Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar Being Polished to “Enormous Perfection”

We let you know about the umpteenth delay to Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar a few days ago, and today we noticed that Cleve has offered up another update to the CRPG’s Steam newsfeed that reveals why he continues to put 20-hour workdays into the game. In short, he’s working to deliver “the ultimate game”, and he intends to do so “very shortly”. Let the saga continue for, well, at least a little longer:

During the last two weeks leading up to the release date I kept marshalling more bugs and slight glitches in the game. No show stoppers but things that just needed to happen in version one. I did not want all the schadenfreude army to take delight in the fact the game was released with these glitches present.

As they accumulated over the past two weeks I kept hoping if I worked harder I could pull it all together at the last moment but when I woke up on Saturday I realized they had become substantial.

This means the release of Grimoire is just sliding a little, which always happens with any software. If you ever meet people who tell you they work as software developers and never miss deadlines you don’t know any people who work as software developers.

Grimoire is a colossal game but has already been played completely through by dozens of testers as early as 2005. Every single issue raised during that test is long solved in the game. It is my own observations that have accumulated in the last two weeks.

I did the math and figured it is better to be a little late and deliver the ultimate game than to release it a couple days too soon just because of the pressure of the deadline. I have been working about 20 hours a day and it is amazing how much of it that was long postponed to “later” has been cleared up just in the last two days. I am going to continue working 20 hours a day until it is released very shortly.

As an example, it was always my intention that NPCs log useful entries in your quest book that are sensitive to context. I only had a couple instances of these but in the last two days have added about 92 additional notes by NPCs in the game to make sure the interactions are memorable.

The game could be released right now and few people would know it was not the final version. I am going to work on it intensely just a little more and then release it as a product polished to enormous perfection. If you get this close a couple days is not a big deal, compared to 23 years of working on it.

I told my wife it was similar to the Challenger disaster. Brilliant engineers worked for years on all these systems but then during the last hour they rushed to launch when a simple review and fix could have saved them from catastrophe. That’s what I am doing with Grimoire. I canceled the countdown and we are just going to inspect those O-Rings to see if they need replacement before I punch the button here.