Okay so I wake up on fake Christmas morning and find a download for FE under the impulse tree. I start it up and I get a bland landscape, 20 spells that take 1000 turns to learn, crappy resource generation, a population prestige equation that is totally broken, crashes, crashes, and more crashes, and beyond all that there is a spider army right outside my starting city and i have no weapons or magic to use. 

Given that, I would go straight to the forum and post the mother of all walls about how angry I am and how the dev team is mostly trolls and fools. Then I would take a poo, drink some aspple juice and take a nap, because I am obviously a child in this scenario. Also, I am the one true god of communism since we are playing make believe. 

IRL I will be beta testing the game for 6 months before it comes out and I'll know if the game is good or not at release. Also, as far as the old "we have a better version in the internal test group that IS ready for sales," fool me once... can't get fooled again. 

I have faith that these guys want the game to be as good as I do. Based on that assumption and the fixes in development over the past year, I am really not that worried about it. The question is just time now. Its like watching a 22 minute sitcom every week for 10 years. I just hate that. 

Hard to understand what good this kind of speculation does.

I just want to know what to expect if it does happen.

Remember...

Pics or it didn't happen.

People are bored lately?

Assuming this happens and FE isn't worth playing, then I'll simply be done with the franchise. No more posting, no more paying attention, no money spent on future installments. I don't think there's much else to it then that. They're getting a do-over on FE. If it doesn't work out, then that's really all she wrote.

I hope that's not what happens of course. I do think people need to have their expectations set in the right place. I expect to get a game that plays like WoM only with improved mechanics, more strategic decisions, and obviously no crashing. I don't expect a "totally new game".

First it depends on the TYPE of problem. Gamewise or technical (crashes). Since my games have never crashed lets go with gameplay.

Now I'm a bit unique here in that I've never played WoM. So I got no preconceptions.

If FE is as bad as WoM then I would sit and think for a minute and then post on this forum about how disappointed I am and what I consider wrong with the game. I'd compare with Master of Magic and Age of Wonders series.

I'd still check the site every now and then for info on the 2nd expansion (if there would be one) but I wouldn't take part in the forums any more (maybe except for General & PC Gaming).

If FE crashes a single time though (none of my games have ever crashed except for StarCraft on my old AMD K.6-2, Dawn of War on my overclocked AMD Barton 2500+@3200+ and StarCraft II on THIS rig ((E8400)) due to hot CPU 64 C) I'd get a panicfeeling and post about it on the forum - if they have made the crashreporting comfortable! - and wait unil I get an answer or patch. Then i would expect my crashing to be solved permanently.

I don't think the scope is big enough for a colossal failure tbh.

I think if FE sucks, Brad should fire Derek, Toby, and Jon and bring in the 5 biggest complainers in the forum and see if they can do any better.  I'll start packing my bags now.  Lord Xia, you should too.

-Clears throat and starts packing bags-

Good thing I have a couple years graphic design experience.

We have to make it work.... For the good of the gaming community.

if it sucks it will be largely due to the game engine it has from wom. the devs not only have to modify the game engine but also create content and mechanics. hell most of the fixing has been centered around the engine. id say derek and jon are making the best of a bad situation. its like opening up a store in a location that just got hit with a nuclear missile quite frankly lots of cleaning up before anything can be done effectively.

in truth the real poeple who dropped the ball inho is the people who initially created the game engine. its limitations,bugs,lack of vision is the real thing that holds this game down.

i hope this is a lesson for all developers in creating a game. #1 make a solid engine capable of handling everything you want your particular game to do. if the engine sucks then if screws everything and cleaning up is a worse in the long run.

#1 game engine (solid with all aspects of expectations of what the game needs to be able to do)  --->#2 game mechanics (math values etc) ----> 3# game content

all the 3 are needed to make a great game but if #1 sucks then #2 and #3 are doomed to never be at full potential of what poeple expected.

so i will say again seeing how jon and derek came in the picture with all 3#'s badly composed its an uphill fight for them and its not their fault.

example with derek and his ffh modding. civ 4  solid game engine and solid game mechanics all derek had to do was mostly work on #3 (content) and he did it exceptionally