Hordes of the Underdark Wrap Report
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 860
Trent Oster: The Hordes of the Underdark project began in late fall, 2002. Our original target date was mid-2003. When it became obvious we needed to move most of our people over to help out on the Shadows of Undrentide expansion, we moved our target date for Hordes of the Underdark target out to fall 2003. With this new target in mind, we completed the first expansion and moved our efforts back to the second. With a great deal of hard work and careful planning, we managed to ship within a week of our target date.
We hit a number of roadblocks and delays along the way, but we managed to get back in line and make up for the delays. Key to us hitting so near our date was careful feature rationing. We wanted to add everything into the expansion, but given a small team and a fixed timeline, we had to focus on large payoff, low-cost features. We also only publicly discussed features to which we had completely committed. Any feature we weren't sure we could complete in time was never mentioned publicly until it was "in the bag". The goal was to deliver a high quality, full-featured, epic expansion pack in time, and I think we hit on all counts.
