Quote:
Originally Posted by Houndstone Hawk
+1. A bit worried (being an offline player) that m/player is going to get all the fore seeable treatment over just as crucial elements like rad commands, CEM & FM bugs, proper FMB manual, a non semi-concreted English Channel etc
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There are many orders in which stuff could be done.
The one thing you can be sure of is that whichever order they end up being done in the majority of the people will be unhappy with it, because the probability that your preferred order or my preferred order of all the tasks will be selected is extremely small.
Personally I've mostly written the sim off for a couple of months.
I'll have a look at the next release version, and then probably go back into hibernation until the next one - and so on until it reaches a genuine "release" standard.
I'm not particularly bothered by the fact that the game was released in a pre-release state, because I've been able to play it before I would otherwise have been able to. Indeed, it may well be that it was release early or release never, and I know which of those options I prefer.
However, I do think that it would have been better for all concerned if there had been more transparency about the situation, because it's not as though the problems were (or indeed are) small, subtle, or could reasonably be expected to escape the attention of players or reviewers.
Doubtless people would have been more understanding if the game had been released as a paid public beta rather than as a final release, especially if the early adopters had been given a discount to reflect the reduced value of the product at release.
That way, the people who are most bothered by the bugs could simply have opted to wait for a full release, paying full price, and the reviewers could have decided to either postpone their coverage, or else review it as a beta, which would have at least given them the opportunity to say some hopeful things about the final release (whereas they couldn't exactly say nice things about a "final" release that clearly wasn't ready, because if they did that for 1c then they'd be expected to do it for everybody else, quite apart from the fact that the average gamer wants their software to work "out of the box").
I don't want my money back for my CE or anything. But I really think that 1c should:
- Not repeat this sort of avoidable communication fiasco in future - release a paid beta as such if necessary instead! The fans will pay to keep the genre alive, and everybody would at least know what they were getting into, which would take a lot of righteous indignation out of the equation.
- Re-release the sim with new packaging and perhaps a new title when it is genuinely release-worthy, so that new reviews & publicity are generated.
- The people who already bought the sim & shelved it will then be reminded to dust it off, patch it off, and finally enjoy the finished product.
- The people who were put off by the bad reviews will then be able to read good reviews and buy the game.