Still do not know what I'm playing!

After several months in this game, still do not know exactly what kind of game this will be!


Effectively,Different types of economy will exist to support the various units, either t1 or more destructive.

What kind of units we have, be they land or naval flights, or other.

Many friends ask me on steam for wanting to buy the game, I really do not know the answer, just tell them to wait for the final version.
But even I feel a bit in the dark.
I look the listing, but I can not get clear idea of the game overall, what we will really have.

Perhaps there are many like me, who know what we have for now, understand what will be the final product, but there is some incomprehension of what the game will support, the ideas and philosophy, as the game engine.

I know that much has to be done not quite see the launch of the beta, when the game still has so little.
I think we should have more content for the beta.
There are many released games out there, and you may need to understand a little how our minds work.
For if we want buy a game we have to know if it worth as other games are going to be launched.

Many good games are out there without being recognized by the weak advertising.
I dont want this will be another because i now will be good game.

here's what I always tell my friends :

• 64bit
• all computer platforms
• multi-core
• simulated projectiles
• server-client
• glactic war
• sphere map
• multiple playgrouds
• physics planet smashing
• macro
• M units
• dynamic lighting /d audio

Well once beta comes out we'll have a much better idea of how it plays.

12 more days.

Thats going to be a large mess at first...

Several thousand new players, over a month of not public tested changes/new features and highly experimental balancing changes.

And as for the initial question:
Nobody really knows so far. But the game is also highly modifiable, so there will probably be several balancing flavors until release, which can again differ completely from vanilla PA.

Let me try summarizing what kind of game it's going to be...

Total Annihilation. On multiple planets. With upgraded engine tech and design lessons learned from the SupCom era. Oh, and you can build thrusters on an asteroid and smash it into a planet.

In other words, it's AWESOME.

It has the potential to be awesome.

Pulling off 'Total Annihilation On Multiple Planets' is going to be a lot harder than anyone (even the Devs) could possibly imagine. No one has matched Total Annihilation for its depth to relative simplicity, or its groundbreaking gameplay in almost two decades, though many (including the original developers) have tried and failed.

Can they capture lightning in a bottle... a second time?

This game is awesome, and will only get better, your such a sour puss nanolath. You remind me of the all the bw die hards when sc2 came out. The same concept applies here if you like ta final product more than pa you will be in the minority and the community will move on without you while you go back to ta

That sounds horrendously pessimistic and depressing but I find myself asking the same question.

Nothing wrong with a little realism, it has been a long time for a reason.
I backed this project to see it get pulled off. While I can have my doubts as much as Nanolathe does, inaction is failure in the first place. So all I can do is show full support when I can.

I'm not sure what the QA process is like at Uber (or even specifically for the beta release), but simultaneously integrating/releasing huge new features and expanding the user base by two orders of magnitude (?) seems like a curious choice.

In my experience, heroism often teeters on the brink of tragic heroism. This game has such wonderful promise... I hope everything is ok.

Alpha and Beta usesr with bug tracker=QA
It sounds like they all get together and play the game at the end of the day as well, which can be part of the process.
Not everybody does a QA department, proper feedback from public Alpha and Beta is an effective force when everybody gives useful information.
I think alot of people expect a completed game out of alpha's and beta's. Namely minecraft sort of ruined this perception, as the games popularity was in its public prime when it was in an alleged beta. I actually had played the game to death by the time it was 1.0.
Alot of people expect this same quality out of all Alpha-Beta access because alot of games use it more as a marketing campaign than an actual unfinished stage. I think PA is following a more true to its name form of this kind of testing.

Well, here's some food for thought. On day one of the alpha, approximately only 5 people not at the company had played it, and even that, only for a week or two, before the alpha build came out. It helped track down a few issues, and worked out the overall flow, but it wasn't QA. And that build was the culmination of 8 months of checkins without the public once seeing it.

By the time alpha comes out, there will have been approximately 20 days since the prior build. While it is a lot of features being implemented, it's not as big of a risk as it's being made out to be. Actually getting everything done by the 26th is much more aggressive than any concerns I have about the process.

Our beta is aiming for major feature complete, but there will be a lot of bug fixing, polish, feature iteration, and tuning and balance.

The reason you all aren't getting an interim build is there is a huge opportunity cost in making new builds. While having "buggy" builds is ok, and expected at this stage, issuing a purely broken build is not acceptable, which means rather than focusing on features, I constantly have to ask people to re-prioritize to fix a client or server crash, or random show stopping bug that likely would have been fixed in the process of them finishing the feature in question. I'd rather we stay focused on finishing the last big features, so once beta is ready to go, we can then spend a few weeks doing a focused fixing, polishing and optimization pass, as that's much easier to do in conjunction with feature iteration.

Hope that helps to understand the process and reasoning a bit more.

Thats interesting. I really thought there would be an interim build before beta drops.

There still may be. But I'm trying to set expectations realistically.

Honestly, i do not get the point of having an interim build while there are only 9 days before beta.
I prefer the team to move as much as possible on core features, it's allready so short to bring so much stuff to life ... I guess there's ton of stuff to be done before final release in between beta and release date.

Well.. exiting times ahead, thats for sure

see I imagined something of the sort was going on. would you say this work sheme is slower than a work sheme without alpha/beta access?

I do see one big upside is that you get rid of bugs along the way so that you don't end up with the mountain of dishes in the sink and also (maybe?) eliminate the senario where fixing one of the bugs complicates the fix for other bugs.

Hard to say. There's a lot in favor of having a hard deadline to aim at. It acts as a forcing function, and can really help the team focus. However, doing it for too long can have a lot of bad consequences. Burn out, code written under such tight constraints tends to have short cuts or isn't as thought out as if you can take more time to "do it right", etc. It's all about tradeoffs.

We feel the need to get a beta build out, and we're doing our best to stick with what our definition of that term is. Then we'll probalby have a week or two of builds every day or two, as new major problems are found, a host of new players means a bunch of new machine configs to account for, etc. And then we can get back to the more focused and balanced march toward a retail candidate, with a focus on systems iteration, lots of bug fixing, lots of optimization, and of course, a lot of polish.

Mind you, the plan is that retail on this game isn't the end of development for us. Just a move to a new stage.

^^ Posts like these are why I love this place.