When is NS2 going to be finished?
iamsoulrider
Join Date: 2013-09-13 Member: 188196Members
Join Date: 2013-09-13 Member: 188196Members
I am not complaining about a half-finished game or anything like that, I am a modder, who has been modding this game since 2010. After a period away after release I'm back, but what do I find? A game that is still being updated every week or so, breaking mods in the process. I thought the plan was for this to be the most mod-friendly game available?
Certainly it is extremely easy to make a mod, as long as you don't mind it working for only one version of NS2 without breaking.
Here is a plea to UWE, please guys, decide what you want the final iteration of the game to look like, with all weapons, life-forms and abilities etc, get them in and then balance and finish the game. This means many things:
High Quality mods can be produced, which can further extend the playerbase/installbase of NS2. - More Income
UWE can work on new IP, without worrying about spending half a million dollars on a game that is not going to earn a great deal more as it stands, most people who are likely to buy NS2 for the game itself already have. - More Income
I know you think supporting the community and continuously developing the game is a good idea, but it all comes across as an unfinished game still in Beta. Please decide on the final of the game and get it as perfect as you can then leave it alone, only bringing out updates where absolutely neccesary.
I love the game but please give us modders a break. What chance would there have been of NS ever being made if HL kept updating every week? Would CS have been able to become the success it did, or DOD?
Finish NS2 and move on, please, for yourselves as a company and for us modders, who are desperate to increase the installbase/playerbase of NS2 through high quality mods.
Soul_Rider
Certainly it is extremely easy to make a mod, as long as you don't mind it working for only one version of NS2 without breaking.
Here is a plea to UWE, please guys, decide what you want the final iteration of the game to look like, with all weapons, life-forms and abilities etc, get them in and then balance and finish the game. This means many things:
High Quality mods can be produced, which can further extend the playerbase/installbase of NS2. - More Income
UWE can work on new IP, without worrying about spending half a million dollars on a game that is not going to earn a great deal more as it stands, most people who are likely to buy NS2 for the game itself already have. - More Income
I know you think supporting the community and continuously developing the game is a good idea, but it all comes across as an unfinished game still in Beta. Please decide on the final of the game and get it as perfect as you can then leave it alone, only bringing out updates where absolutely neccesary.
I love the game but please give us modders a break. What chance would there have been of NS ever being made if HL kept updating every week? Would CS have been able to become the success it did, or DOD?
Finish NS2 and move on, please, for yourselves as a company and for us modders, who are desperate to increase the installbase/playerbase of NS2 through high quality mods.
Soul_Rider
Comments
Worse than the mods breaking each release for most players is the performance drops and worst of all, the balance ruination.
NS2: She's dead, Jim.
Seriously though most games like this are a WIP for quite some time, especially when it is very community driven. A lot of game devs don't give a crapola about what the users really want in the game. UWE is very open to the players wants and needs and that's why this game is constantly being tweaked.
Now feel free to make excuses and say they've got more important things to worry about like performance and balance even though the game runs reasonable most of the time, keep ignoring how the game lacks variety and players as time goes on...
http://www.gameaperture.com/2013/09/community-discontent-as-result-of.html
No program is ever finished. It's just coders and/or user don't use it anymore.
The OP has a point. The 'rich' mod abilities has been drastically underused because of the constant change (and break). Stability in that area would at least allow only support (and minor change) on the mod and not "redo everything" from start.
Did you not read my opening post? This has nothing to do with performance, and everything to do with drawing a line under the game in terms of content. Once content is complete, then bugfixes and balance can be done, but as long as UWE continue to add content to NS2 on this sort of scale, they are killing the chance of ever having successful mods, something which UWE themselves prioritised during the development of this game.
Finalise the game and finish it, stop adding more and more content, which UWE are admitting themselves they can't afford. Sure, the reinforced program may end up covering the cost of the update, but what happens when they spend another $500,000 on the next update, who is going to bail them out then?
They have to realise they can't expect their community to spend hundreds of dollars on this one game. As a constellation member, black armor purchaser, I have nothing but time and energy for UWE and their aims, but there comes a time when a business has to become profitable in what it does without bailouts, or it is not going to last very long.
I would rather UWE worked on new IP and allowed the mod community to drive further income for NS2, so they can support themselves, rather than being supported by the same few thousand people time and time again.
Interesting post, but still completely irrelevant to the point being made in this thread.
I don't care how buggy NS2 is, I can't play it anyway due to being on a router that suffers from UDP overflow on most steam games, doesn't have the options to change it, and in general leaves me stuffed. Other much more serious factors mean I cannot upgrade the router either.
My point is about the game. When you design a game, and I am assuming NS2 was designed, not thrown together on the off chance, there will be a point when you reach as close as possible to the design of the game. Content is complete, and then it is just about balance and bug hunting.
What I am saying is to UWE, hurry up and reach content completion. I don't care how long it takes you to fix bugs when I can't play it anyway. Once content completion has been reached, the game and updates can slow down to balance and bugs. Currently UWE are talking like content is never going to be finished and they will keep adding new content to NS2 until the end of the world.
Where does that leave modders? Learning a new programming language and taking their amazing mod ideas away to another engine and another company, boosting their sales instead of UWE's.
I want to play a finished game, and be able to mod that finished game into something else. So my point is, for how many years are UWE going to add content? I could come back and start modding when UWE have finished with these big content updates, but as far as I can tell, they want to support it forever, so modding will never take off, and they have wasted potentially hundreds of man hours, if not more, adding in modding functionality that will never be used.
As much as I love UWE, I think they need to take onboard a Business manager. They are indie and learning, but someone with a strong business focus should be able to make them realise that their current ideas for development undermine all the great work they have done, and will jeopardise any future work they carry out.
Finish the game.
Balance and bugfix the game.
Create new IP and allow modders to boost NS2 into the stratosphere, like CS, DOD, TF and NS did with Half-Life.
Whatever shred of interesting gameplay this game had the potential of upholding seems to have been left behind completely. I don't know who had the retarded idea of removing any marine incentive from playing aggressively anymore, but kudos to you for throwing out what little positive things I could have said about the game.
I don't need to comment on the 20 evolutions of continuously failed movement mechanics, but I did. The real shame is the movement was done correctly and shown to the developers in the past, and they opted for some half-assed crap instead.
Seems like the only updates to the game have been random crap that in no way improves the gameplay for the past year. Atleast 90% of the new content since release has not benefited gameplay in any conceivable way. Grenades, babblers, railguns, vortex / umbra fails, convoluted biomass crap, skins. All of it with exception to skins has contributed negatively to gameplay.
And medpacks are still not 2 tres, how is that even possible. I cannot fathom the ineptitude required for this.
To be honest you do make a very good point about the mods breaking for each and every patch. I can imagine it must be a huge pain in the ass trying to get the mods working again and fix any bugs that come with the new patch.
The point I was trying to make was that UWE need's to fix the performance to have some kind of player retention, and they have had that high on their priorities for quite some time. This also comes under the area of "finishing the game" as there have been fluctuating performance problems with each new patch. Things like making the game more friendly for modders unfortunately comes after due to the fact that without the players who the hell is going to want to mod the game? Something similar can be said for new content, attract new players to the game and keep the current players playing.
Players are everything to UWE and without them they would not exist, but I am sure you realise that and unfortunately again most players are not modders. For now they are trying to make the game stable again. It was very stable before the recent big content update and it has been before that before. Once that is sorted then they can focus on more quality of life features and aspects of the game. Improving modding being one of them.
I for one love the fact that UWE keep adding new content, it makes the game interesting for me giving me something new to learn, I highly doubt I am the only person that feels this way either. Of course there are also players that hate change and want the game to stay in one place the whole time. I don't know the numbers but I have faith that UWE have a good idea about how many people support the changes they have and are making compared to the people that resent them.
Max has posted quite a bit before in the mod forum about upcoming changes that may break the game. I imagine sometimes its too complex to know which mod will break with an update until its released. It's a fantasy to expect the devs are humanly capable of keeping track of what things in every mod will break with every build. Big changes are probably easier to predict that many mods will have issues, like the recent reinforced patch.
If max\brian had a separate modding twitter or such that was tweeting every time they posted something in the mod forums, that would be helpful if they have the time.
E.G. take minecraft before 1.0:
Majong realeased 3-4 betas before putting any changes into the public version. With these 3-4 betas modder had the chance to keep up with the devs even as these beta were sometimes buggy as hell. Also there is a bug report plattform for modder at minecraft reporting problems directly at the beta script. Modder often fiind bugs "normal" beta tester will never see. Also mostly ever time there were some bugfixes by the community, which were pulled between the betas by mojang.
That is what i'm dreaming off , being a passive part of the NS2 development: seeing what the guys are working on atm, trying to keep up, fixing bugs i find myself if possible, reporting bugs directly with source. By this with just 10 modder working with the beta, UWE would get some help finding bugs faster, Modder could try to get there Mods rdy before a patch and a lot of other things.
Of course i think most modder are ready to sign a NDA to get acces to this confort feature. And yes imho you can compare Majong and UWE. And i am aware that this would take some work for UWE but overall i think this will improve NS2.
Don't listen to them, Charlie! Most (or all) people using the phrase "UWE should...." could never even remotely achieve what you have.
That's what happens when everything is in your LUA stack.
Exactly how i am working atm. Still i think i wouldn't hurt to integrate the modding community into the workflow.
I'm afraid there's just too many code iterations for this to be viable. Even during playtests the build gets updated in the mean time, changing things here and there. It would be impossible for modders to keep up, and probably even more work than it is now.
I have no idea about modding, just a shot in the blue
like what... lying and screwing us over?
http://www.gameaperture.com/2013/09/community-discontent-as-result-of.html
an other mimimimiiiii post from the narcissistic uwe-göbbels hugh...
quote: "we cannot share: Exact sales figures, salaries of particular developers, investment considerations, confidential contracts... The list goes on. It is the nature of our status as a producer that the consumer will not have perfect knowledge of our activities"
AHA! what did you tell us charlie? OPEN DEVELOPMENT!
that is what i paid for, to be heard, involved and to get a good game in the end.
i invested hundreds of hours to merchandise and i even paid for that.
nice, you got yourself a job for a few years and
maybe built yourself a financial future and i learned not to trust you again!
you dont give a f***ing s**t, ofc, you wont have to ever again,
cause you got our money in ya pockets already and you are big now.
i am so frkn disappointed on a social level...
(something where hugh, ironhorse, etc. have no competence at all. stupid bots you are! no critic you can answer with true tongue)
everything not free software, is scam
However, I am not a programmer and absolutely loathe coding. So if I am wrong or this would be too daunting a task, I would completely understand.
The problem is not NS2 it is the steam workshop, meanwhile modder are comming up with fixes for that just be a little more patient
You never used git or a similiar system i see, also that is then the modders problem not UWEs anymore. If i get the rights i even can host a git system for ns2 beta ... Thats a thing of 5 mins. Also it is totally normal that a beta has like 10 patches a day while testing.
And also as most modder are using hooks we have like 10 classes to check don't tell me now UWE adds every time thousand lines of code... jenkins + git (+ maybe also access to bugtracker
)= open development finished
Things like web, vortex, bone shield, grenades, the alien and marine tech trees, and what each upgrade does should have been finalized on the release of the game. Values like how much res something costs or how much of a value an upgrade gives could be tweaked from there, but the base concepts should have been solidified, because that's the promise you make when you transition from a beta to a full release. Instead we're still in beta and at this point it's a paid beta of a game that is over an entire year behind their development schedule.
This has *already* hurt the game's potential and has limited its user-base. Modders aren't going to be happy because the build is always changing and they have to update/adapt their mod to not only code, but new/drastically changed content. The competitive scene is already hamstrung, they have had no consistency to base competition off of and there is no metagame, it's still all just preliminary exploration of the balance. This is just poor game design standing behind a set of really great ideas and features with a unique genra