why not just make maps and release it?

[Defrag]

But this is where the flaw in his logic begins to show. If your mod lacks an amazing or cool idea, it will die anyway.

Will it? Many games and mods have succeeded in the past simply by taking an existing concept and improving upon it and adding its own twist to things. My war game example is a good one. Everyone has played a war game. Did CoD really do much more than MoH? Did DoD:S do a lot more than DoD? Hey guys, I'm running up a beach! You can only tweak things so much when dealing with an existing genre because you're not making up or defining the genre. Compare doom3 to doom. Doom was a seminal genre defining piece of gameplay history which had you blasting people and finding keys to unlock doors. Doom3 was very much the same other than the use of light (or lack of it) to do the same thing. I didn't see many amazing new ideas in doom3, but it certainly wasn't a failure (even if I didn't appreciate it).

When I talk of an "amazing" or "cool" idea I'm talking about something fundamental and totally different to the norm (garry's mod being a great example). I'm not talking about cool game-changing ideas that affect an existing genre -- that's a given. If you don't have any of those ideas then you're pretty much humped from day one. The amazing stuff I talk of it defining a new genre or doing something totally off the beaten path. Something games companies can't do because of market forces.

Now, this is from Christmas 2004 so forgive me if this policy has changed (the existence of the devjournals would indicate it if anyone posted in them), but there is no reason at all for such massive secrecy after things have been finalised. If things are still fluid and it hasn't been decided if a feature is in, then by all means don't tell the community about it because they'll be sorely disappointed when it goes. But if it is finalised, tell them about it! It's like those people signing their NDA to beta test - it means they can say NOTHING. Not even "This mod is going to be the best mod in the world, everyone should play it!" which would do nothing but help the mod. And a similar thing applies to telling the community about features that are going to 100% totally be in the game.

Christmas 2004 is a long time ago and things have changed somewhat.

The feature stuff really depends on what it is. If it's something fairly minor or routine then we probably talked about it at length on the forums or when people asked us. If it's something new and fun but ultimately might not work, then we generally test/tested it before we talked about it because we don't want to be saying "yeah the spy can turn into a car and then run people over in a silent fashion" only to discover our programmers can't do it or it just... sucks. Then people are all like "hey where's this you promised it!" -- it's like the release date conundrum. People tend to hold you to things even when you've said something off the cuff :P

If the feature is new, awesome and going to stay in, then we might not say anything either. People do like surprises, right? I'd say that the vast majority of what we're doing is now a known quantity.

[o_barbarian]

I hate to bump and old thread and say I told you so, but you have been pre-empted by Valve with TF2.

[schtoofa]

You say that because VALVe announced that they're going to release a new TF mod? Didn't we say that a year and a half ago (give or take) ? Seems like FF pre-empted them!

[o_etzell]

*Cough* Owned *Cough*.