2 months to release and the game feels like pre-alpha and is a letdown. Please delay the release.

Its exactly the same argumentation as it was with other titles that had horrible unfinished releases. And during their betas it was obvious that it would happen. Everyone who pointed that out got at least once exactly such an answer. Almost word for word. Three recent AAA titles come to my mind. Nevertheless, they sold/sell like hot cakes and the companies made tons of money, so nothing to see here, move on.

Are you seriously stating that a game like PA can be completely and well balanced in, lets say, 3-4 weeks?
Unitset has to be complete and thats going to take some time that I substracted from the 6 weeks left.
I dont want to state that the devs are bad in any way its just so much to do in such little time.

All I have left is the deep hope that I am completely wrong, maybe the beta builds vastly differ from internal dev builds.

Ive also seen a lot of crap games getting praise-reviews because the reviewer liked them for some reason.
Really, I dont give a damn about game reviews

NEVER a step back and always an improvement? Oh come on, its not unusual for steps back to happen during development.
Builds breaking the game for some people completely, bombers not hitting a lot, the "offline" thingy in lobby,.. just to name a few steps backward.
As said, nothing bad about it as these happen during dev, no reason to deny them.

The beauty of beleiving is that it doesnt change reality and facts.

PA development team has some of the greatest engine technologists for a RTS game, and Sorian is one of the best AI makers I know, but that doesn't necessary make the final product good, a game is more than engine and AI.

I think you took my words to the fullest extent with the seriousness of a step back. When I mean a step back I mean Uber changing the game to Free to play do to unforeseen circumstances, or losing a talented developer on the team and has delayed the UI construction quite a bit. I've only heard good news in the beta updates and responses by uber. It can be argued that of course they don't want to let the people hear about bad stuff in the background but it really isn't obvious in the live streams or updates that state the game is in trouble. Its hard to fake "having a bad time but got to pretend to be happy" on a live stream.

Stuff breaking in beta is EXPECTED and ASSUMED to be planned to be fixed. Its not really a step back when a bomber fails to drop its bomb.. Its progress but its not like bombers are going in reverse and now the bomber gets stuck in orbital or something.

I remember when Beta dropped.. there was a beta update everyday to help get the build to be stable. Thats not easy for a developer to do but these guys went the extra distance to help us.

Concerning balance, I really don't mind if what they release is not balanced, as long as it is balance-able.

As long as the features/units/sfx are in, the massive amount of people playing it can balance it far faster than uber can.

Look at it this way- Either they release an unbalanced, but still fun, game and use the feedback to quickly improve the balance, or they delay a promised release date to balance it internally, and take longer doing it.

The media would be the only thing that I would worry about, but very seldom do reviews about strategy games mention balance. Instead, they talk about things like the UI, how the explosions look, how fun it is.

As long as the balance isn't so obviously wrong that a reviewer finds and uses a broken strategy that guarantees a win like, the first time he plays it, balance can wait. Make it obvious that it balance will iteratively improve as time goes on, and I think consumers will understand that for sure.

This game is alpha. It crashes all the time. Selecting and controlling units needs to be rethought entirely. And its incredibly laggy. I have serious doubts this game will be much better by the release date. No automatic game matching? No making sure you and your opponents are close to the same skill level. Thats pretty bad considering that is basically a requirement. Feels like they waded into water that was too deep for them. Did they even look at the competition that they are going up against?

When I played Heart of the Swarm Beta and Wings of Liberty beta before that the game was stable and basically final. the only things they were tweaking were balance issues and the occasional glitch, not releasing update after update after update just to make it stable.

and what competition is that exactly????

How is that any more difficult than pretending to be happy in a interview?
Also you don't need doing a good job for being happy, for example Generals 2 dev team was quite happy with what they were doing.

Please elaborate, as it uses the same control system as pretty much every RTS.

By definition, Betas are not feature complete. Features are still being added to the game.
As has been noted elsewhere, many high-profile game dev studios (eg. Blizzard) do not use the term "Beta" correctly - theirs are in fact balance testing and minor polish work, which is not what Beta means.

The developers of PA wrote most of the games that form the competition (at least within the sub-genre of RTS that PA is in).

Please elaborate, as it uses the same control system as pretty much every RTS.[/quote]

I think he means "Orders as First Class Entities"?
http://planetaryannihilation.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Orders_as_First-Class_Entities_(OFCEs)

That seems like THE biggest thing on the UI side.
Everything else can be probably moddeded in, except this would be integral to how everybody plays the game.

It's not really fair to compare anyone to Blizzard, I'm sure that as part of the huge budget they can afford for thier 3 titles they either have in-house QA or a big name QA contractor handling a lot of the actual Alpha and Beta builds that no consumer has ever seen.

Thats the Problem with most 'Betas' nowadays, they're nothing more than glorified Demos.

Mike

Except OAFCE are still just an added feature (not denying they would be awesome), and don't justify the statement that the controlling of units needs to be thought out entirely (which implies the current system is unworkable).

League of Legends, StarCraft 2, DOTA I mean there are a ton of games that play like this. They all are much more polished than this.

Of course its fair to compare them. They are both trying to make a AAA title right? Then it should be held to those standards. What about RIOT? Also an indy dev and they seem to handle a game like this just fine.

It does need to be reworked.
1. You have to right click to do an action but sometimes you don’t have to, which is confusing.
2. The orbiter rarely respond to commands.
3. Its unclear when you can drop a unit from the orbiter and when you can’t.
4. Jumping from a moon to a planet is clumsy at best and unworkable at worst. Have to zoom out then zoom in. And it doesn’t keep orientation.of the planet.
5. Centering on a unit does not really work sometimes it will center you on the unit but on the other side of the planet.
6. Selecting units via dragging a box only sometimes selects the one you want.
7. Selecting units in a control group is confusing. You cannot issue commands to the same unit type.
8. I feel like just clicking around the planet changes your orientation.

Thats just on controlling units. And thats just off the top of my head. I could go on and on about other interface issues that maybe will be address but it doesn’t seem like it will change much in a month. If this game was released in 2007 it would be acceptable but the bar has been raised and this does not meet it in the slightest. The entire join game system proves that by itself. Let alone the bugs, crashes and lag that are occurring. It’s really a mess. The state of the art has moved forward for RTS and it seems like the last one Uber played was Total Annihilation.

No it's really not, Blizzard has much more capital and manpower and and thus can spend a heck of a lot more time on thier 3 games. I don't see how they're comparable at all aside from your opinion of PA being an AAA game.

It really just comes down to how you define what exactly a AAA game is and if they makes it a fair metric for internal comparison.

Mike

DOTA and LOL aren't even the same genre. StarCraft 2 is arguable a different genre too (at least a different sub-genre).

Orders of magnitude difference in budgets says it's not fair to compare them. And aiming to be "AAA" doesn't mean anything. Game developers aim to make the best game they can within the constraints they have. However it's especially not fair to compare with Blizzard as they have yet to use the term "Beta" correctly when it comes to games.

I quote from wikipedia regarding the launch of LOL: "However, the game's confusing launch was criticized: it was felt that the title was released too early, with some features missing and others to be removed."

These aren't issues with the control system, they are bugs or still to be implemented features. You fix the bugs/add the features, you don't re-think the entire control system. You are also still not quite understanding that this is a Beta. Not a Blizzard Beta, but a real Beta. these and other issues will continue to be worked on and fixed.

I guess it was really a demo then if there was never any issues with unstable builds since that seemed to be a non-issue.

What he was saying that Blizzard sits on a throne made of cash and has dedicated teams and resources to fix any and all problems that arise.

It would be cool to see Uber compete with a AAA title... it would be like the New York Yankees competing against the Oakland A's. (its a monetary comparison *yankees paid roughly $1,380,162 per win while the A's paid $33,108)

101% agreed.

Absolutely agree on that, things can and will go bust during development.

OR they release a balanced and fun to play game. Whats the beta for? Just bug testing? I had some hope that the countless hours of beta beeing played could at least be used for setting a baseline at balancing and only fine tuning from there.
Balance in an RTS is, to me, something of very high importance not to be done as a small side task after release.

A release is feature complete and by the heap of things beeing off or missing the currently playable beta is quite far away from that.
Betas close to release should have all major features ready and somewhat working.

Blizzard, that ruined the Diablo series, nothing except big messups like EA compare to them. Having such huge ammounts of money and failing that hard, quite an achievement.
D3 is a good example as it also was an unfinished bugged release lacking balance. They obviously never really played that themselfes.

So a real beta is measured by how bugged and broken it is?
Early to mid - yeah they are whacky on all ends and crash, lag, bug around,.. whatever.
But once the show gets into a timeframe of around a month to release, in my uneducated opinion, it should look somewhat like a releaseable version.

And regarding units:
Huge armies need formations and advanced management, without that - one could consider it close to unworkable.