WhyAmIHere
ah the ol' "Stop criticizing, it's EARLY ACCESS". definitely never heard that one before
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Beta Patch Notes e1.6.0
- Thread starter Callum
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There really isn't a grey area. Its already the standard for the industry. Similar to Kickstarter, it allows developers to raise money to help develop their game. Its not illegal, unethical, or misleading. They told you what product you were buying before you bought it.
You want to demonize TW and the video game industry for their behaviour: go ahead. Just dont expect me to wipe the tears from your eyes because you purchased a game advertised as not finished and then act like someone tricked you into buying it.
Take some responsibility for your own actions. You bought a game labeled as early access. Thats your decision.
Yeah, you're all victims for buying a product that wasn't finished with the intent of helping them finish it.
Poor you.
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Is there ANYTHING that you would consider worthy of criticism here, or does the shield of 'early access' deflect any issues with the game in your mind?
WhyAmIHere
Early Access means you're not allowed to say anything bad about the game. It's in the rules.
Early access isn't a shield. Its an honest description of what you bought.
If you don't want to be involved in the process, wait until the game is finished.
Take some responsibility though. You bought exactly what TW was selling.
I can't speak for Old-Bull but I think TW should have been clearer that players weren't going to get an opportunity to sit in the director's chair regarding major mechanics and additions to the game. I don't really blame either side -- people were led to believe that EA meant they were going to help build the game while TW has to deal with suggestions that amount to like 1000+ hours of their time to implement so of course they don't -- but TW failed to manage expectations.
No its a free pass for all the entitled 14 year olds to play the "poor me" card and refuse to take responsibility for their own actions.
The only thing missing here is "Get off my lawn" in your signature.
WhyAmIHere
Bingo. If they didn't want people to expect to have a big say in what's going in the game, their EA blurb shouldn't have had phrases like:
or
Then again I probably should lower my expectations in terms of TW's ability to communicate. Not like they've ever show themselves to be any good at that, mexxico excepted perhaps.
It must be hard for someone like them, only knowing a single phrase: "IT'S EARLY ACCESS". Hopefully someone can get them the linguistic help they need ?
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I mean, they are engaging, and they are utilizing feedback though
WhyAmIHere
Around the edges, perhaps. Generally though, comparing roadmap posts from TW like this with the commonly given community feedback gives you damn-near disjoint sets. There has been some slight positive movement in terms of overlap in the last couple months, I will concede, however.
LuciusDomitiusAurelianus
Sergeant
Mind you, I agree with the substance of what Old-Bull is trying to say: It's an EA game, and that almost always means it is going to be weird, so having people come here and become unhinged and try to brigade TW, insult other people, and just be toxic is not helpful in the best case and actually hurting the chances of dev enablement in the worse. Though, I will be contrarian to that last point as say if a company is not prepared for people to hate their product and raise hell - well, that's not realistic no matter the brand.
That said, while communication has markedly improved outside of the normal active people (Marda, Mray, Mexx, Duh, Dejan) from TW / Comm. Management, it still feels haphazard. The most annoying thing is very large features are teased sometimes months before being ready, the features are quietly dropped, and then it's radio silence or ambiguous statements. For instance, the dynamic battle terrain was promised in 1.5.10, 1.5.11, and 1.6.0.
I also dislike the changes they make to meaningful mechanics without letting the players know - they did that with getting negative relationships for killing Lords in battle, and now the fact they did not rollback being unable to issue orders to troops after the enemy fully routes after *everyone* said they hate it is head scratching. This behavior hearkens back to the early-2000s with MMO devs doing things like server wipes, redesigning combat / leveling / quest systems without telling anyone - Turbine and Asheron's Call 2 was guilty of this since their Alpha/Beta days and the game cratered within a few years (and the company a decade after that).
That said, they are making progress, coming into with an assumption of design then releasing it early to the mercy of 10s of 1000s is very stressful. Redesigning one tiny part of an inter-woven giant codebase, is a slow process, and no matter how many play-tests/unit tests/smoke tests you do, ****'s bound to break. I think the work they are doing with agents, formations and pathing is slowly building to sieges "being fixed" - this patch alone made a ton of progress (there are other issues - but people rightfully complaining about sieges is the most obvious)
Maggot Toes
Sergeant
I bought this early access after watching a Spiffing Brit video about how broken the game is. It's over a year later and slightly less broken and I'd still buy it early access. If they want to release a $20 elephant DLC I'll buy that too.
The broken game is still more fun than lots of cheaper not broken games. The first PC game I ever bought in 1991 for $50, UMS II, was so broken you couldn't play more than 10 or so turns before the AI got stuck. I'd still buy it again too.
The biggest recent complaint is mods and looks like they really tried to do something about it this time even if it isn't everything wished for.
The broken game is still more fun than lots of cheaper not broken games. The first PC game I ever bought in 1991 for $50, UMS II, was so broken you couldn't play more than 10 or so turns before the AI got stuck. I'd still buy it again too.
The biggest recent complaint is mods and looks like they really tried to do something about it this time even if it isn't everything wished for.
No. I'm sorry no but this is not the game that TW was selling. There are numerous threads on this forum highlighting the things that were expected or told would be in this game that we now know are not going to be in the game.
But you know what? Fine. I admit I should not have bought an early acess game. I should not have taken TW at their word and should have been a more savvy consumer and had very low expectations. I take responsibility for my choice. Now that I have taken responsibility for my actions, can we talk about the flaws in the game's development and its lack of features?
It was? I never saw that, just a vague timeline.
Anyway, onto patch reactions:
- I think these new culture perk Cons are messing stuff up with the economy, except Battania's, which effectively cements it as King Ding-a-ling among culture perks now.
- I personally dislike being able to back-out of a Kingdom decision; sometimes I click the wrong one and don't want to decide that moment -- generally when I'm launching one last siege assault but have to give out the previous siege target to a clan and misclick on the peace agreement instead.
- Reducing the success chance for emissaries sucks in terms of player satisfaction.
- I still haven't seen the Lord/Lady Needs a Tutor quest pop with any consistency, even when it should be popping all the goddamned time (20 years into a playthrough).
- Not a fan of the universal desert speed penalty, would have preferred an increase in food consumption or similar. Right now, it is just Snow 2.0, except all year.
WhyAmIHere
A reasonable post overall, but I'll quibble with this part. The communication has gotten more common, but it has not improved. Their communication is still full of ambiguous statements that lead to misunderstandings and confusion, as if there exists some directive from their management to give as little direct, substantive information as possible in said communications. See the recent communication on the modding changes before 1.6.0 came out for a prime example of that.
EDIT: I suppose it's arguable that an increase in communication frequency is automatically better, which is fair. My point is that the frequency, not the quality, is what's increased, not to say that an increase in frequency is worthless.
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CannonBoe
Recruit
Even if the quest was not an issue at all... Why? Why take the option away from us? Why can't I roleplay this ruthless dude that won't let anyone go? Also it still promotes F1>F3 tactic, I believe I don't need to explain why.
I think they're doing a good job overall. They listened to the modding community and are willing to further listen... mexxico, MRay and other developers have been engaging pretty frequently with the community and also asked for and taken suggestions plenty of times. They really didn't create false expectations as far as I am concerned, they do want both the community and themselves to be satisfied with the game like they stated. They have a vision of their own so not every feedback will be implemented, naturally, but they definitely take feedback into account and decide upon directions they should take and what to implement and what not. And this has been happening since the beginning of EA, even if the communication wasn't as often as it is now. I used to give feedback on steam patch notes the very first months of early access and some aspects I suggested (even though nobody answered my messages on steam) were immediately taken into account for the next patch. And I've been met with the same kind of response on the forum as well. Even though it took some time, eventually they looked into the leveling progression that we were advocating so much that it needs improvements. Right now, like some others have stated, athletics and other skills do feel like they are not so sluggish anymore to level up (in comparison to even the last patch). They're making changes that they are not even mentioning in the patch notes, but they're good subtle changes that improve gameplay overall.
I'm 100% sure if I actually cared to make an effort I could go through every patch and show a multitude of things they implemented and changed based purely on feedback, and that is without the numerous bug and crash fixes which so many of them are only discovered through player feedback. Just going back to 1.5.9 really quick and glancing my eyes on the patch we got: sandbox mode option (community suggestion), (even little things like the low warmup time in MP sieges was 15 minute at launch, and now it's down to 3 minutes, community suggestion to lower it), no more relationship penalties when killing lords in battle (again), increase of throwing weapons damage to shields which was discussed by players before and a lot more. We just can't say they don't take into account feedback. Plenty of UI changes are based on player feedback so often as well, and we got plenty of good ones this patch. Plenty of quest changes/balancing have been player feedback as well. It seems like little things but it's a lot of things overall.
Some developers literally don't listen at all and they don't care... I saw such too. The boomer developers at 7 Days to Die are my most classic example. Damn boomers. So I feel like TW gets flamed way too much in comparison to some that do a much poorer job at fixing and updating their games (some never fix them, there are old games which are still buggy messes to this day). I just imagine though, how bad it must feel to release a patch, thinking you've done a pretty good job, and still be flamed so hard by people that some of them didn't even bother opening the game to try the new patch at least. It's really sad. They stayed up late trying to release the patch despite the difficulties, when they could have just said "**** it, release it next week", and the patch is so smooth with so many good UI changes and performance but not enough players give them credit for it. Sieges are also a little bit improved as well. But yeah that's that. I hope they keep doing good work despite the negativity, that's all. It must be pretty demotivating to see that after every patch, be it good or bad, the negativity never changes. I'll give it a few more patches though, and I am sure the community will turn around eventually. Content and stuffs are coming.
