After reading about the balance issues with enemy strength and soldier abilities, I was wondering if these problems could have been mitigated for the release if Gollop and other key designers had played through the entire release candidate themselves before the official release?
I don’t mean this as a big criticism to the PP designers: just wondering how these issues were missed. Were the designers relying purely on backer-build feedback for balancing to determine if the game was release-ready?
Or perhaps the backers gave feedback on the balancing issues and the designers missed the feedback or ignored it?
It seems to me the only way to have found these issues was for the designers to play through the entire game themselves and attempt to win the game. But because the balance issues were present upon release I get the impression the PP designers did not play a full game through in multiple ways to discover the balancing problems.
Playing thru a full game takes time, especially when under a deadline, but that’s how you can ensure all the selected game mechanics yield the desired overall experience. Or one could use the extra money from Epic to hire a person who’s only job is to play thru a full game continuously, so to give measured feedback to the designers that would not be ignored.
The relevance here is for those who back kickstarter-like projects: obviously backers want a game product to be 90-95% balanced at release, so one should ensure those running the crowdfunded project demonstrate protocols to check the health of the overall game balance and difficulty throughout the development and alpha-testing cycle.
Game released quickly because? Nobody seemed to play this game. I will not write about what is underdeveloped because faster to write what works.
I have over 80 hours of play and my patience is over.
Ass skills, have the creators seen the RAGE skill?
They were ashamed to sell the game in this state and make players testers.
Two weeks since the premiere and they haven’t released any patches, maybe on Monday.
The game is very good, which can not be said about the developers.
My guess is that they still developed and bug tested all elements until release. Now we are testing it for them to balance things and give feedback so the game will be ready for Steam release in Dec 2020.
I won’t answer your question as this is just food for trolls. Beside that you already have said that the game is very good but developers are not? But they made this game. So your opinion is not holding up. Cheers.
I can well see that especially close to game release that a dev is too busy to read every piece of feedback on a forum, but a lot of comments relating to balance were being made during BB5. If they ignored it then TBF that’s their prerogative, it’s their game/vision at the end of the day, my perspective is that forum comments are given freely and it’s upto the devs which they want to make use of.
There was a hell of a lot of fingers crossing going on after that BB5, I think we all hoped that the game would release well, but I know personally that I was far from expecting it.
During Chaos Reborn’s development I think the Snapshot devs went the opposite way, they were a lot lot more active on the forums, the game IMHO was very well produced in that instance, however it wasn’t feature complete upon release, and I can see forum involvement being a partial cause of that. Maybe the devs made a conscious decision to step back more with PP.
For me it’s an Early Access release, but I wouldn’t put my hand under an axe, for example it’s not clear that it’s on design or not that many missions can be achieved in 1 or two turns.
But let face it, most high budget production games are now released in an Early Access state, there are exceptions, but it’s rare.
I’m waiting the next patch, I hope the UI problems that bother me the more will be fixed with it. The information icons disappearing on Geoscape is my current major bothering point, pause management the second, and Geoscpe zoming the third.
For balances I can’t say anything, I have no clue if many soldiers are supposed to die for example, nor if avoid OP holes (to not risk destroy the fun) is expected or not.
Personally, I think the current balance issues show that the game wasn’t tested before the release by new players. Someone who has hundreds of hours in the game, like I assume the devs do, knows all the ways to bypass the strengths of the enemies. A new player doesn’t. A new player also doesn’t know how good the skills are or which are the strongest multi-class options. I like it too when a game doesn’t hold your hand, but I also don’t want to lose half of my 6-man squad a few hours into the game or to figure out 10-20 hours in that I have to start over. Making a game that is challenging, but also not unfair has always been the biggest challenge devs have to face.
Another problem the game has is that doesn’t introduce slowly the new enemies you encounter, but instead throws at you 2 or even 3 Sirens when you first meet them or a Chiron whose ability to target you across the map without even LOS to any of your soldiers is BS. Again, beta testers with 100+ hours know how to deal with most of these situations even if they start fresh with a new build of the game because most builds introduce only a few changes, so you can’t rely on the feedback of the same people in the alpha-beta phases. Had they used new additions to their beta testers a couple weeks before the release, all these balance problems would have been found and, hopefully, addressed.
Then we have several quality-of-life features that are missing and give the impression, justifiably, that the game is unfinished, like the option to see all the soldiers that are available in every found Haven, tabs to separate weapons from grenades and ammo. Personally, I would like the option to see all the areas of the world that have been scanned. It is often the case that a scan doesn’t reach all the way to the shore of a continent, or that 2 area scans don’t overlap and you miss a location. In my case this happened to be the location of a base, so I spent 2-3 weeks with only one base because I thought I had scanned everywhere.
We are “paid testers” (I’m not sure if this word is the translation, Chinese “Paradox Development Studio games” players are used to calling themselves like this … we pay game makers to buy games and then help game companies test games)
I agree that the release version, effectively BB6, showed a lack of balancing across a wide range of issues. I am playing the game because I enjoy it, but I’m not recommending it to players who were not part of the BB crowd because too much is unbalanced and too much is unfinished.
I see a lot of such threads saying how “unbalanced” the game is. I have been playing on hero on my 3rd playthrough and I don’t see how it is “unbalanced”. What does it mean exactly?
The fact that rageburst can be used with a sniper rifle? The fact that lairs basically have to be cheesed or take hours upon hours? The fact that Sirens can Mindcontrol mutiple people indefinetly (at least they fixed this in the patch)? The fact that assaultrifles are conpletely useless after about 4 weeks? The fact that chirons can nuke your guys into the orbit without any other enemy seeibg your squad? The fact that return fire ignores cover?
This List isnt even remotely finished and doesbt even include bugs.
Seriously have you been blind for 3 playthroughts?
Edit: using exploits to make the game trivial is not fun for many people.
not all Assault Rifles… in 4 weeks, you can have NJ Assault Rifle, that can penetrate armor Crabs get… but of course, if you still use old one, its obsolete… and later, you can get ARs that get extra penetration which makes them useful against heavy armor…
Sirens mindcontroling? shoot them in the head… with head “disabled” they lose all willpoints and cant do squat.
Rage Burst with sniper rifles? so what… there are enemies that cant be dealt with other way… if there was no rage burst, you would complain how those enemies are unkillable…
Game has problems, but not everything you describe is bad design
I love this!
Every single person tends to forget that first time when you meet sirens, there is a HUGE chance that you dont have lvl 7 soldiers, nor armour piercing weapons.
Yes, in the mid-late game sirens ARE trivial, but if you have basic PP weapons, they are IMBA.
Having enemies that cant be killed unless you use one particular build is pretty much the definition of bad game design
Using xcom2 for example: sure sectopods can be killed in 1 turn using a sniper with Pistol Build and Bluescreen rounds. But there are plenty of options to deal with it if you dont have one. Try dealing with a Chiron or 2 on the other side of the map with plenty of enemoes in between you without the sniper/rageburst cheese…
you can disable Siren with snipers no matter what level they are… two, three hits into head at max and its disabled, it gets -30 Will and its no longer able to mindcontrol… At the time Sirens appear, you usually have snipers at level 3 at least… so you can shoot twice with sniper rifle…
you can hide from Chirons inside buildings… if you stand near wall, they wont fire at you because they cannot target you… they can only shoot if you are in the open…
So your opinion is not holding up. Cheers.