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Post by Gmr Leon on Oct 2, 2014 0:06:35 GMT
I dunno. I guess I take the whole don't mistake malice for stupidity thing too seriously. Except I replace stupidity here for utter incompetence. (Which is what I was getting more at with the whole underdeveloped concept part.)
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Post by Danjal on Oct 2, 2014 0:08:16 GMT
Whether it is malice or incompetence, neither are particularly promising for the future of Godus.
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Post by earlparvisjam on Oct 2, 2014 1:59:43 GMT
I dunno. I guess I take the whole don't mistake malice for stupidity thing too seriously. Except I replace stupidity here for utter incompetence. (Which is what I was getting more at with the whole underdeveloped concept part.) Were it a unique or rare occurrence, then yes, I'd buy into that. However, from the first day, 22Cans has been saying one thing and doing another. It's been done repeatedly and, when enough time passed, the history was reworked to fit the current narrative. A year ago, they were fending off people complaining that it looked like a free to play game (especially when it had the in-game store plain as day). Things went silent while they "took our complaints into consideration". What we got was 2.0 and the March shift to mobile. Notice, however, that the pc and mobile versions are 90% identical, once we got to see them both. April was a mobile release, then it was May, and then June, and then July, and then August. But wait, they then claimed to be switching sprints back and forth between mobile and pc. Except, we've yet to see evidence of this actually happening. Mobile was getting Hubworld in April when they released. Then, it was pc that was getting Hubworld. Then, it was in a few weeks. Then it was coming soon. Now it's in limbo, though we've heard squat as to what or why it's still missing. All the development notes were written down. Then they needed rewriting. Then they needed confirmation. Then they finally released and looked nothing like what had or was about to happen. Settlements were implemented and we hated them. They went silent and came out with the second version that was just as problematic but in a different way. Then, they spent the summer putting all the actual promises/plans on hold to do version 3 and it still feels kludgy. Oh, and another settlement revamp was already mentioned. Sigh, there's so much more and that's what is so bad about all of this. I just can't take that much sketchiness as an indicator of stupid. There's just too much evidence of at least some forethought to this. When taken as a whole, every single thing done points to a project that has been entirely focused on a mobile experience. At best, pc has been a side project when convenient. The villager sacrifice mechanics were already implemented in various forms in the code. They just pulled them together to try to cover up crappy free to play mechanics. Beyond that, the rest was just simply compiling the base for pc using Marmalade and spending a few hours addressing platform specific bugs that came up. Hell, the entire point of the pc focus was to add some difference between the two versions. |
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Post by Gmr Leon on Oct 2, 2014 2:30:42 GMT
To make sure we're entirely on the same page here, I'm not intending to appear as though I'm sweeping aside what they've done. I readily acknowledge it all, but I also look at it from the perspective of, even if they are sidelining us, they're also somehow terrible at that too. If you want to push us aside, you just quit talking to us and even bothering to update our game. Admittedly, that would be even more catastrophic for their PR, but it'd save them time and resources, which as their primary aim seems to be milking the mobile audience for all it's worth, I'm frankly almost surprised they haven't already. Were it not for my recognition of the aforementioned PR aspect, I would be surprised.
The reason I more readily attribute it to incompetence is because I see that, and I see that they clearly had original intents for a PC game, then rapidly shifted gears somewhere in the process to mobile even before it hit SEA. What that tells me is they suck at planning, and they suck at admitting when they've misled a bunch of people into backing a mobile game because they were so terrible at planning that they hadn't actually bothered to solidify the primary platform yet. Following this decision to redirect platform focus has resulted in every skewed step of this game's development, which while it wouldn't do much to admit it now, it would at least be a decent step towards some degree of honesty towards us as well as towards their own incompetence.
I can almost assure you, whenever this game "finishes" development in whatever form, we'll see Peter giving interviews fessing up to all the crappy designs in the game and then going on some bizarre pity party over woe is me in accidentally finding success despite my absence of planning/design abilities. I mean, we already have seen this in some interviews.
All I know is, you don't start with the intent to screw over a bunch of people by running a Kickstarter that puts emphasis on a variety of platforms with PC appearing to be its primary focus and then switch gears* unless you're a major asshole, or you're a completely incompetent person who sucks at planning and solidifying ideas ahead of time. Personally, I think they started with good intents, faltered on incompetence, and everything following that has been rather assholish behavior. Do they recognize that? As far as I can tell, no, and it's incredibly infuriating, but insulting them doesn't get that through as well as being cruelly tactful to them to the point that they can't help but hurt themselves by retreading over their own transgressions.
You don't make a person step on their own landmines by firing at them, you make them come out to confront you and let them blow themselves up. That's how I like to think of it anyway, your worst critic/enemy is yourself and all that rings especially true to me, so being kind is easy if it makes them feel like an ass.
(*I mean seriously, what kind of plan is that? With a publisher, you may mess up business relations, but with general people, you just get bad word of mouth, which Molyneux already has enough of as-is. I can't honestly see where it was ever thought out enough that they somehow felt it was smoother to fuck over some random people than to just go with a publisher. All I can imagine is that somewhen, at some point, they honestly wanted to do what was in the Kickstarter, and then something fucked up in Molyneux's head and he panicked over how to handle backers and Early Access, switched gears to an easier audience, DeNA, and now we're stuck with this freemium mobile garbage.)
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Post by Danjal on Oct 2, 2014 2:37:49 GMT
I think that one of the primary problems - aside from incompetence and/or inexperience with certain systems and/or fields of expertise.
Both by Peter aswell as by various 22cans employees.
Is the conflicting priorities and loyalties.
The decision to cater to vastly different platforms and audiences.
The decision to go into business with DeNA.
All that kinda stuff.
The conflicting loyalties when dealing from a position of inexperience/incompetence lead to many failures in judgement.
Add to that a propensity towards overpromising and a subsequent unwillingness to tell the truth.
(Which is funny, Peter is afraid that if he tells the truth that people will judge him for it, yet he's more than willing to make promises he knows he probably can't keep.)
And you end up where we are now.
With a boatload of deception, miscommunication, unfullfilled promises and a massive backlog of work to deliver on.
*edit*
Ultimately, there's just so much crap going on, that its not easily pinned down to one or a few issues.
Its an amalgamation of clusterfucks and problems aswell as just plain bad luck and happenstance that come together in what we see today.
Some of it is intentional, other bits aren't.
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Post by earlparvisjam on Oct 2, 2014 2:54:49 GMT
Oh, and while I'm on full rant mode, I'd like to point out why I don't give two shakes (trying to avoid curse words, and it's hard right now) about the mobile release. When they push a new build that kills our save files, nobody bats an eye whereas the same can't be said for mobile. The reason for this difference is at the heart of why Godus is a massive pile of fail at this point.
The pc version is barely at 50% finished (according to their nebulous logic). Technically, the iOS version is 100% finished. Since iOS is considered a finished game, any changes have to fit into expansion and patch context rather than base implementation. From what it's shaping up to be now, the additional 50% of pc functionality is nothing more than the expansion content from the mobile version. As long as they continue to add content to iOS, we'll continue to sponge updates from them.
So, what we see with the Arc release is the only way they are going to be able to add that 50% of pc content and work with both versions of the game. They can't expand Homeworld without risking breaking the mobile saves. Anyone that claims this won't hamstring pc development down the line is either clueless or trying to deceive. There's still hope they'll separate the two versions into distinct takes on the same game, but it is closing in on impossible at this point.
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Post by Danjal on Oct 2, 2014 3:43:18 GMT
To that regard I can only hope that the PC version will either get a map editor or a sandbox-style procedurally generated map for the main 'campaign' map. That if and when they do so, they simply knock out certain features like the expansion beacons, or make it so that we can place these things down ourselves. Similarly to Gmr Leon's suggestion to have us place down the temples and shrines etc with some divine currency. Something that could easily be taken from the whole good/neutral/evil superbelief which can be acquired through gameplay actions such as sacrifice, and other impactful decisions and tasks. Just have us deal with our own issues. Rather than forcing us down the pigguts called mobile development into a freemium sausage. I can only imagine that once they have the main mechanics down, it shouldn't be too hard to remove the rails and let the PC release just kinda be its own little sandbox. |
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Post by banned on Oct 5, 2014 21:52:45 GMT
...I can only hope that the PC version... So sad that you feel begging for scraps from the iOS table is a viable response. 22scams is a scumbag infused pestilent boil on the ass of game companies. They need to be purged with fire as a warning to the next puke MBA that thinks mobile to PC port is a great idea to cut design costs. Anything less is to invite more scumbag puke MBAs to fuck over potentially good games in the interest of short term profit. |
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Post by Deleted on Oct 6, 2014 8:17:05 GMT
To make sure we're entirely on the same page here, I'm not intending to appear as though I'm sweeping aside what they've done. I readily acknowledge it all, but I also look at it from the perspective of, even if they are sidelining us, they're also somehow terrible at that too. If you want to push us aside, you just quit talking to us and even bothering to update our game. Admittedly, that would be even more catastrophic for their PR, but it'd save them time and resources, which as their primary aim seems to be milking the mobile audience for all it's worth, I'm frankly almost surprised they haven't already. Were it not for my recognition of the aforementioned PR aspect, I would be surprised. The reason I more readily attribute it to incompetence is because I see that, and I see that they clearly had original intents for a PC game, then rapidly shifted gears somewhere in the process to mobile even before it hit SEA. What that tells me is they suck at planning, and they suck at admitting when they've misled a bunch of people into backing a mobile game because they were so terrible at planning that they hadn't actually bothered to solidify the primary platform yet. Following this decision to redirect platform focus has resulted in every skewed step of this game's development, which while it wouldn't do much to admit it now, it would at least be a decent step towards some degree of honesty towards us as well as towards their own incompetence. I can almost assure you, whenever this game "finishes" development in whatever form, we'll see Peter giving interviews fessing up to all the crappy designs in the game and then going on some bizarre pity party over woe is me in accidentally finding success despite my absence of planning/design abilities. I mean, we already have seen this in some interviews. All I know is, you don't start with the intent to screw over a bunch of people by running a Kickstarter that puts emphasis on a variety of platforms with PC appearing to be its primary focus and then switch gears* unless you're a major asshole, or you're a completely incompetent person who sucks at planning and solidifying ideas ahead of time. Personally, I think they started with good intents, faltered on incompetence, and everything following that has been rather assholish behavior. Do they recognize that? As far as I can tell, no, and it's incredibly infuriating, but insulting them doesn't get that through as well as being cruelly tactful to them to the point that they can't help but hurt themselves by retreading over their own transgressions. You don't make a person step on their own landmines by firing at them, you make them come out to confront you and let them blow themselves up. That's how I like to think of it anyway, your worst critic/enemy is yourself and all that rings especially true to me, so being kind is easy if it makes them feel like an ass. (*I mean seriously, what kind of plan is that? With a publisher, you may mess up business relations, but with general people, you just get bad word of mouth, which Molyneux already has enough of as-is. I can't honestly see where it was ever thought out enough that they somehow felt it was smoother to fuck over some random people than to just go with a publisher. All I can imagine is that somewhen, at some point, they honestly wanted to do what was in the Kickstarter, and then something fucked up in Molyneux's head and he panicked over how to handle backers and Early Access, switched gears to an easier audience, DeNA, and now we're stuck with this freemium mobile garbage.) The whole Kickstarter looked like an act of Desperation. It looked like they tried to jump the crowdfunding train with almost no preparation. They had nothing to show - even the prototype they had to do while the campaign was on it's way. I think they had "cash" problems. Curiosity was running since 6. of November and they tried to implement some kind monetization (a shop). But i remember a news report in a gaming magazine, where Peter said that Apple stopped this sort of monetization, because it would have made the game gambling - and that gambling apps weren't allowed.
So i think they had a big problem: worked on an experiment for month without making money. And don't tell me it was only an Experiment they didn't want to make money with - that's something i don't believe for one second. You only have to look at how desperate they are to sell godus on any sale possible, even for 1.29. No, they wanted to make money with curiosity but even there they seem to have missed some core / central issues (sometimes it could be better to think about things before doing - and maybe write it down in a design document!?).
It was the time of the great Kickstarter success stories and maybe they thought they can do a pc/mobile game at this time. So they jumped on the train and started a "panic" Kickstarter. But even if they thought they could do a pc/mobile game i am sure their main focus was mobile, as with curiosity, but they needed money and mobile users don't pay for development of their games - so the whole regenesis story was invented. Maybe if they had gotten 2 or 3 million, they would have tried to do the promised game, but with 500K they couldn´t do much. If you look at the interviews in this time you can see how negative Peter was, about the trend of the kickstarter and they maybe could not reach their Goal because of his history. If he had much Money in the company wallet (or is it whallette now?) i don't think he would have had many concerns. This makes even more sense especially if you know that Peter tells everybody that if someone wants to do a Kickstarter he should only ask for half of the money they need to do the game. So the next steps were Logical -> DENA -> steam early acces. Brought money to go on with development for the mobile game.
So, I don't think it was planned from the beginning to outsmart the pc audience. But they never told us the truth and it was a mix of panic (low funds) and bad planning (asked for less than needed, concept was developed while kickstarter was running). And if you look at godus it is just like curiosity - only that the map has a few layers more compared to the one layer from curiosity. And it's not as easy as on curiosity to form a giant penis.
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Post by morsealworth on Oct 9, 2014 9:55:14 GMT
No matter how poorly it was planned, a scam is a scam.
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