The achingly slow pace of PP and the disconnectedness of the strategy layer from the tactics one is so disappointing. The game is so damn good in various aspects, but it’s like finding diamonds in the mud. And there’s so much mud. I’ve never tried so hard in a game as PP to pass through a layer of confusion to get to the good stuff. Just … why … makes it seem like UFO Defence was a fortunate accident.
I have played it over 100 hours and I’m still waiting for it to go somewhere. It’s plodding and the number of things to do on the world map, often concurrently, makes the experience feel like seconds are experienced more as days. I sit there, bewildered, as I click between my deployed ships and wrap through them over and over and over. This layer is exceedingly obtuse: needs constraints, shaping.
This game needed a user journey mapped before being built and then an execution that was framed in such a way that it could be fast tuned (which it should have been, regularly), and yes – modded. This game feels like it was made without an understanding of what consumers expect in gaming nowadays. I have also heard Julian in a podcast say things like cosmetics don’t matter. Oye, out of sync with us.
Listen to your consumers. Let them guide you. You aren’t the best, at least not anymore. We’re here to elevate you so that your creative can shine again. The new XCom cannot hold a candle to the original one, nor to Terror from the Deep, nor even the third one, IMO, which was also pure crack. Come back to us, your intuition needs a lift and we’ll provide that to you. Just pay attention and take us seriously.
Pace and lenght: yes the game is too long and as a result, it feels stuck.
Progression: The game has progression systems, but is not like tiers of armors and guns or linear improvement of stats. this is an intentional design choice that makes the game unique, but it is hard to deal with, because players expect linear progression. Even if most linear progressions are actually artificial, because those ganmes scale linearly difficulty as well. In the end I kind of like it, and with more variety the game could be great with the current design.
Story: I actually love this, the issue is that the game feels too long so may events are very spaced out.
These are issues and I think chosing the duration of the campaign wiould actually address it. But in some way is also one of the strengths of the game, and the moment to moment game almost makes up for it. Though granted, if you want to see were the story is going the current length of the campaign is a drawback.
What you miss is that the game development is a business. There are hundrends games being produced every year. Only small amount of them survive long-term and build game franchaises. We’re talking like 1-5% of them surviving and probably 5% of those only have long-term success. Phoenix Point is simply dying and if DLCs won’t sell, you will have funeral at the end of this DLC cycle with some note from devs that will tell you they’re stopping work on PP because it was a tremendous success.
It doesn’t matter that they found some 500 people who play the game and think it’s good. It’s too low to survive on the market. As for numbers you gave we can’t look at “exact” numbers because Phoenix was on Epic, so doing any sort of comparisons will not give anything useful for we don’t have numbers. But I can tell you that starting numbers for Phoenix were probably way higher. Remember this game had fantastic visibility on Twitch and Youtube when it came out. There were doznens and doznes youtubers doing it. And from all of this 1,5 year later you get playerbase very small even though you’re producing stuff. That means that you have terrible retention of your product.
As I said we have numbers from YT, Twitch and Steam to have some sort of clue where things stand. And they don’t stand in any reasonable shape for me. Games with those numbers are forgotten within 1-2 years. When devs will stop this DLC cycle, there will be no moders to keep game alive, so playerbase will go to Chaos Reborn level. And yeah maybe they will think of some sort of sequel. But they didn’t deliver any long-term playerbase and they won’t pull second kickstarter off on Phoenix Point. So…
I won’t tell you why all those poeple who saw the game didn’t bought it or why the ones that bought stop playing, coz I don’t know. But the numbers are the numbers. You simply can’t think about a game with 300 constant players per hour as a long-term franchise. Maybe if you’re Tynan Sylvester and make the game as a hobby. Otherwise in studio work you’re constricted by the market because you have costs and other things to worry about.
So you are claiming that the game had a sharp decline compared to other games because it has now lower visibility on Twitch and Youtube without any contenxt or info about that. You are not supporting your claim with any evidence at all.
The only data we have shows a 10% retention of players in Steam in the 5 months after launch. An actually higher retention than XCOM1, XCOM2, Gear Tactics, Empire o Sin and Chimera Squad in the same time, if lower than Battletech or Civ VI (Look numbers above).
You are making just a subjective statement based on the perceived decline of players, being a decline of players true for all games, and your perception not being useful to tell us anything, and without any context or any data to support it. So the claim is completely useless.
Saying something is true, does not make it true. All what you have said is actually compatible with the game doing fairly well.
And no, the numbers from numbers YT, Twitch and Steam do not support your claim. the numbers from steam would disprove your claim, and you have no numbers from YT or Twitch or any context to compare. So if you go just by the evidence, you need to conclude:
There is no reason to assume there is a significant decline in the players of PP compared to any succesful game of the genre.
There is no point in analysing retention if you have 400 players. And the player number is declining.
Yes I agree that almost all games (not all) have decline. This is quite common. The problem is when this decline is below certain treshold. You need to have some sort of playerbase to claim succes on the market. Most games don’t have those numbers because most games simply don’t survive.
The player base is now actually increasing with the new DLC.
Yes there is a point in analysing retention. And 500 concurrent players are not a bad number at all for a game that launched with 5000 in steam. The point is that is an indication on how popular the game is.
Actually all have decline. It is just that some games still retain some players for a long term.
Games dont need to survive. They are a product, no game keeps its dev cycle forever. They can only be profitable or not profitable. PP has been profitable, so is a succesful product. And succesful enough to warrant support and new content till December.
If the new content brings more sales the game may keep going. And nothing else matters includding the number of current players.
We’ll see with time if it’s increasing and for how long. Currently this bump-up is small. I gave numbers before on XCOM2 DLC WofC. It got from 10.000 to 47.000 avarage players per hour and it stayed there for 2 months.
If in two months PP player numbers will get below 100 this DLC won’t be any success. If you sell new product it’s not good if the 6-year old one is still doing better. That’s a bad sign that you’re missing sth obvious here and not delivering enough.
PP has been profitable, so is a succesful product.
As I said profitabilty is not good measure because you can sell product in preorder scheme, make money and deliver some underdeveloped product which almost nobody wants and everybody throws it away right after they get it. This is your success definition?
Games dont need to survive.
No. Most games have to survive. You think they make game thinking who cares if someone plays it? You think they really sit there and “We care only about our kickstarter money and have them all in places”. I don’t think so. I think they all care about success and the need to survive which is buiding constant playerbase. And if they want to make money over time they need to “survive”.And for that you need to build stable playerbase otherwise you will be still trying to gimmick some overpromised scheme and trying hide that you can’t deliver it. For how long you think you can trick people in that way? They pulled that off once. I can’t think the people, who bought it and are mad, are thinking right now “when next kickstarter starts”.
Current player counts on Steam are not necessarily old long standing players, but also includes new players.
I agree. This is not ideal measure. But it’s good enough to show trends. Sometimes you don’t need to have all knowledge to make conclusions. You check proxies for trends and you can make precise enough observations and tell what’s going on. Like Steam numbers show some sort of reaction on DLC. We don’t need to see SnapShot balancesheet to tell how big this reaction is. The steam shows us what we can expect. We can add other inputs like YT, Twitch etc. This is quite common in forecasting.
Seems like you’re ignoring what I said. My first two games didn’t go beyond 3 weeks. That’s about 15 missions in total maybe? I was already self-restricting before I made it to the end of the game, on Legend. I consider that my first time through.
I CONTINUED to self-restrict further, not because I could, or because I was learning more (though that is true too), but because the game was a complete joke and irritating in its actual state that it felt NECESSARY to, to be able to enjoy it. Even during the first playthroughs and every single one following. I was a new player (to this game).
The more I get to know about this game, the more they change towards the casual audience, the more disappointed I become. That’s just how it is. There’s been little difference in my perspective since I first started playing this game, to now. Only then did enemies seem to be tougher and more in number and it frequently created scenarios that were fun to do… then they reduced enemy toughness/strength and number (because there were exploits I didn’t know about) and it made the game worse for me.
I know you seem to think that “as we get better at games we challenge ourselves further” and that’s certainly true, yes… but in this game, it’s less about “challenging myself” as it is “finding what the fuck actually feels balanced and not grossly in my favor”. There’s a big difference between this game and its balance and most other games. This whole process of self restricting has PURELY been an irritating exercise in attempting to find a gem in a pile of dung. Because the game has NEVER been balanced in such a way that would allow me to just play it as it is without being disappointed, from the very beginning, all the way through to now.
… and you’re right about that. But they also changed the types of enemies that exist and the pace at which they’re released. I’m sure you remember the time when there were like 10 arthrons on the map, all heavy armor, all machine guns and grenade launchers on the third week of the game or so. I’m not going to say that was GOOD or anything. The changes they made in this direction regarding enemy design and pacing is certainly better, but it really needs to go in line with changes to Phoenix as well which is very slowly happening… maybe.
Scylla was definitely in need of a buff as it was able to be one-shot with Rageburst+Sniper rifle (which also was nerfed and pretty easy to figure out on the first playthrough)… but even today there’s still issues with the Scylla. Namely that it’s easily disabled by War Cry (and Virus). A level 3 ability that can be spammed every turn. For such a large and terrifying creature, it’s funny that there’s really nothing to be afraid of and you can just feel free to walk up to it in melee and zap it with your Neuralyzers, as long as you have a Heavy who can war cry every round.
And this is most simple achievement from GOG (38.4% of people haven’t get that). I don’t know how big playerbase is on GOG, but I based on that. It is close to 40%:
Still it doesn’t matter if it is 0%, 0.4% or even 80%. As we don’t know how playerbase is divided - how many hardcore TBS players are there and how many casuals.
Can you please quote where I said such thing about what difficulty hardcore players select and how they play it or finish it? Because it looks like I suggest something that I even don’t think about. Or it never happened.
I never said anything about you claiming such a thing. You did suggest that there are only two types of players. Casuals and hardcore players. That is the most important thing you got wrong, and the one you keep ignoring. If you assume that, you are the one dividing the player base into two artificial categories ignoring that people and players are nuanced and have different perspectives.
I did not suggest you explicitly defined ones or others. But you framed the whole argument about difficulty, and about complexity (which I guess are the most obvious relevant variables, thought another one can be commitment).
You also stated when talking about the game being casual, that beating the game on Legend was easy, and that therefore the game was for casuals. You were making the connection there.
The implication seems fairly obvious; don’t you think? If the game is objectively easy on legend (your claim), and there are only two types of players (your claim), and being or not being casual is related to difficulty, certainly the hardcore gamers must be able to beat the game on the easy legend difficulty. Of course no one that thinks the game is hard on legend would be a casual… that has been the frame of the entire conversation for a long time now. Me trying to show that simply saying the game is too easy is not a valid way to think, the same way it is not a valid way to think dividing players on casuals and true hardcore players. As from there we may go to only being interested in making the game harder because it is so horribly trivial for the true players. And leads to the same type of claims others have been making, that the only way to go is make the game harder for the true players and ignore those casuals who should be playing other games.
You really still don’t get that I was just trying to show you that arguing in such inflexible and divisive and terms and categories leads to absurd conclusions?
You keep arguing about totally irrelevant numbers and the point is that using that kind of arguments locks you on your perspective and excludes others. And that is the point.
PP is great game at first part. You got tons of things to do, you get new things, weapons, items, researches, factions, stories. You get new pandoran types, pandoran bases, faction units… You get your bases, more POI’s… It’s challenging as your soldiers are half level, you get new skills as you fight…
Then OMG… second part… there is nothing left from the part 1… nothing… few boring techs, some special OP weapons, no new pandorans, no new faction enemies. Most excited story lines are done. Your soldiers are lvl 7+, you are just steamrolling anything with them… one shotting scyllas… lame factions attack eachother, you just fight for them and waiting the game end with pain and suffering.
LotA DLC failed to handle that 2. part so badly with wrong, unfitting grindy designs and limited rewards which are more game breaking tools…
FS is an early game event like we need more for that time…
There are casuals, TBS fans which looks a bit challenge but not headaches and pros.
PP wanted casuals so badly but failed them as a TBS even so easy needs time and understanding for play and getting mechanics. As PP does not show you the way, even a veteran TBS player needs to restart game once or twise to get what PP needs to win… so casuals could not pass even the first month and they gave up as expected.
First part was very good for TBS fans, I like that so much… but at second part, there is nothing for them left in the game and it was easy for their challenge.
Pros, veterans, crazy people already stop to care about the game after they figured out how you can handle every situation. Some people tried to limit themselves to enjoy but still 2. part was ultra boring when you limit yourself too.
and we are here with the PP… as they failed with all DLCs and no modding support, it’s a dead horse now.
Seldom have I laughed so much. In other words, when did you become a casual player? Your comments speak a different language. Anyway, stand by your opinion or you are not trustworthy. CC members were never for casual players.
CC members are for pain and suffering. It’s like you wanna shout but there is no word coming from your mouth. We are screaming to SG about the problems but they do not hear us.
You’re missing the point. Backers didn’t get scammed because Snapshot delivered no content. Backers got scammed because they delivered RPG TCS. Most backers didn’t want any RPG from this and still they got it. That’s why they got scammed. It says on the starting page. " “Without a doubt, one of the best strategy games to come out in the last few years.”" This is scam. This is no best strategy. Maybe some RPG Strategy if something. Doesn’t mean it has poor content for some RPG Strategy players if any of this exists. I don’t know. I’m not interested in any RPG game. If you’re comming from that point of view you’d feel disappointed. That’s why you have all those people left and right. Because the product delivered is for different target group. It was marketed to different group than it was created. And this is the core problem this game has. However you define those groups: casuals, hard-core players etc. The mechanics and the way the game is structured is at odds with people who bought and backed the game or with people who are simply interested in the game. Maybe they didn’t realised it but that’s the reality and you see results of this reality in steam numbers.
Show me a promise made from the devs that show the current game substantially different to what was delivered.
Because the only thing I see here is you claiming Backers not liking the game means they have been robbed which I think is ridiculous and kinf of mean.
Also claiming the game is some kind of RPG seems ludicrous to me TBH.
Because I think that difference between difficulties is not so relevant. There are differences, but player who knows what he is doing and think that Veteran difficulty is easy, will be surprised that Legendary is not much more difficult. So yep even Legendary can be finished by casuals. They may struggle more, maybe require some restart, but eventually they will finish the game on the highest difficulty. If they will have enough patience.
So I wouldn’t say my conclusions are so absurd.
Surely I’m not pro/hardcore player. I just know game well, but my decisions in the game are far from optimal and effective most of the time - which should prevent me from finishing game on Legendary. But I can do that for sure. Surely I’m not casual with such knowledge, but really… casuals can achieve what I can. I haven’t mastered this game, I just know few effective tricks and how things are calculated.
Surely binary splitting playerbase for hardores and casuals looks like too restrictive, but from my perspective in many games it can be done like that. There is small fraction of players who really play phenomenally, and the rest. Differences in secound group can be easily nullified by teaching them few rules. These rules are quite obvious and simple in Phoenix Point. That is why I say that Phoenix Point is made for, and can be finished by casuals, no matter how they play and what options they select.
Well, they listen. But they can’t amend game just for Council members. Then game would become a lot harder for casuals. Our role was not to change the game. We are there to point some most important things. How Snapshot Games will react is hard to predict. As we don’t understand completely their vision for the game. Surely I think that part of that vision is to allow casuals to play their game.
Or it never happened.