Frustrated and disappointed!
oscpro
Join Date: 2010-05-21 Member: 71829Members
Join Date: 2010-05-21 Member: 71829Members
Alot of us paid over a year ago for pre order and we have only seen something that can't even run for 2 seconds.
I am not trying to be harsh here, but I run a online business myself and if my customers had to wait this long especially after telling them it will be available in fall 2009, they would ask for a refund.
I have a recommendation to the devs, you might want to step this up abit or this community and your reputation will be very bad to say the least.
I have been playing games since the original quake engine and unreal engine, this is by far the longest I have seen any team take to make a game.
Soon, it will get to the point that new games with better graphics will be out anyways and this game will already be old when it launches if it really does launch. I am beginning to wonder if this will ever be done.
I played ns1 and loved it so much, that is why I preordered this game. I also understand you devs have let the community be a part of it, but your walking a thin rope that will soon break.
I know a mod that was done on one of the ea games engines and they did the same thing, they waited too long and the community got tired of waiting and the reputation went down the drain. Dead before it was even realized.
I know you guys know this stuff, but I am quite frustrated myself on how long it is taking the devs to complete this game.
I have a very bad feeling about this.
Suggestion, if you are unable to get this game done in a timely manner, then I suggest you get some help in the dev area to speed things up.
I still have time to file a chargeback on my credit card and I am hoping some good news comes soon so I don't have to.
Forgive me, I am frustrated about paying for something that has yet to work. No alpha, no beta, just engine test on steam to pacify the time. Looks bad.
The word is already getting out that this game might flake out and if you do not get it out before SC2, then this game might end up like AVP.
<a href="http://forums.voogru.com/general-gaming/12620-natural-selection-2-a-18.html" target="_blank">http://forums.voogru.com/general-gaming/12...ion-2-a-18.html</a> (not the only site mentioning this)
I hope you guys show us all differently and very soon!
I am not trying to be harsh here, but I run a online business myself and if my customers had to wait this long especially after telling them it will be available in fall 2009, they would ask for a refund.
I have a recommendation to the devs, you might want to step this up abit or this community and your reputation will be very bad to say the least.
I have been playing games since the original quake engine and unreal engine, this is by far the longest I have seen any team take to make a game.
Soon, it will get to the point that new games with better graphics will be out anyways and this game will already be old when it launches if it really does launch. I am beginning to wonder if this will ever be done.
I played ns1 and loved it so much, that is why I preordered this game. I also understand you devs have let the community be a part of it, but your walking a thin rope that will soon break.
I know a mod that was done on one of the ea games engines and they did the same thing, they waited too long and the community got tired of waiting and the reputation went down the drain. Dead before it was even realized.
I know you guys know this stuff, but I am quite frustrated myself on how long it is taking the devs to complete this game.
I have a very bad feeling about this.
Suggestion, if you are unable to get this game done in a timely manner, then I suggest you get some help in the dev area to speed things up.
I still have time to file a chargeback on my credit card and I am hoping some good news comes soon so I don't have to.
Forgive me, I am frustrated about paying for something that has yet to work. No alpha, no beta, just engine test on steam to pacify the time. Looks bad.
The word is already getting out that this game might flake out and if you do not get it out before SC2, then this game might end up like AVP.
<a href="http://forums.voogru.com/general-gaming/12620-natural-selection-2-a-18.html" target="_blank">http://forums.voogru.com/general-gaming/12...ion-2-a-18.html</a> (not the only site mentioning this)
I hope you guys show us all differently and very soon!
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Good games take a long time to develop, especially with this small of a team and with them doing everything from the ground up. You must not follow many Indie games as all the good ones take years to finish.
It's starting to get annoying seeing people create these threads all the time and whine about how long it's taking. Seriously, complaining isn't going to speed up the development.
In the meantime, there are many other games out there for you to enjoy.
And why would they have to get it out before SC2 in order for it to be a successful? People can juggle more than one game at a time, not to mention they're pretty different games.
& Im still waiting in anticipation :)
i run the engine test fine, alot of people do.
those games you speak of were made by much larger development teams. with such a small team, its only common sense that the game will take longer to develop
games are all about graphics. i doubt anyone played ns1 for its graphics
once again its only $40 and you paid that over a year ago. i very much doubt your wallet is feeling a 1 off purchase made over a year ago.
Good games take a long time to develop, especially with this small of a team and with them doing everything from the ground up. You must not follow many Indie games as all the good ones take years to finish.
It's starting to get annoying seeing people create these threads all the time and whine about how long it's taking. Seriously, complaining isn't going to speed up the development.
In the meantime, there are many other games out there for you to enjoy.
And why would they have to get it out before SC2 in order for it to be a successful? People can juggle more than one game at a time, not to mention they're pretty different games.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I would agree with you but...
He has a point. They announced a fall 2009 release date and a bunch of people pre ordered. It is now mid May 2010 and we still don't even know what the fade looks like.
Customer service and satisfaction are very important for businesses. I'm assuming Charlie never took business 101.
Fallout 3 is a good example, it looks very good even though it runs on a rather old engine and uses no real new techniques, what it does use however is extremely clever modelling and texturing techniques, and so it looks high-end.
NS2 has a good lighting engine and solid assets, it's going to look good for some time to come because it uses what it has well, looking good does not mean 'uses all the latest tech' that is simply useful sometimes.
Gameplay wise things don't really date until someone builds a better version of the same style, quake 3 for example is still probably the epitome of the quake-style twitch shooter, although unreal tournament could be a contender as it is similar in many respects. Unless someone is going to make NS3 any time soon then NS2 will still have solid gameplay.
NS2 looks good and as the devs seem to know what they're doing, will probably play good, rushing it however will detract from both.
<!--quoteo(post=1771907:date=May 22 2010, 09:17 AM:name=xtcmen)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (xtcmen @ May 22 2010, 09:17 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1771907"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I would agree with you but...
He has a point. They announced a fall 2009 release date and a bunch of people pre ordered. It is now mid May 2010 and we still don't even know what the fade looks like.
Customer service and satisfaction are very important for businesses. I'm assuming Charlie never took business 101.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Neither is releasing a crappy product as your first venture.
The game is already late, it can be late and half finished, or late and complete, which do you suppose is better?
And I am really thankfull for that, I mean do you want to have a game as soon as possible, that sucks? Or do you prefeer to wait longer and have a game that you play the next 10 years? UWE could also take the money for vacations and give us a game with less feauteres. And then you would be happy?????
Sorry for my English I am German ;/
Really? You doubt you've actually been paying attention to any games for quite awhile then. A little over a year might be feasible for a team of 12+, and even with teams greater than that, they've taken 3+ years to complete. UWE is smaller than the major game companies, and while that is an overused excuse, it doesn't change the fact that its true. Plus, they've only really started working on the game a year ago. When they got funds for the pre-orders, they decided that it was feasible to expand their team and make the game that they wanted to in the first place.
It is the longest wait I think between Pre-Orders and Release however, but we're dealing with a start-up, pretty much independent company here. Its a completely different breed.
IMO, NS2 might only "die" in the hearts of the newcomers. Much the oldschool NS community will likely still back NS2 with all their heart, regardless of the disapointment of not having a finished copy in our hands. Many of us understand what is and has been happening and we accept the fact that we're going to have to wait a little longer. I speak for myself here when I say, that I prepared myself for an extended wait as soon as I pre-ordered. Anyone who was up-to-date on the events surrounding it probably should have done the same. Its almost a year since I pre-ordered and it doesn't even feel like it. Before no time, we'll have the release everyone wants.
Also: New games with better graphics don't mean anything People STILL play NS1, Counter-Strike, etc. despite the "graphics" of newer games. Using that as a reason to release game X before games Y and Z is a pretty bad one. The release of SC2 is going to temporarily reduce the gaming communities of a great number of games. Period. It doesn't matter when NS2 is released. People are going to swarm to SC2 and forgot about games X, Y and Z for a decent period of time. There isn't too much UWE can do about that.
Oh and keep in mind: UWE is working on Natural Selection 2 AND the Spark Engine side-by-side. This means you as a customer should expect much longer wait time because before you get the game, they're going to have to finish the engine. I wonder if the games like Unreal Tournament, HL2, etc. factor the engine development time into the "we've been working on game X for about this long..." statements.
I'm correctly assuming that you don't pay people to do nothing, as well as that some things simply take a long time.
I should point out that 'late' doesn't mean 'is taking unreasonably long' and instead it means 'is taking longer than the unreasonably short deadline'.
Seeing the amount of work that has been and still needs to be done in order to get everything ready for a first release, and given the size of the team, work seems to be progressing quickly. If the art asset releases are anything to go by the artists are quite a lot faster and better than I am, and I'm no slouch. New tool features are regularly released, bugs are fixed, levels are presumably made, and the rest of the time is likely devoted to finishing the game code.
As far as I can tell, the devs are making the progress I would expect them to make given their team size and end goal of releasing NS2 with most if not all of the advertised features. Complaining doesn't make people work faster if they are already working to the best of their abilities. I've done games art for quite a while so I know how long it takes, and I also have done enough programming to know that bug fixing is a horrible, slow, and draining exercise, you spend most of the time trying to find the damn thing, how long that takes is kinda random because it depends which if the many possibilities it is, and which one you try first. As bugs are being fixed and art is being made, time is being expended as is neccesary.
Admittedly I don't have a lot of information, but the little I do have gives me no cause for concern, it will be done when it is done, and that will take time.
The endresult: I lost interest in my most anticipated game ever. Waiting 8 years is long enough for anyone to do so. Up to today I never played the game..
This is the reason I never follow games in development anymore. I follow ns2 but I have good hopes a decent version might hit the market soon. But I will not pay before I'm sure I will be able to play a half decent version.
Part of the reason why I support indie stuff is that they are able to act against the industry standards. Postponing probably happens for a reason, no matter the company, but I still feel they lost a pretty nice way to stand out from the crowd of bigger developers there.
As for the rest of it, I'd really appreciate if they did a progress report at some point. Right now it just feels they are giving us pieces to a incomplete puzzle and we've got no idea how big the puzzle actually is. I don't really care about exact release dates and such, but it would be nice to see whether we should be counting in months or year quarters and so on. At least for me most of the progress tweets have been more or less confusing and misleading without any big picture to use as a context.
... Complaining doesn't make people work faster if they are already working to the best of their abilities<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
But it can make them work <i>smarter</i>. Community feedback plays a respectable roll in indie communities (and even those like Valve). Precisely the right amount of threads like these serve to remind of the sense of urgency.
Money on the other hand is quite good at motivating, honestly I think you give yourself too much credit if you think pleasing an annoying community comes before things like ensuring you have a job tomorrow and paying off huge development debts and whatnot.
'Work smarter' is a silly idea, either you work quickly or you don't, an integral component of completing things quickly is knowing how to complete them, you work through the required actions until they and the work are done, that's it.
It's a game damnit, and release is more often than not pushed back to iron out unwanted kinks.
You live with it, or you don't. If you are wanting to speed up development, hire a professional and send him towards UWE.
Anything else increases development time.
<!--quoteo(post=1771859:date=May 21 2010, 09:35 PM:name=oscpro)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (oscpro @ May 21 2010, 09:35 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1771859"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I am not trying to be harsh here, but I run a online business myself and if my customers had to wait this long especially after telling them it will be available in fall 2009, they would ask for a refund.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
It doesn't matter if the product costs $5,000, $100, $40, $1 or is free. If you know something won't be ready on time then don't say it will be. I imagine they assumed it would be ready for Fall 2009 which is fine, but when it became obvious it wouldn't; the logical thing to do would have been to make a statement announcing this setback and a revised release date. It happens all the time. It's just good business ethics.
I don't mind waiting as I want NS2 to be even more kickass than NS1.
NS2 would have released in Fall 2009 if the pre-orders didn't inject a new income stream for UWE. The game they scheduled to release in Fall 2009 didn't even include exo (heavy) armor. Think about how incomplete that sounds. With the new income from pre-orders they were able to release the game they originally envisioned, or at least add in more features.
While I understand that waiting a year is a pain in the ass and I'm sure you're all dying to play NS2 you have to think of it from UWE's viewpoint. Games are only reviewed once upon their release. They aren't revisited ten months later to say "hey, remember how we said this game was shallow well now it's totally awesome!"
UWE's first released game needs to be successful for so many different reasons and initial reviews, how complete the game is, and how much testing/balancing/fixing went into the game all determine that initial success. For UWE this is their life. NS2 must create revenue or it's possible they're all in financial trouble. If NS2 is released a year and a half after pre-orders and it's awesome the vast majority of players won't care about the wait. If it was released five months ago and the game wasn't complete, fun, or engaging it would have be abandoned and that's not an acceptable outcome in UWE's eyes.
Fall 2009 was an honest mistake. We had some good momentum built up, and really believed we could hit a late fall deadline of a first playable version of the game that we could release to the public. We weren't planning on it being a finished polished version, but we anticipated getting something into your hands by then.
However, development of the tools ended up taking much longer then anticipated, and we had to face some harsh realities of building your own game engine from scratch, with only one graphics/engine/tools programmer. We were also having difficulty finding mappers, we've lost several environment artists to other game companies, and a lot of Charlie's time was eaten up by invester meetings, and the day to day business of running a company. Anyway, to make a long story short, we missed the fall deadline, and shortly thereafter put together an extensive update to the community, in reference to the missed deadline, though I still see people posting that we never informed our community about it.
We've continued to plow ahead, making extensive progress on the game, and trying to work as efficiently and smartly as possible. We use programs such as Pivotal Tracker, to help us make better estimates about our progress. We work some long hours, and on weekends. And still, nothing runs as smoothly as you anticipate. As you can see, just the act of bringing over the engine test to Steam caused a whole host of new problems, which is yet more bugs and issues that the programmers need to spend their time addressing, and not focused on the game itself. Any PR release, blog post, or tools release takes time away from the game development, but we feel its worthwhile to keep our community engaged.
You can't judge the progress of the game off of the engine test. For example, we have all of the alien lifeforms modeled and animated, and in game, (yes, including the Fade) but still need to refine and work out the gameplay. Just because we haven't done a reveal or blog post about something doesn't mean it isn't done. In the case of the Fade we want to do a proper reveal movie, which takes time, and right now we really have our heads down concentrating on the game itself.
We understand that people feel like they've been waiting forever for this game. But keep in mind, NS2 did not go into development right after NS1. It's really only been about a year and a half of solid development time, and most games take at least 2 years with full sized teams, and often can take 3 years or more, if they've developed their own engine and tools from scratch. But since most companies aren't as open with the public with the behind the scenes development of the game, people don't even know there is a game until the publisher decides to reveal it when those games are already quite far along in the development.
Yes, we've missed some deadlines, both external and internal. Yes we feel bad that people have paid money for the game, and are still anxiously waiting to play it. But please have some faith and patience, and bear with us a little longer. We are not vaporware, we are not goofing off with your money, and we have more invested in the success of this game and company then anyone.
There will be some upcoming announcements soon that will help to give you a better sense of the state and progress of things.
Thanks for your ongoing support.
--Cory
It's a game damnit, and release is more often than not pushed back to iron out unwanted kinks.
You live with it, or you don't. If you are wanting to speed up development, hire a professional and send him towards UWE.
Anything else increases development time.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I'd rather not turn it a black and white thingy. If you turn it into a get refund or shut up thingy, there's going to be quite a few extra refunds.
I think at some point they really could sit down for a day, put together some progress report. It's going to stall alpha/release roughly a day and it could relieve a lot of tension.
Progress bars are an alternative too. I don't know how much they're going to help without some kind of explanation though.
They'll blacklist you from ever using them again.
That said, if you need that $40, UWE is glad to give it back.
Me? It's not that much money and I don't mind waiting. I see progress. I expect it to be slow. I think it was overly ambitious from the start, but I can see how it is eventually going to be finished.
In the meantime, NS1 has still been providing a lot of fun.
I feel the wait worthy and my 40$ well invested, as to encourage such a great life project in a way. The game will come in time. As for people whining, I'm sure this is just a minority, which you can also see in bars spending just as much money for booze and make fools of themselves. In other cases, they might have never accomplished anything in their life in comparison, and that would make them unhappy to sustain such money investment and interest in someone else's project.
I'd hope all the work being publicly released (I mean, it's already Steam integrated!) would help convince anyone the game is still coming though.
So less than a year is the longest you've waited? You are small time and know nothing.
Money on the other hand is quite good at motivating, honestly I think you give yourself too much credit if you think pleasing an annoying community comes before things like ensuring you have a job tomorrow and paying off huge development debts and whatnot.
'Work smarter' is a silly idea, either you work quickly or you don't, an integral component of completing things quickly is knowing how to complete them, you work through the required actions until they and the work are done, that's it.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
You might benefit from learning a bit about the software development cycle and project management; for example, look up a "Gantt" chart to see why working "smarter" makes a difference. Again, you've misjudged the impact of community feedback; a prime example is Valve's response to the L4D2 boycotters, which resulted in a meeting at HQ and release of more L4D DLC (albeit what little it was). Complaining (in moderation) is a form of feedback, and feedback works.
Besides, with the incoming SC2 release we'll have enough fun the rest of the year ;)
I pre-orderd becauses I felt that It was a worth while project. I enjoy following the progress of the game. I have learned a lot from the discussions on the forums. There are a lot of bright people envolved. I feel i've already got my $40 worth. Like NS1, NS2 will be unique and I'm sure I'll spend too many hours playing it. Plus I've played so much NS1 i felt a little guilty not giving them the money. But that's just me.