Didn't people say for years PA would have no experimentals?? I mean, I don't mind, but... didn't they?
Yeah, there is quite a bit of new content Uber originally didn't plan. They also wanted for a long time to keep orbital as simple as possible, and now they added two new combat units and balanced it in a rock/paper/scissor fashion, all the while including positional play and micro. I guess time, rebalancing and constant discussion of the community made them change their mind. I certainly love it, especiall the new orbital is sooo much better. More challenging too, but that's even better to me. Winning a space battle does actually feel rewarding now. A-moving avenger superblobs got a bit old, and the more expensive T2 units should be a bit nicer on the performance as an added bonus.
Well. It was never a big 'no-no' like Shields were. Back in Alpha/Beta Uber toyed with the idea of megabots and discussed that in the Backers Forum. Now that that Forum is now defunct and Megabots have run their course, I hope I won't get in trouble for showing this:
Shame about that game I really liked the trailer. Hopefully some juice from PA:T will help revive it.
You'd think this would put to rest (some) concerns that they weren't aware of community criticisms of the game. I mean, they're ticking every box here, and being true to what they originally said - these features weren't in the original scope, and weren't planned for. So they put together an expansion for this new content, and they've based it on over a year of player feedback. I've got to say, I'm genuinely impressed.
You clearly weren't a backer, then. I highly dislike the fact that the game is still incomplete and they have definitely not "[ticked] every box". I'll bring back a point I made a while ago, but where is the actual planet annihilation? We can throw a rock at a planet to make a crater, have the game freeze for 40 seconds, and then kill everything on the planet. That's.. Stupid, and not "Annihilation" at all. That's a cheap try and misrepresentation of what they shown off in the backers discussion and trailers.
You clearly haven't played since the asteroids patch to PA then. Planets are full on annihilated now. I'm unsure whether or not it's based on the size differential between the two celestial objects, but if you slam a planet into another, it's gone for good.
In fact, shields weren't either. Quoting Neutrino (from Reddit, during Kickstarter campaign): During entire development cycle, anti-turtling faction within community continuously shifted perceived developers' stance on shields from a second-priority thing to the Thing Never To Be Implemented, together with presenting false perceived opinion of community on shields to developers. I presumed that they succeeded in deceiving Uber in that their own opinion is a manifested will of entire playerbase, but release of Titans, featuring experimentals that e-sprots crowd also repeatedly attempted to prevent from happening in PA, suggests that devs just stick to some original plan.
I hope Uber still makes THAT Titan IF anyone has noticed, the existing land titans are Tank and Quad. Imperial and Raptor Titans are still out there ;-)
I doubt that Uber was convinced entirely by the Forums to be honest, as there have been many polls and threads in favour of shields. I think they make their own minds up and are quite sensible and methodical.