A> Dude, you are THICK!!!  Geezz...  Besides, what does a 
 A> release date have to do with playtesting?  Sign up as a 
 A> playtester if you want to do that.
 A>  You still wont see a date...
  I won't see a date, of course!  But what I WILL see is how well the project 
is coming along.  There are three stages a game has before it's released:
-"Tech demo" stage.  That's basically when the game is largely just art, maps 
        and objects that happen to share some coherence.  A lot of things are 
        planned, but not actually in place.  Prey's been here for awhile.
-"We can actually tell you something meaningful now" stage.  This is when     
    most things are in place, if not in a ready-to-ship form.  It         
actually looks like a game at this point, although a good chunk of         
what you see could be changed at any moment.  I suspect Duke Nukem         
Forever is at least at this stage.
   
-"Beta, at last" stage.  This is my favourite time period to track, since a   
      game is very close to release, and whatever you see is almost always    
     going to be what you play.  The only things left to do are often         
just bug fixes and gameplay tweaks (which can be extensive).  DNF         
could be in this stage, though I doubt it's right on the verge of         
being released.
  Anyhow, I'm more interested in just knowing what's going on rather than 
when I'll be able to get a real copy.  That, I can deduce on my own after I 
know what's going on!
--- Maximus 3.01
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