I'm talking from no experience here since I've never play tested a game before.
But I'm wondering if a 6 month play test is enough. I'm sure Paizo will do a great job at recompiling a lot of feedback and then fixing a lot for the final edition, but shouldn't there be a testing period for that as well?
Like an Alpha and a Beta?
I'm hoping this edition is amazing and lasts us another 10+ years, so wouldn't want to see many reviews months after release on how some stuff could have been better.
Just want to avoid Pathfinder 2: Unchained 2: electric Boogaloo.
I imagine Paizo set the time based on their past 10 years of playtesting in this way.
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There's no amount of time that would be guaranteed to be sufficient. You could release the game to playtest, find a lot of issues, make a lot of changes to fix them, release the game to a second playtest, find a lot of new issues, make a lot of changes to fix them, release the game to a third playtest, find a lot of new issues...
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Like an Alpha and a Beta?
Remember that Paizo staff have been playtesting this for a couple years.l
We're in the Beta, if not Gamma, phase of testing at this point.
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Like an Alpha and a Beta?Remember that Paizo staff have been playtesting this for a couple years.l
We're in the Beta, if not Gamma, phase of testing at this point.
Then why all the concerns? Why is the alchemist so bad? All the hatred for resonance will most likely lead to some sort of change. What if another major component needs to be reworked?
I do think that 6 months may be too short a time after reading the playtest. The concern I think many people are having is that Paizo may have a hard deadline. I know it has been mentioned by the developers that they do not, and I hope that part is true.
There's no amount of time that would be guaranteed to be sufficient. You could release the game to playtest, find a lot of issues, make a lot of changes to fix them, release the game to a second playtest, find a lot of new issues, make a lot of changes to fix them, release the game to a third playtest, find a lot of new issues...
I don't see this being a bad thing though. If you o the process 4x times you're still going to end up with a better product than if you did it only once.
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There's no amount of time that would be guaranteed to be sufficient. You could release the game to playtest, find a lot of issues, make a lot of changes to fix them, release the game to a second playtest, find a lot of new issues, make a lot of changes to fix them, release the game to a third playtest, find a lot of new issues...
If you keep finding "a lot of issues" that are worth fixing after 4 cycles, doesn't that imply you have a pretty big problem? I mean, you will always have complaints from someone since you can't please everyone, but that would no longer be "a lot of issues".
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Depends on what the end-game is for Paizo with their ambitions.
I was having a discussion with someone who thought the current Playtest felt "more like a boardgame than a roleplaying game". Then it kind of devolved into what Paizo's plans were over the next 5-years.
It was compared to playing a couple hours of Talisman, Runebound or the World of Warcraft boardgame where you have essentially a pre-gen with some canned abilities that you may get to pick starting with, and you get to plug in next abilities as part of playing through the content. If Paizo was shifting to this space, maybe it's the coolest game in that space, right?
In that case, PF2e is certainly at beta quality today and it just needs to flesh out rule mistakes that would certainly be discovered in 6 months of playtesting. It's just those folks who want it to supplant 3.5/5e for weekly fantasy roleplay that perhaps feel like it's a lot further away from the end-goal we're strapping onto it.
I imagine Paizo set the time based on their past 10 years of playtesting in this way.Those playtests were vastly different, however, as they all operated under the PF1e framework, and weren't exploring what is, for all purposes, an entirely new game.
We'll have to see if the time is sufficient for a playtest, but call me skeptical.
I'm including the original Pathfinder playtest from 10 years ago. That certainly was exploring a new framework.
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Is it enough? I sure hope so, but I seriously doubt it. It'd probably be fine if this was a relatively minor change like going from 3.5 to PF1. But this isn't. In effect it's an almost complete overhaul of the game on par with going from AD&D 2 to D&D 3. And the way they went for more extreme choices with the possibility of rolling them back a bit means that if they do get rolled back, the fallback position would be untested. Changes might be too much or too little or just changed to something else that's also a problem. There really should be at least one iteration of the rules before the final, but it's already been stated that isn't possible with the time-frame.
I think they should release another rulebook 6-7 months down the road, even if it delays the release. Better to wait a little bit longer than to jump in half-cocked.
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There's no amount of time that would be guaranteed to be sufficient. You could release the game to playtest, find a lot of issues, make a lot of changes to fix them, release the game to a second playtest, find a lot of new issues, make a lot of changes to fix them, release the game to a third playtest, find a lot of new issues...I don't see this being a bad thing though. If you o the process 4x times you're still going to end up with a better product than if you did it only once.
There are competing constraints.
You can bet that PF1 sales dropped off as soon as word of the playtest got around. There are commercial considerations alongside the creative ones - 4, 5, 6 public iterations of the playtest would no doubt make the final game better than just one. But they can’t afford to keep running the company on curtailed revenue for that long.
Also, each playtest probably takes some marketing buzz away - by the time they release “PF2 - the real thing!” people are going to be pretty ho hum about it if there’s been four earlier versions disseminated for free in the years leading up to it.
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I think they should release another rulebook 6-7 months down the road, even if it delays the release. Better to wait a little bit longer than to jump in half-cocked.
You release such products at GenCon or you don't release them at all. That's how the industry works. So, it's either GenCon 2019 or 2020.
If you keep finding "a lot of issues" that are worth fixing after 4 cycles, doesn't that imply you have a pretty big problem?
Well, yes.
You can iterate on simple problems like "the Alchemist is weak" and find a balance fairly quickly.
But let's say you introduce a big new system like Resonance. And say it turns out that it doesn't work well in practise; it makes certain categories of magic item worthless, or too many people just hate it for being different from what they're used to. So you rip it out and replace it with something else for playtest 2. That 'something else' isn't guaranteed to be any good, just because it's different; it might be fundamentally flawed in a new way, in which case you'll have to start again from scratch.
I'm from a videogame development background. On a recent project, we were using analytics to identify the point at which players abandoned our game. Most gave up during the tutorial. We rewrote the tutorial and tried again. Most players still gave up during the tutorial. We rewrote the tutorial and tried again. Most players still gave up during the tutorial... Maybe there was a 'right' tutorial, or maybe it was just a case of players correctly identifying the game as one they had no interest in. We had no way of knowing if it was worth continuing to try.
Eventually you just run out of time / budget and go with whatever you ended up on, without having much time to test it. Maybe that's how you end up with things like Starfinder's "high-level space ships are virtually impossible to fly, even for high-level characters" issue...
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Probably not, 6 months would be for a tweak AD&D 1E to 2E, 3.0 to 3.5 or 3.5 to PF2.
Even if they tweaked it each month for 6 feedback cycles say if resonance is rejected they don't have much else to go on.
2 years is probably not a long enough development time either, 3.0 had almost 3, 5E got 3, 4E got 2, AD&D 2E got 2 IIRC.
Well, this is disheartening.
I really do wish it turns out great though.
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Another thing companies can do with projects facing deadlines is manage scope.
It's possible that things like Resonance (and I imagine the Alchemist) don't make the first rulebook/boxed set and show up later in another book/expansion.
As I suggested earlier, if Paizo is thinking that they'll position 'Pathfinder' as more of a tabletop roleplaying boardgame which occupies a new hybrid space between boardgames like Descent/Legends of Andor and old school RPGs, the next year is really about polishing rules since there's a lot more leeway as the gaming system doesn't need to support the full breadth of oldschool RPG campaigns. Then things like +level to everything or the skill/proficiency system are pretty much on par with other boardgame rules since you're not trying to emulate a fantasy world, but rather complete the scenario/story you selected/pulled/downloaded.
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Resonance is a major mechanic though. I'm not sure they'd be able to add it in later as an optional rule.
If I look at Unchained, it had some fantastic optional rules that were usually not taken into consideration because it had come out later.
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I'm really not seeing the parts where this is more like a boardgame than a roleplaying game or how it can't be used for a fantasy world.
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Resonance is a major mechanic though. I'm not sure they'd be able to add it in later as an optional rule.
If I look at Unchained, it had some fantastic optional rules that were usually not taken into consideration because it had come out later.
Resonance not getting added is not a bug, it's a feature.