This is disappointing to write, because like many of you I was there from the very beginnings of UFO, TFTD, etc.
No need to harp on about what’s been said already. Sirens are (were?) overpowered (I just finished a map with 5 or 6 of them, what a joke), Citadels are laughably easy as the Scylla heads straight for you while lairs are just ridiculous, the game’s code optimization is a total mess, etc.
I ran into the difficulty spike after too many hours wasted, and decided to start over anyway and munchkin the game… The best combos, the best geoscape strategy, reload when I miss a shot, etc. It was going “ok” and then suddenly…
[CRASH] the game crashes, I wish I had taken a picture of my screen cause it just shut down with an error I had not seen before. What’s worse, upon reloading the last save, it’s giving me another error message - the save game (was in mission) has gone corrupt and cannot be loaded essentially. And what’s even worse, when I go back to my last geoscape save it doesn’t even load anymore either.
So, that’s it. Nothing should be this stressful. The fact that they took a year extra to polish things should have prevented all this from happening, no? This game clearly wasn’t ready for release, even after a year of extra time.
I’m sure I’ll be back in the future, once they’ve solved all the technical issues at least. Until then, good luck y’all.
Money does talk. It’s used to pay the staff, rent, electricity, all that good stuff that actually produces games…
In any development project there comes a point where you basically have to make a decision to release or be neverware. Unless faithful backers are prepared to stump up some of the filthy lucre.
You could try verifying the game. Also, I’ve noticed some crashes starting missions in sessions on a PC that resumed from hibernation, or even been running Android Studio. Nothing I can put my finger on, but it appears to be graphics driver related (Zotac 1080 mini)
I have two game breaking Bugs.
First:
Load Problem if scylla was killed and mindfragger appears. Workaround: destroy scyllas ass then no mindfragger appears.
Second:
Kill a pandorian with return fire in a padorian turn always gives a never ending pandorian turn. Fucking every time. Therefore most of my soldiers dont have that perk
After nearly 25 hrs of gameplay these are my only “real” Bugs. The Rest is balancing the game. But as i say in some others thread. I like the game! And kam Looking forward to new Patches
Snapshot received financial support from EGS as part of the exclusivity deal. They are guaranteed a year’s worth of sales, paid upfront at the time of the deal. So, their overhead and production costs are a non sequitur.
Given the general consensus of this board with regards to the state of the game; the balance, geoscope, lack of mission and map variability, and simply the rough state of the overall product, six more months in the oven would have done the game a lot of good.
For me there are two major bugs that require reloading. The first is the return fire bug that hangs the game in the enemy turn as you’ve found (anecdotally, I think if you RF kill the last Pandoran to take its move, it doesn’t cause a halt). The other is that the worm-thrower chirons and when the scylla hatches a mindfragger sometimes lay them in the scenery, and if it’s indestructable scenery, I don’t think you can complete any mission that requires all enemies killed.
I’m sure that no developer wants to release buggy software. My
experience (of which there’s a lot) is that, generally, developers, by
which I mean coders, artists, designers etc. never really want to
release something because there’s always things to fix or improve and we
all know things are much much harder to fix after release.
Management & distributors want something that’s well received and sells.
They are well aware that reports of bugs and poor reviews can kill a
game financially and they’re not mad. But, yes, money talks.
Would I have wanted another BB, would it have been the right thing to
do? Yes, probably, and I suspect that those actually doing the work
probably thought so too.
That’s part of the problem I think. Contracts come to an end. If you’re
unexpectedly doing another BB some of your contracted staff might
already have accepted jobs elsewhere…
Then there’s the DLC to be worked on. Slipping the main game by 6 months
also means moving the DLC. More contract issues…
IMO we should spare a thought for the development people who’ve spent a
long time working on this, could see the potential, and have had to read
some of the really harsh comments in the forums. It must be dispiriting.
Although I am emotionally with you, there are no people who like unfinished work. But the forum is a place for constructive criticism to help the Game be better.
“You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of.”
― Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
I can bet you my sandwich that most of the Snapshot staff is keenly aware of the criticism the game has (rightfully) received. I’ve been in their position and they don’t need to post to read stuff and reviews.
Could they have afforded to delay launch by another X months? Financially, I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not (with my guess being maybe not). However, they had already postponed release three times and did an unpopular switch to epic. At that stage, the PR hit of another delay starts to become significant!
Substitute the number and imagine the consequences (the Contract with Microsoft and the Contract with EGS will be left in brackets). 3 or 6 or 9, I bet 12 predicting the progress of BB. 12 months with burned out nervous or 1-2 months of hilling as it is now? And add-ons, without DLC, is a complete game, Plus how many months?
Mr. Gollop did respont and post personally in the past, as do occasionally other devs. That he is not participating directly in the discussion, doesn’t mean that he, nor others in the team, don’t read and take feedback into account. UV is the Community Manager, so he is the one managing community most of the time. I am pretty sure, he also stated that he passes feedback to appropriate parties.
This would be foolish to deduce, that simply because devs don’t personally reply to people complains on the forum, that they aren’t in some capacity paying attention to fan feedback. To what degree they will be able to address players complains remains to be seen.
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