS DEFINITELY going to require a CD at all times, thanks to a mandate from "on high". Those in charge of these decisions seem to feel that copy protection is rampant (apparently, even more rampant than ever before), and that Chessmaster (and all other products) will lose HUGE amounts of sales due to piracy. Whether this is true or not will never be known, of course. But, there it is.... There will be copy-protection on both CDs, and the program will not run unless you have a CD drive in on startup (or can produce one when asked at startup). As for the quality of the current build, there are still many bugs to be fixed, but the development team is confident that all "significant" bugs will be fixed before the game is released. Unfortunately, as with any game published by a major retailer today, the game will go out with a fairly decent number of "less significant" bugs, many of which will, of course, be found by YOU, the users. Sadly, deadlines are deadlines, thanks to the marketing and sales folks, and they are firm believers in patches. So, if you are the kind of person that can be HIGHLY turned off by even the slightest bug, AND you can wait, I would urge you to consider holding off purchasing the product until the first patch comes out (which is usually two months or so after the product is initially released). The old adage holds true: a program gets more testing in its first 72 hours in the public's hands than it does during the entire development cycle. Therefore, there will ALWAYS be bugs that only the public can find, and THAT is, primarily, what patches are for. Obviously, though, the team wants to make the best product possible, and, from what the development team tells me, there are currently a TOTAL of less than 40 known bugs (of various "significance" -- from crashes to "suggestions") that have yet to be fixed, and the testers are finding only about 3-4 per day at this time. I tell you this in the interest of diplomacy and goodwill, and the hopes that none of you will send me "hate posts". ;-) jm
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