From the ELN forums, Justin talks about the delays to Werewolf, why such things happen, and gives an answer (of sorts) about what this means for Mage: The Awakening.

It's the state of constant revision that games go through, especially when you pull them completely apart and look at every individual piece, weighing it for change, inclusion or abandonment. Requiem underwent 20 months of design, writing and development, and Forsaken is even more different from the original property than Requiem is from Masquerade.

In truth, Vampire ran six months past its original design parameter. The only reason we managed to get it out on its original schedule is because we robbed Peter to pay Paul, shifting time out from the printing timetable. In fact, Vampire had already been completely edited when we sent it back into development, and then it went through a second edit.

Not understanding why a game needs to move on a schedule suggests that you don't understand what it takes to design a game (and no, I don't mean that pejoratively). This is a company populated by professionals who do this 40 hours a week (which actually comes closer to 60-80 hours a week during such a massive revision). We wouldn't have pulled the schedule unless we had to.

On the other hand, complaining that the game is late makes it a sort of damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation, because if the game came out on time, you'd complain about that, too, and rightly so. As the rest of the thread illustrates, people would rather have the game late and functional than on time and broken.

Regards,
Justin

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Erasclio said: I guess you can't tell us anything about Mage, can you?

Sorry. Nothing yet, mostly because I don't actually know the impact.

Regards,
Justin