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this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
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I really confused by all this hate. Has anyone here actually tried to play the actual game? It's pretty damn impressive what they have now.
I'm not confused at all, timelines are forever moving goalposts, and each major "milestone" is really just a tech demo addition with no cohesive product. You can walk around spaceships, get auto generated quests, or get in some pvp where the person who bought the best ship wins.
The underlying promises have been continually missed with constant deflection that amounts to "hey look at this shiny thing we just did".
It’s still alpha. 11 years after I threw $100 their way.
Some people may be happy to play buggy alpha builds as they trickle out, I want to see a finished game without the perpetual feature creep.
We haven’t even seen Squadron 42 which was supposed to be out in 2014.
See, now YOU guys fucked up. I can understand why someone who paid literally $100 for a video game would be upset.
I only spent 45. I'm not unhappy about that purchase. But I pretty much understood what they are trying to deliver is going to take a very very long time. So I guess I'm not mad about it because I wasn't expecting to actually buy a completed game for that 45. It's not the first time I've jumped on an early access game so I was fully expecting to wait and the things I've seen look so awesome I'm perfectly happy waiting till it's done. But shit I am going to get squadron 42 plus the base game so IDK I'm happy with that.
I paid $45 over 10 years ago. I would like to play version 1.0 sometime during my lifetime.
They showed off Squadron 42 earlier this year. They're definitely spending money on stuff since it had a ton of A-List actors in the game. Graphics look amazing, everything looks so detailed... The game engine however was struggling. During the gameplay footage it constantly looked like the frame rate dropped to 15fps. They claim the game is "Feature Complete" (whatever that means in their definition...) and now is in the polishing stage. I honestly don't think their CryEngine based Engine will run well even on the latest and best hardware when (if) it finally releases unless they make massive changes to the engine...
I'm sure it is, but they lost me almost a decade ago when I paid for "alpha access" made dozens of bug reports, put a hundred hours into a broken game, signed up at least ten other people, and then lost alpha access because I wasn't enough of an influencer.
All I wanted to do was play a buggy fucking game and give them free (professional) QA and they instead decided to restrict access to a bunch of extra exclusive PTU alpha influencers. That's the second I decided to not give them any more money or free labor.
How did you lose alpha access? I paid 45 bucks several years ago haven't reported a single bug and have played on and off for years and I still have access.
After Arena Commander was released, while they were testing early stages of flyable ships, they implemented a tiered release process where a small group of hand picked players were given access to release candidate builds before these were pushed to "alpha subscribers." In practice, this was supposed to help reduce server loads for testing purposes, but in practice it meant we would go months at a time between playable updates, while a select few stared to control outsized influence on the development meta. At times it meant that the game was actually completely broken and unplayable in the public universe for extended periods, while the special test group would go on about how "trust us, it's not ready yet," even though the newer build were clearly more stable.
Also, in those early days, it was already obnoxious enough going back and forth with forum power users over shit like accurate G force simulations, control scheme preferences and weapons balancing, and then suddenly most of us were completely cut out of that conversation.
To me, this was a departure for what I signed up for, which was to be an alpha tester. In my mind, the generous sums of money I spent on ships and weapons was supposed to buy me two things - access to real time development of a revolutionary gaming concept, and perhaps a small amount of influence on that development (even if that just meant reporting bugs focused on things I cared about). When they implemented the tiered release system, both of those things were negated. All of use who were not selected for the real alpha test were excluded from the meta, and the real access to the development process, and were instead walled off behind an increasingly tall "community management" fence.
Bug reports from random players aren't that useful. The bottleneck is fixing the bugs not finding them. For any bug you report to a games studio, there is a good chance they already know.
It's not a game. It's a demo that's been given more money than any other game in the history of kickstarters, and it's been going on for over ten effing years.
Does it look cool? Absolutely. Am I totally 100% behind the idea for the game? Absolutely! Can you play the game right now in a way that all of your progress isn't erased? No. But you can BUY progress that will.
So that's what people do. They buy things to make progress in a universe that's possibly never going to be officially launched. In August they reported making over $600,000,000 to date. For a game that's never launched, or set a launch date, or put together a serious road map.
I did multiple times, it's a fucking mess.
The confusion comes because most people are jaded by the dev cycle, which has been incredibly expensive while delivering almost nothing of substance for years. On top of that, many have defended the dev team with a lot of fervor despite this, so I think people take it less seriously when people praise the game.
I’m personally skeptical, but I’ll definitely give it a better look if it gets released.