IGN Review

is poll lock still off by default? i feel like having that on would address his concerns of "finding your berings" when navigating between plaents.

Are you sure Brian? I think TA's did, though you never played it. I could share Supcom did as well though. *shrugs.

I believe it is, I think it should be on by default. Though pro players (or at least we'll versed players) will lose the need for it.

Yep. should definitely be on by default. i always tell my new friends to turn it on and i still use it 400+ hrs in

You've just formed a dependency

The freedom of having poll lock off really let's you just fly across the planet, of course it still jostle you sometimes when you while base turns upside down, but you get used to it.

TA didn't, just Googled it.

SupCom didn't. AoE didn't. SC2 didn't. C&C didn't.

I don't really trust IGN as a reliable resource for reviews. Hopefully people will do their own research and look up multiple reviews and perhaps player reviews instead of just industry reviews. It's rather disappointing that an industry journo right out the bat will start with "I had this awful realization as I got into Planetary Annihilation: I hated the planets."

It might not be everyone's cup of tea... the same way I don't enjoy MMORPGs that much at all... but.... I can appreciate what goes into it and that other people find that fascinating and really cool. Sure there were some valid points but I can't help but feel that the overall tone of the review was based personally and not professionally.

Anyway that's my 2 cents.... please feel free to disagree 100%

Cheers,

-Todd

Well are they wrong?. I wouldn say so.

I mean its about seeing it from both sides. I paid a lot of money for PA, but im no blind fanboy nor do i hate the game. But i feel like budget also needs to be taken into account. its kinda funny, because take a game like Destiny, if that is what 500 million dollars gets you in an average FPS game, and yeah money was spend on PR commercials, even if that game cost 100 million. what Uber has done for a few million is amazing in comparison.

Is it a bad game ? no i wouldn say so, i enjoy it. But at the same time, i have no illusions about its lacking, in terms of user interface, performance, units, gameplay.

But again, if they keep working on it, it will get their. Once you make a decision you gotta live with it. then choose to release it.

The problem is, that bad reviews dont just go away on steam. But i do like the ability for customers to review on steam, it really forces sloppy developers like the once behind the Fable Anniversary to get their act together or their product wont sell, that game was released in such a bad state, it blows my mindh

At any rate, im sure the future will bring many good things to PC. its definitely a game that breaks the mold literally, its kinda unproven ground, having an RTS like this, so im sure more changes and improves will be coming. Who knows orbital might even end up getting cut. its very confusing, odd atm. Ive lost like 500 units sometimes before, because the way they stack like into one single unit lol.

I always have a real hard time with depth perception in the orbital layer.

When unit cannon comes, that should be invading planets much more fun, throwing tons and tons of units, and you can automate it. and have units rally to a cannon and then launch at spot. obviously we could need an ability for halleys to fly a planet into close orbit and stay there. Since it would be silly to have unit cannon throwing units across the galaxy.

Performance is always improving as well. It definitely runs much better than it did, but it still leaves a lot to be desired. The whole slow motion, always frustrates the heck out of me, when units go neo. But its better than the alternative, that the entire game slows to a crawl.

How could a minimap work? well it could be a mini globe, you have in the corner, which is sync to your view, as in you can turn it with your mouse when you click and hold, and when you let go or have a button it will revert back, to show where your main view is looking.

Minimaps are possible, its just it has to be done tests and trials. i mean how long did it takes for 2d or top down rts games to get refined. Haha i still remember the controls of dune, i freaking love that game, but having to issues each and every single unit a move and or attack command. that got old fast.

It obviously doesnt help uber, that recently on PC and more so steam there has been a string of horrible shitty crappy pc ports of games, so pc gamers are getting tired and angry, i cant say i blame them, ive been burned quite a few times recently as well.

Watch dogs horrible game, unoptimized runs like *** on a high end pc.
Aliens colonel marines, wasnt anywhere near what was promised or even shown.
Fable Anniversary horrible buggy mess, crashes constantly, blurry so you cant see anything.

For me personally its gotten to the point now, where my trust generally speaking in game developers has become so low, that i dont preorder games anymore, my trust is simply gone, after being burned so many times. Many times what you see they show in gameplay or trailers arent even in the final game. and they use excuses like well it was work in progress. right so you made the game look worse? lol.

TLDR: I think uber should have waited with releasing it and kept it early access, but im sure they had their reasons. and calculated the risks vs reward. I just hope it favors them and the future of PA. because i love this game. I do play most vs AI. cant wait to see upcoming improvements and additions.

They forgot to set aside the bribe money!?!

Hi @RMJ

Yeah look I agree there's stuff that can be improved. I just don't think the game deserves a 4.8. That's a pretty low score. Not saying it should have been a 10. I don't think anyone expected that. Somewhere in the 6-7 mark would have been more appropriate I would have thought.

Some things missing.... still room for improvement but at it's core a decent RTS game that tries to do some very new things and for the most part pulls them off.

Cheers,

-Todd

TA definitely does. But it's limited to move, attack & patrol type commands. I think Starcraft was the same (you could in Warcraft 2, so although I can't specifically remember, I'd be surprised if it wasn't the case). But you definitely couldn't build or other do 100% of available commands from the mainscreen, as you can in PA.

After reading the review. I don't think he tried the whole game. but a recurring theme is popping up from a couple reviews i've seen .

NO OFFLINE

NO TUTORIAL

NO MINI-MAP

"BASIC" SINGLE PLAYER

I'm pretty sure Uber can knock 3 of these down patch after patch. I do feel bad that in the review the following wasn't really emphasized:

Death star laser

Planet smashing

an actual orbital layer for combat

Teleporters

area commands.

Maybe the reviewers are getting tripped up before they can really enjoy the game :/.

Maybe as a long time player I can see the fruits of the labor, I just wish the reviewers could too .

If reviewer generally like the game, reviewer goes like 'No saves and offline, but that's fine game is cool'. I saw reviews where reviewer bashed the game for "Alt tabbing badly". When reviewer doesn't like the game, he will point out any flaw, even if it has nothing to do with playing.

There's definitely a pattern thats emerged from in terms of criticism; both from critics and average users.
The only disappointing part, and the thing that surprised me, is how much of it actually matched that complaints from the forum. A lot of people seemed to call it well in advance.

It seems like that even though this is a great game with lots of potential, its greatest challenge at release was never about producing a great unique RTS experience, but being able to SHOW people how unique and good it actually is and where its potential lies. Thats were I would have thought tutorials, single player, the community, dev/commmunity made videos, casts, tool tips can help (kudos for implementing the more community based ones). You've got all these cool features people just need that whats, hows and whys spelled out for them in an obvious & optional way.

I think the IGN review is overly harsh, and a 4.8 certainly is too low a score. But: It nails the first impression of "I'm confused!" a lot of players experience upon first launch. Why can't I save? Why is my orbital tech limited in GW? Why do I have to discard so much tech in GW? How does the game work?

I hope Uber adds a tutorial; in the meantime, how about linking to several tutorial sources on the game's main menu? We have a link bar on the right side, after all ...

I think there is a subtle point in this review that many people have missed. Many in this thread call the reviewer an idiot or 'just someone with an opinion' because they think that the reviewer hates that there are multiple spherical planets. From my reading of it he does not hate planets. Instead he dislikes the fact that, for him, the interface is not powerful enough to give him a coherent overview of the planets. The type of overview which strategy games usually require and provide with strategic zoom or a minimap.

The reviewer clearly knows about the existence of PiP but what he could achieve with it did not fix the need for an overview of the battle. There are people here who have apparently wrangled PiP into something usable for them. At best this means that the default UI is bad at leading new players to discover a PiP setup that works well for them. Also, do those people play on systems with more than one planet?

For as long as I can remember the minimap in Spring lets you select units and give any orders. I thought it was a standard feature by now.

I am very disappointed that we have never seen an attempt at a minimap implementation. I do not think the idea can be judged before it has been tried. Both systems have drawbacks. The PiP system may be capable of providing an overview but it will be a patchwork overview with units walking off one screen and appearing on the other in non-obvious ways. This would not be a problem for a minimap as there are projections which make all paths continuous. The minimap downside is the unintuitive distortion. Neither has a clear advantage so which system is preferred may be down to personal preference.

This review can be summed up in 2 ways :

"I don't like this aspect of the game, therefore no one will."

"I don't care about learning the game, therefore it's bad."

These are the kind of people that hate most PC games because they can't play them or don't care, they just want to write a quick review.

Then you've played exactly one RTS, called Planetary Annihilatoin. Because there are plenty of RTS games where you can issue orders by using the minimap, and even a couple where you can select units to issue orders by using the minimap.

There is absolutely no reason why you couldn't give all the functionality of the main-screen/PIP to the minimap, or even turn the main screen into a map-projection in the first place. There's no reason why you couldn't toggle between "globes" and "map projections" in the main screen, and use the next-planet/previous-planet to shift planets. There's no reason why you couldn't PIP each of those map projections themselves so you can see every battleground at once. Other than a lack of implementation.


Currently, the UI is clunky and clumsy, and doesn't elegantly reinforce the "zoom lens" of the player. And the player experience in this game is consistently criticised across reviews, including by players. Do you actually need to obstruct the available view to the player, rather than presenting them with all the information and enabling them to physically zoom in on areas that are important?

I agree with Googlefrog, there's a subtlety to the pattern of reviews that people are missing.

Correct. Screen space is one of those elements, and minimising that for situational awareness is something that PIP does poorly.

More so, you're ignoring the problem that is present. People are still making the perfectly valid objection that their view is being obstructed. PIP has not solved the principal problem it is designed to address. It "can" address that problem, but much less space-efficiently than minimaps can.


I think people would work out quite quickly that shapes were being distorted. That doesn't actually matter all that much, because your screen is 2D, so you're already noticing distorted shapes and distorted distances subliminally.


You tell me, you're the UI designer. Why make your UI space inefficient?

Arrogance has everything to do with your points. There is no solution which is best, because a better (or even equal and different) solution is always out there. Arrogance stops people from recognising that what is implemented is not necessarily the best solution. If the "solution" did not address the problem it was meant to solve, it is by default, not a solution, just a mitigation. If it had addressed that problem adequately, it wouldn't be complained about.

Really it should be that surprising, members of the community are part of the target market as well. Crowdfunded games have a fairly unique advantage in terms of getting feedback because you have a community that's been following along potentially since almost the initial concept, all drawn together by wanted to play the game they perceived from the pitch. Sure different people all have different wants, needs and expectations but its not likwe you get people backing an RTS game that would rather it be an FPS game you know?

I think it was a missed opportunity to not try and leverage that potential more, it's basically free marketing research after all. We might not be as experienced as the guys at Uber, but most of us know what we like and don't like, even if somethings we don't have the exact vocabulary to express it perfectly.

Mike

I think the solution to the limited visibility aren't minimaps. Minimaps are forced to have significant distortion which makes it both difficult to issue commands and to estimate distances. Plus, there are no compact mappings for spherical objects, and no coherent ones either, at least if you wish to limit the distortion factor to any reasonable factor. This isn't Civ series where "spherical" maps were actually just unrolled cylinders.

What could help though, is an improvement on the notification system. More notifications, PERSISTENT notifications for ongoing events, and foremost directional markers on the edge of the screen which help orientating towards the event when on the same planet.

And as for PiP:
IMHO way to few windows. Personally, I would prefer to have a column of 4-6 PiP windows on the left edge of the screen, whereby the active is displayed in the main region and leaves a gap in the side bar. Plus indicator on each PIP which shows on which planet that PIP is.

And the good old issue of "Units are way to stupid by default", which also contributes to the feeling that you are never getting the whole picture, because you are forced to pay way to much attention to micro management of a few units.



I can't even say that that IGN review would be inappropriate. Most of the points criticized are valid points. The game was published with an "1.0" tag, so it is expected to be finished, and yet it isn't even feature complete nor are the existing features polished enough. Obviously it isn't done yet, not even remotely, but there are no bonus points to be given for ongoing development. It all comes back to the inconvenient truth: The game was released way to early, at least half a year.