I'm actually in the same boat as you -- I followed things quite a lot over a year ago, but then got busy with things, and just appeared again a couple days ago. I spent last night searching through posts on the propsero forums, these forums, and the current IG forums, and the extent to which QSI/IG have silenced the issue is truly remarkable. I'm sure they have their reasons and, hey, it's a private company, if they can't do what they want then who can...
I have a couple educated guesses as to what really happened. There is no way to confirm them, of course; Alan himself no doubt has an NDA keeping him hush-hush, but given that he admitted himself that he had just started looking for new employment when he left QSI, it is unlikely that he ever had any intention of doing so, or that he had more warning beyond a couple weeks before he actually left.
And I'm sure everyone jumped on IG/QSI when this happened. It is easy to make villains out of the folks that are responsible for the last series of cuts (the designers included). Alan was very thorough with his ideas and wonderful at communicating to the public the design process of the game, which is almost unheard of in the industry. He was friendly, he was visible. But the people who made these decisions were doing their jobs as best they can -- nobody goes to work, savoring that they know they have to let Alan Emrich go. We'd all like to think that, if QSI/IG trusted Alan's vision just a little more, maybe things would be different -- but none of us can say. We aren't professionals in the publishing industry or the design industry. People who are maede those calls, and maybe they were right and maybe not, but 99% of the people who say they weren't right are just pissed that things won't be as cool as Alan wanted them to be; the fact of the matter is that things may never have been that cool, even if Alan stayed until the end, and this way we can be reasonably assured of a good, if not great game.
I know I will always wonder how MOO3 would've turned out. I wonder, if I came across ten million dollars, if I would hire Alan Emrich to make the best d##m game ever made, because part of me says there are few better suited to it. But when you're QSI or IG and you've already invested millions of dollars, it's easy for the skeptical side to gnaw away at your faith in anybody.
It was enlightening just going back and reading some of Alan's early diary entries -- 'it's Sunday, I'm by myself at the office, and the design document is nearly ONE HUNDRED PAGES! it will probably be 2 or 3 times that when I'm done' -- and then it turned out to be 500+ pages. Apparently, Alan was told by Hasbro in the beginning to set the bar so high that nobody could approach MOO3 -- whomever was making the calls at Hasbro then knew the potential of the MOO Franchise, and, it seems, Alan's near-infinite capacity to design, and design, and design some more. The details in the data dumps are staggering.
And he delivered. Alan jokingly recalled one time when he 'finally went too far' in submitting certain ideas to Hasbro. It is clear that, in the beginning, the MOO3 team had support to take this project all the way -- it would be a huge investment, but it might just turn out to be 'the final game I would buy,' as one forum member put it. You can see Alan drawing on his experience with board games and with PC games in the design doc excerpts. It is apparent that, not only did he want to design the best game, well, ever, but he wanted the public to take part in the process; not just to observe the process, but to affect it.
My perspective in reading the old posts (the .zip on their website) and the sparse ones around the time of the shakeup in April is perhaps unique, since I missed the flame-wars that surely must have ensued; the amount of drama and the fervor of the debates on the forums were high even when things were going full-steam before Alan and Stormcloud left, but it seems that the departures of two volunteer developers, followed by two of the lead designers, caused a crisis of faith.
My personal educated guess is that IFPs had something to do with this. Alan said early on that he fought long and hard to get them into the game, that even a lot of the design team was skeptical. He respected the criticisms but it was obvious that IFPs were 'his baby,' so to speak; Alan is a professional and has been in the industry for 25 years (I think?) so I consider it unlikely that changes in the design team would result from this one issue, but it seems obvious to me that the statement by the current producer that 'removing IFPs won't really affect the game that much' -- especially after looking over all the data dumps and how interwoven they were -- is damage-control. We will probably not ever know the difference, but even if it's true that IFPs are not the biggest cause of the shake-up (and I believe that it is), I think they are emblematic of a series of causes. Alan's approach to designing MOO3 was a very risky one, and the longer the project went on and the more money it surely burned through, the more nervous I'm sure the higher-ups got.
In the end, MOO3 will probably be good game. The majority of the team who designed it has labored for a very long time. And as fascinating as Alan and his work have been, it is important to remember that a whole team of people work on this; every time a designer makes a call on a policy, those people have to make it happen, and it's their work you're seeing as much as the designers', no matter how much genius was involved in the conception. Don't miss the forest for one particularly interesting tree.
I'll buy it, I'll play it, I'll probably like it. But I'll always wonder what Alan's vision would have produced, because even with all of the data that was released to the public, only he truly saw the elephant.
Cheers,
SWK
