Which products would you like to know about?
Or Visions of War... I pre-ordered it somewhere in February and now it's pushed back to March 2013 or something like that. With no guarantees that it will be the last time it happens.
It's hard for me to speak to the NPC Codex -- I started at Paizo when it was already in editing, and it moved through editing and out the door rapidly, but I don't have insight into when it actually started development since I came on board late in the process.
Blood of the Night was a victim of GenCon -- we lost roughly a month of work to GenCon (two weeks prep, one week for travel time and the convention, and then a week in which enough key people were sick that we couldn't make much progress). The same holds true for many of the products that were supposed to be in development in July or August (Oct/Nov/Dec releases). We're pushing hard to minimize the impact.
I'll check in with Erik on Visions of WAR, since he's the lead on that project.
Chief Technical Officer
|
Most of the time, we're not going to detail individual reasons why products are late. In many cases, those explanations come down to this: some individual (occasionally a Paizo employee, more often a freelancer) blew a deadline badly or turned over a manuscript/map/illustration that needed to be severely edited/rewritten/redrawn, and bringing those sorts of issues to light in detail would be unprofessional at best.
Sometimes these issues have ripple effects, too, where a product is delayed not by a problem with that product itself, but by the fact that a person who was scheduled to be working on that product was pulled in to repair a higher priority product. (The priorities, in a general ranking, are: hardcover books, Adventure Paths, other monthly books, other monthly non-books, books that are less than monthly, non-books that are less than monthly. Also, anything that has a subscription is higher priority than anything that doesn't.)
Visions of WAR, you might notice, is therefore pretty much the lowest priority, which is why it keeps getting pushed back. (And yes, it *probably* will get pushed back again, as we're not yet caught up on everything else. On the plus side, when it does come out, it will have several more recent illustrations in it than it would have, had it been published on the original schedule...)
We've done a number of things to mitigate these problems. For example, since Adventure Paths are a very high priority, that means any problems we run into there tend to ripple all the way down through every other product, so we no longer assign Adventure Path volumes to writers who haven't established themselves as completely reliable. We've also switched the AP line from having one person in charge to having two—one for each six-month adventure path, which means that we now have people who are able to focus on each six-month AP for more like nine months. And we've been staffing up in both art and editorial, so we can more readily handle all the stuff we want to do. We've also brought in Jessica to manage all the scheduling, which also allows Wes (who was doing that before) to focus on his *actual* job.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
We've also brought in Jessica to manage all the scheduling, which also allows Wes (who was doing that before) to focus on his *actual* job.
Hu-rraaaaay!
Jessica's addition has also led to a higher number of editor lashings and developer contusions, so we'll see what happens when her distinctly pharaonic brand of project management meets up with my preferred gas lighting methods.
Say tuned!
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
Hey, I totally go get them coffee after I whip them! I'm nice!
|
The priorities, in a general ranking, are: hardcover books, Adventure Paths, other monthly books, other monthly non-books, books that are less than monthly, non-books that are less than monthly. Also, anything that has a subscription is higher priority than anything that doesn't.
Now, more than ever, I want the module line to go monthly.