IGN Review

Alright true, didn't go as in depth with my words as I should have, I'll give you that one.

I tried. I really tried being respectful to you. But you sir, you`re just a close minded *******. And you stating "Oh gosh oh gosh Arma III and PA are like the most awesome games ever and i dont accept critics because => I <= and a couple of friends do like them" is like as deep into the fanboyzone as somebody can get

Erm.. I've never even played ARMA III, but I've been told by everyone I know that I should get it sooo...

I don't know, thanks for giving me your wonderful opinion, in which you were actually respectful of me in your own magical word, bye bye.

I like PA so much but the reviews, in general, are right. For me and regarding this topic in particular, i would say that he is right when saying that game ideas were poorly executed. Sadly, when you have such flaws, you are open in the flanks to be criticized and so Uber did.

They made a short term decision and are paying its price. I don't know the price for the long term (and best for our eyes) decision, but I think they know what they did and are aware of their limitations. They did a great job with this game and I hope it will keep on, but it's better be prepared for more and more judgement, because market is relentless and average consumers don't want to know the story behind a product, they want it working like it was advertised. And it's definitely not the case.

Not really. His criticism of playing on multiple planets makes some sense. They look cool, but I'm not sure if they are more fun than a well-designed flat map. The same goes for "limited visibility" - there's nothing equivalent to minimap showing movement of enemy forces and overview of the whole game. And this is a standard for RTS genre.

So far it's just "new and different". Time will tell if it works out.

Completely personal preference. For me, spherical is way better than flat. So much more strategy required. They also take some getting used to, and a lot of people are idiots – try something for 2 minutes and then run away complaining.

Wrong. Just wrong.

PiP is way better than any mini map. With it you can have complete vision of the planet thanks to PiP mirroring. Not only that, but you can give orders through PiP. Way better than a minimap.

Also, it is physically impossible to turn a sphere into a flat surface without some form of distortion. It is impossible to have a traditional mini-map on this type of game.

While there are some factual inaccuracies, the main premise of a lot of his concerns are genuine. When he claims that navigation is not as good when dealing with spherical planets, he is right. Strategic zoom is easier to use on a flat map than panning around multiple spheres. Also, PiP can't show you every side of every planet. In a traditional RTS, your mipmap can show you the entire map. PiP is not a straight upgrade to a mipmap.

There is one thing that bugs me though; comparing PA to FA and the likes. Thing is, there was no way this game was going to blow FA away at release in many respects unless Uber delayed official release for years to come. Today's FA is the product of far more man-hours and player testing. PA's value is in its potential at this point, but there's no way a reviewer can account for that.

Not to mention FA is basically Supcom 2.0.

Anyway, there's a mirror function for Pip do you can.. sort of get a total overview, click it once then click back, boom!

Because uber did not pay those guys.

I'm glad that IGN gave a bad review, maybe it will shake some things up (as well as the bubble some of the people in this community are living in which is why they attack the messenger and not the message). Despite IGN's integrity or sentence structure, all the criticisms in the review were valid. People on theses forums have consistently been asking for saved games, offline play, a tutorial, flat mini-maps, duel screen support, and more orbital gameplay options. Instead, there is a community (on the forums) that places more emphasis on whether or not we should be able to reclaim trees or who gets what commander from Kickstarter. Maybe the developers should internalize this criticism and start focusing on the topics that are constantly popping up; clearly many people throughout the development process, who have come and gone, have placed a consistently strong emphasis on these topics. Hopefully, this is a time to look inwardly; not to let pride/ego get in the way.

Flat minimap is impossible without severe warping, come on! And the beginning of the review was a rant about how he didn't even like the premise of the game.

IGN has terrible integrity for a reason.

not that it will help, but i left a comment on IGN expressing how much of a moron he is with his omg i don't know how to play this game 4.8 ****.

A review is subjective. Everything in a review is subjective. Games are subjective, they aren't supposed to push some objective envelope, that's secondary to entertainment (which is a damn shame, I'd like to see more innovation in the gaming industry as a whole).

The concept of 3D vs 2D is subjective, and it's a player experience point of view. Yes, you will get players who don't enjoy the game because it's 3D maps, not 2D. Get over it. Do the 3D maps add anything of value which couldn't have been represented in 2D space? It might be different if you could physically interact with the system via some sort of hologram.

I've seen the responses of this community to reviews. The community discounting any negative review as being "from a bad source", including STEAM reviews, by the people who have purchased this game and have played it. You can't discount the opinion of consumers. Especially if you look at the reviews of other steam products, and see different trends there.


Personally, I don't think that the 3d does add value. It's cool and it's a nice representation of what's going on in 3D space, but it doesn't help the player's efforts to manage the logistics. If anything, it's actively working against people's "zoom lens" by always obstructing their perspective. And guess what? There are a vocal number of reviewing players who think exactly the same. So irrespective of your opinion that it does add value, there are players who think it's a turn off.

Should the whole game shift into 2D space? No, it's not like it was a bad concept from the beginning that should just be completely scrapped, and PIP was introduced to address it. PIP clearly doesn't do enough to address the problem felt by the playing reviewers. There are other ways around the problem, including improving PIP, or implementing the other options. Personally I think an ability to shift into 2D representations of planetary surfaces, and then view every P.S on the same screen would be very helpful. Sure, you get distortion. But you get more efficient screen use than PIP to make up for that.


Furthermore, the author of that review then goes and makes criticisms of implementations. Like the fact that you can still be blocked in the GW by inadequate tech. People don't like encountering a problem with limitations, without having the tools. Blind firing nukes is not "fun" gameplay.

The problem is that the strategy genre is filled with people for whom singleplayer is important. Look at other strategy games, and the effort they put into singleplayer. You list them in your own post. The overall demographic in the strategy genre is mainly singleplayer. Now look at Uber's own emphasis on AI. AI is not needed in multiplayer.

Focus on single player is perfectly valid. It's a matter of marketing. Maybe if they marketed it as a multiplayer strategy game with a single player component the reviews would be more favourable, and they'd be written for a completely different crowd.

The issue is "focus on multiplayer". Focus on multiplayer is one aspect of the community of this website, maybe even the overwhelming majority. But to most people, RTS has a strong singleplayer bias.

I'm also not convinced that PA had a strong multiplayer focus from the start. The community has a strong multiplayer focus, because multiplayer is one of the ways that the community can interact with one another, and the AI wasn't really that good to begin with.

If it had had a strong multiplayer emphasis, there should have been greater emphasis placed on multiplayer during marketing.

Looking forward, critical release of this game has identified problems that the developers can address - both for this title, and future titles.

Brian...I don't know how much you know about engineering design, but Kroll describes that as ignorant certainty, and suggests a move to intelligent confusion. Arrogance gets in the way of good design.

These are the objective facts.

1. A minimap would give you complete vision of the planet.
2. A minimap would give you the ability to give orders.
3. A minimap does the same thing in one screen that two PIPs does.

PIP vs Minimap is a design problem. Neither solution is "better" than the other. They both have equal merits, and experts will disagree on that best implementation.

More importantly, here's a review of the design process (for manufactured products)

Guess what?

If PIP was the best solution, it would have addressed the initial problem, and the market would have been sold. They wouldn't be complaining about obstructed points of view. Clearly, it doesn't solve the problem. It needs improvement. Or possibly the idea was just a bad idea to begin with, and it needs to be scrapped entirely, and go back to the drawing board.


Notice how the arrows go both ways?

No one solution is "the best", and it's worth remembering that. There's a quote from experienced designers to the effect that the best solution is the one you implement.

Guess what? Sometimes professional engineers have to sit down in a meeting, and say "guys - this idea I thought of, which is THE BEST IDEA EVER, which I've been endorsing for weeks and weeks, will not work. I think we should scrap it and start again."

There is no room in good design for arrogance.

Fixed that for you.

Actually, Knight fixed it for me.

So you are choosing pride/ego ... thank you for proving my point.

I truly don't understand how I showed any pride or egotism what so ever...

I gave a fact, that a flat minimap is literally impossible without warping, and a widely accepted opinion across the Internet, that IGN is often seen as untrustworthy, most suspect they've been paid off. Do you want me to paste those reviews for other games that make no sense when compared to another game again?

Oh and I said it was silly that he was being very biased towards the whole article, he didn't like the idea of planetary maps in the first place, if course he's going to say the game was terrible.

He even has a contradiction, stating that there simply isn't enough view, yet praising the PiP. The review didn't feel professional to me to say the least.

it does need better camera working, like the ability to 'swivel' your camera around, cant just use WASD (or equivalent)

I might agree if I knew what you meant! What do you mean by swivel? I know you can do the whole cntrl+m thing but I doubt that's what you mean.

Care to elaborate?

You are... bringing up points that aren't relevant to the points I'm making...

I am a web designer and developer. I spend a large portion of my day working on UI.

There are solutions that are the best. Until one that is better comes along. At least that's the way I look at it. So technically one could have the perspective that nothing is the best, but that's haggling over a small word just for the sake of bickering.

My point is, there are some UI elements that are bad. Some are good. And some are great. From my perspective, and with the quality of work I strive for in my work, "good" is the same as "bad." Anything less than "great" is bad.

And a flat minimap with distortion is straight up bad.

Minimap would give you the ability to give orders? I have never seen a minimap in an RTS give you the ability to give orders.

No... minimap doesn't do the same thing that PiP does.

In UI design, there are some elements that are simply straight up better than others. With the paramaters that PA has, PiP is straight up better than a traditional minimap since a traditional minimap wouldn't give you the ability to give orders, and a traditional minimap would distort the surface, so distances would be meaningless. So even though you can technically see everything, what you can see is pretty much meaningless.

People are stupid, and just because people complain doesn't mean that there's a better solution out there. People will complain about anything no matter what you do.

Arrogance has nothing to do with the points that I am bringing up in this post or my previous post.