I’ve been a part of most of the mainstream and slightly less mainstream mmorpg launches and I’m pretty positive it’s gonna be much better in 8-12 months.
I enjoy the game in its current state, so I’m staying.
$40 was your wallet?.. Sheesh
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A lot of work from home perma-pandemic spoiled tech kids will decry this sort of comment, but if you look at the games that were finished and released during the pandemic saga its clear that it is more difficult to build complex software with dependencies on multiple skillsets in a remote fashion.
Bugs get missed. Communication is less natural. No one is able to quite pinpoint what went wrong. Games are made to be made in person. I feel bad for everyone who had to finish and ship a product the past 2 years.
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Its as if they wanted the game to be good but are frustrated that is not, but it must be something else.
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You and @Quiggley21 have some serious issue for even saying working from home is a issue. I work in the game industry, our developers are much more productive and happier then ever since working from home.
You also don’t meet up with people to raid in real life to better communicate. What you’re basicall saying is a doctrine from some people who don’t trust their employees. It’s something that has no basis, especially since this game was developed far before the pandamic and AGS does have a big majority of people working in-office.
So please don’t say anything if you don’t know what you’re talking about.
The game is so fucked up because of corporate “The amazon way” thinking, cheaping out on QA and Support + rewarding “alternative thinking”. Well that’s why they choose the strangest and stupidest ways to implement stuff.
So technically, you’re hating something corporate amazon is creating while praising corporate amazon phrases and practices that people should work in office.
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I think game development works better in physical spaces. I base this off of making games in physical shared offices for quite a long time.
I think working from home is probably a lot more comfortable for the average dev, but that the shared energy and magic that is required to make great games is summoned from the shared experiences of real people interacting in physical meatspace both during the day and after hours when the relationships necessary to do extremely hard work together are formed.
Maybe corporate wants people back in the office because they know this is real also. I think its also important to remember that games are multidisciplinary. Perhaps it is legitimately more comfortable for many engineers to work from home and focus on their tasks without distraction, but it developers alone don’t make the game. It’s a highly collaborative effort and a lot of key decisions on great games have happened over card games at lunch, after hours hang sessions, smoke breaks in front of the building, etc. Taking things fully digital greatly harms the spectrum of communication and that is, I believe, why we see such shit work coming out these past 2 years.
I hope people who are legitimately more effective outside an office can continue to work how they prefer, but I think it’s hard to take your “Trust me, I’m the expert here.” reply seriously. Lots of us have made games for many many years.
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There is no “magic” in AAA game development, you have leads that are in the office and that communicate constantly to archive good results (But they could do so as well at home). And you have people making budgets and approve of scopes. After that there are the ground workers that make the foundation/MVP and then come the masses of staff working on assets/code/sound/testing/networking/tools these people do not need to be present. Then comes QA and Quality Gates. And the circle repeats.
Taking my professional experience as a basis for a argument is not a “trust me i’m a expert” but a basis for my statement since people do not argue rational but emotional. Like you “feel” and you “think” that something is the cause or bad, but you lack the evidences for it. And you’re also not declaring them as that but you state them as the truth.
And having people in the office or not is not the reason that his game which was in development since 2016 is failing now. From all the interviews and the constant shifts in scope and goal of the game it’s because Amazon wanted to be “special and trendy”, and now butcher their game because of some data analyst or lead designer or higher up pushing things that are not healthy for the game.
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nah, this game is FUBAR
As far as my server is concerned (one of the highest pop US WEST servers at least for a long time) is basically dead, I see 10 people outside of the mutation dungeon instead of the 50+ 1 week earlier, all global chat is almost dead no wars are happening, there is almost no trade anymore.
A lot of these changes happened to late and they still haven’t listened to what people wanted in a lot of things, there has been 0 new content (OPR doesn’t count) and this game is as far as I can see DEAD.
There is no reason for a new player to get this game even if it was not dead because they will not spend weeks/months grinding item level, money etc to become competitive. Crafting (getting BIS gear) is so unrewarding its insane and it is even worse now with no one to sell the decent unwanted stuff to.
They ran this game into the ground so fast its amazing, most other games last longer than this with way less hype and population to begin with.
They didn’t shoot themselves in the foot here they shot their feet and legs off with a bazooka.
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Right, because this is an entirely new development that never happened pre-covid… not like CyberPunk, Aliens Colonial Marines, Mechwarrior5, etc etc. came out half finished broken pieces of garbage and had to be brought to a playable state by the amateur mod community or by months of further dev work. I’m sure those games were ruined purely by people working from home. I was really looking forward to ACM too, and it would have been great if not for that damned pandemic of 2013! 
Cyberpunk had its issues but I played it and still enjoyed it (mostly) and it did get fixes, there is a big difference here because this is an MMO and once the population is gone the game is unplayable, Cyberpunk you can go back to and play anytime.
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I wasn’t comparing them in that sense. I’m just saying, games being released before they are finished, full of bugs, with broken content, has been the norm for at least a decade now and it has nothing to do with the pandemic or working from home, it’s a well known issue with the gaming industry in general and has been for a long time. I don’t know why these boomers insist on blaming all of new worlds problems on working from home. I think it just shows they have a bone to pick and aren’t dealing well with change.
Bro you rock, may logic prevail! Anyway I want to point out that I am a new player (2.5 weeks or so) and I started this game fully aware of all the issues as my IRL friends played since launch.
I started with the intention of being ready for when this game is good because think about it: If this game does get pulled from the flames and saved, it has sooooo much potential.
I believe this massive amount of potential is also the reason people are so passionate about the problems in the game. They don’t want to leave, they want to stay, they just really wish this game worked.
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Oh I 100% agree with you, companies are greedy bastards that only care about the $$$ and not about making a good product. Ever since the video game industry became a really good cash cow we have had more and more pay to win, gambling and loads of other bullcrap that is more about addiction than it is making a good/fun product.
It is not that I don’t think this game had potential, it did.
It is that I think they have no idea how to make this game better from a player perspective, with the proof of what I am saying by their attempt at Myrkgard, they couldn’t do it but they tell us to “get good”.
They have no idea what works in an MMO, and I can tell you now we did not want 1 company earning millions a week so that they win every war on the server just by throwing their gear in our face, most of these people duped and cheated to get said territory in the first place and are mediocre at best in the majority and it has been proven since we caught up in gear right near the end and destroyed them.
OPR is anti competitive in design, it encourages to many people to do the wrong things to look good, they couldn’t even make an anti spawn camp properly and these are the reasons why I think this game with potential will never live up to that potential.
No lag or desync in the forums. …Yet.
That’s a really shit argument. Ok you got me I want this game to be better than it currently is.
So, where to from here?
Nope, they make’em faster than they fix’em
I hope so. I am much more skeptical than I was at the beginning. But the game still has immense potential - they just really dug a pretty large hole that is going to take a lot to climb out of.
Compilation errors would explain alot of the bugs and broken code. Like everyone is working on different things in remote locations. Then it’s all compiled and stuff gets overwritten by other changes. Or they are just incompetent at their jobs. At which point it wouldn’t matter where they were working. You can decide for yourself which side of that equation you will argue. Either way it means the same outcome in the end.