Been playing, playing and playing .... And to be honest, it does not look like alpha but beta. I can still remember early Supcom Beta. Ok units were not disapearing, but definitly PA in its current state is even more polished than supcom. Af course all the stuff is not available, but the overall progress achived within a so short time is really impressive. In the current state, performance is far better than what it used to be in Supcom Beta, Pathfinding, even if perfectible in many areas if far better than in Supcom beta (and final release). I can still remember when Supcom went out and we had to wait for the saviour performance patch. It's obvious, the new RTS reference is being built and more over we're part of this project by helping to fund it and helping to track bugs. This is one of the most exciting event in my gamer life
There is suppose to be multiple planets and crashing asteroids into each other. You know the fun parts Yeah I think its a typical RTS game with an interesting map at the moment. But its not yet Planetary Annihilation I have yet to see one planet explode.
I have no idea how SupCom was performance-wise in early beta, but the performance of PA in lategame situations really is at an alpha level and definitely does need tremendous improvements. Apart from that there are also pretty problematic bugs with the ui (or rather missing, incomplete ui-features), that mostly result in giving (wrong and bad) commands to units without even realizing it until your acu walked into the enemies base to die. Also PA is missing a lot (A LOT) of features right now. I am not complaining about the state of PA in any way (I play it daily and have a lot of fun doing so, I am quite happy Uber lets us play this), but there are still some things to do before it can be called beta.
I must agree, on everything. On one side, a lot is still missing as expected, on the other hand besides those obvious bugs, the overall experience was rather smooth and stable... I mean a big feature like the Chrono-Cam works very well already... I expected the Alpha to be way more problematic and choppy.
Yes, this is still very alpha. Some might even say pre alpha. We've put a good bit of work into making sure the front facing experience is good enough to give out to the public. It also comes from Uber's internal philosophy of making sure the game is always playable. We try to do play tests every day. That's not always possible, but it is not acceptable with in Uber to leave the game in a broken state if it can be avoided.
You can feel that the people who are working on the game genuinely know what they are doing. The game itself is good, considering what works and what doesn't. It is highly playable. I currently have over 40 hours played and even though I feel like I'm overpowered cause I know how to win and what to do to kill each person before they even see whats happening, it is extremely fun and I seriously have no idea how will I manage my life once the full game is out and when millions of people start playing.(possibly billions) The fact that the current style will be kept and there will be no serious complications when it comes to units and building up, means that a lot of people will be able to play the game and enjoy it. This will bring all TA and SupCom fans together regardless of age as well as other strategy fans. I'm pretty confident that this game will go big and stay big for a long time. If not, I will cut off all 7 of my legs.
It's just the start of alpha to. Alpha and beta always had blurry definitions. Most of the time a game hitting alpha means first version where you can do a complete run through of it. The minimum of features are implemented that lets you play the game loop from start to finish. A beta means the game is feature complete. Everything the devs intended to put in is there and functional even if in a rough state. All that's left is finish data, polish and optimize. Again very rough definitions. More like goals aimed to help finish a game and kick it out the door. Tried it for the first time this afternoon and there's surely fun to be had... and it's just starting
It's suprisingly fun at its current state. Did 3 games today where I just overrun everybody with t1 bots (hundreds and hundreds of them). It makes the game lag crazily (low fps and some stutters) but it looks great, even at this early stage. Bots attack from the front. Bots from the back. Bots attack out of water end the enemy is suprised each time. :mrgreen: Of course, its still very rough and large amounts of features are missing but playing this alpha really made me very optimistic for the final product.
Nowhere neat beta, I must say. The official meaning of beta (at least, the one used by IBM), is that alpha is while major features are still being implemented, and beta is while polish, bug fixes and minor features are being implemented. That being said, Uber have put a lot on their plates and handled it spectacularly well. They didn't fall into the trap of releasing too early (the amount of people who scream for an alpha release, then rage when it's a buggy pile of crap astounds me sometimes), and despite bugs here and there, stuff is working great considering they are using so much undocumented tech in new ways, for rendering, save files, pathfinding and all!
Gaming creation tools have got a lot better since the days of TA or even Supcom - this has lead to games being easier to get together and feel like they're almost finished products when they're not. & it's getting easier all the time, take a look at the Unreal 4 tech engine demo vids, search for the ones where they talk about map creation, quite impressive how powerful they've made the engine in terms of game development.
