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

The influx of betas being paid to get in is just a by product of the times... If a developer can get pre orders locked in and have people want to play then they can monetize that market to spend towards development. I don't see it as a bad thing in ubers case since they haven't once mentioned a delay and mention the added funds help get new team members.

I only argue that this game shouldn't be compared to a starcraft 2 beta for two reasons

• They have had a ton of money to not only make an engine but do it twice and then start major development.
• They have had an overall longer design process.

With these two facts of course they can have a more polished beta filled with more features. However, even their game requires an inordinate amount of patching to figure out how to balance their units to this day.

I think its a little extreme to say uber has the funding to go another 2 years to just balance and tweak the game... With the budget they had and the time they have utilized, its quite amazing how fast this development has been. I wouldn't be surprised if they just needed 5 more months to finish development and have the game gold... Probably even less then that. I know people are concerned that the game isn't release ready in the next 2 months, but given ubers time line to develop and fix things, they can and will do their best to reach their mark.

But it does mean less people would care now that there wouldn't be that wait to get to play.

The only problem in getting in early, is the seeing the flaws in the game currently. Hopefully Uber plans on releasing a ton of crap within a few days though, because that will make those sparkly add ons seem that much better, by letting players compare that to "the way it used to be".

This is true, there is just about as much potential as there is work to be done. Upside is that more players is more bug reports etc and maybe more fixxes.

People need to chill with all the nerd rage. We're arguing about the definition of a fairly arbitrary label (does it really matter what WE think beta is?) and making all kinds of assumptions about the game.

Uber has more going on than any of us see. For example, every couple days Sorian tweets about some new trick he taught the AI. The UI needs work, Uber has a major rework in the pipeline that is much better, but it's not at the point where they want to release it to us (either it's missing features or is unstable or something). So while it looks like Uber has a long way to go, they are FAR closer than we realize because they have all the stuff in their local builds getting closer to being done, but not released because Uber wont give us flat out broken systems (I wonder why ). Telling Uber about an issue with the game is helpful, ranting about how the game is doomed because X is not done in the exact right way is not going to help.

And release dates, and delays! Uber is a bunch of rational grown ups, with no big publisher (And backers are contributors not investors, we don't get to make demands). So Uber will not release a game that is not done enough, and THEY are the ones that decide that, AND no one is going to force the release date. They will delay as long as they need to, and it's a silly point because right now anyone who preorders gets to play. Release only means the publishing of the server and the official reviews.

And I've said it before and I'll say it again, however obsessed you are with the game doing well, Uber is more obsessed. This is not just an awesome game to them, it's their livelihood and their baby.

So lets just chill

I want to jump in and say that, so far, I am in the "delay" camp. The game has come a long way, a very long way in the short time it's been in development. That said, there are still IMHO too many missing parts to be anywhere near release. Simple click+drag to select units often doesn't work. Assist orders to engineers are ignored 45% of the time. Orbital feels thrown in as another Air layer that doesn't offer much new. Going from planet to planet it cumbersome. Unit scale is waaaay too large, making even large planets feel tiny. I could go on and on, but I agree when people say this is more of a beta of the Engine rather than a beta of the game.

I don't doubt that Uber can, and will, deliver the game we all want, but I hope they take their time. As it stands now, I'd be very upset to see the present game with a couple more units released as the release version.

Neutrino stated the kickstarter money is merely a small part of its budget, if that's true, then PA doesn't have more contents, more detailed arts or better tuned mechanisms than some indie games with a budget much smaller than it.

But it does have a new engine, with pretty technical features, for a genre that doesn't come easy to indie up although it isn't too hard either.

That being said, people are underexaggerating how much is done.

Yeah which are made with off-the-shelf game engines which would never be able to handle PA like it is now...
I don't think you understand how much work it is writing such a thing.

I understand, that's why I said more than 70%.
But it's not worthy to invest in techs unless they provide enough potentials for more or better contents, and to achieve these potentials you might need more money than what you invested in the techs.

So, your saying that by not having high fidelity graphics, Uber is wasting 'potential'?

I don't see how that's the case, PA's Engine is remarkable for it's capabilities in regards to gameplay, fighting on spheres with huge armies and all that, PA's current Aesthetic doesn't really degrade the engine's capabilities at all and frankly the lower fidelity graphics actually help the Engine achieve it's goals, not hinder it.

Mike

Don't most high level players play on the most basic graphics anyway?

For like, any game?

Qwerty - Honest question. Are you aware of any engines out there that are being built to support:
- Up to 40 player RTS games
- No hard unit caps
- Procedurally generated planets (literally, endless content in terms of maps you can play on)
- Highly moddable once we release the server
- Windows, Mac and Linux compatible using OpenGL

I know of zero technology out there that could make the game we're trying to make - at least not without fundamentally re-writing large portions of those engines, which usually takes as much, if not more, time than building our own engine would have take to begin with.

Now, to be fair, I've only been doing this since 1997, but I hope I would have heard if someone already had the technology we're trying to make.

I don't mean to be snarky, but $2.2 million is actually a tiny budget by any normal gaming standards. The fact that the game isn't done yet in no way diminishes our plans to make this competitive with the best RTS games ever made. Most of the games in my own career, mostly working with publishers, have had budgets in the $8 million to $15 million range, with one or two insane outliers that ended up costing $40+ million. Indie doesn't mean what you think it means. It just means we're independent. Which means every cent of the overall budget, we're relying on our own ability to generate the revenue for - we don't have a publisher waiting in the wings who can bail us out if we waste any of that money ****ing around. So you better believe, we are highly motivated to make good use of every dollar we spend.

Hope this helps detail a little more in to what we're trying to do and how we're doing it. Please, ask more questions. I always feel like there are a lot of misconceptions about game development floating around, and especially what people think when they hear the word indie. It means a lot of different things, and putting too much weight on it does a disservice to ever company, large or small, trying to make games without publisher backing.

Well, I don't know if it's appropriate, but when you say 2,2 millions it's a little budget, I think to something else, do you think about a new extension ? With a new kickstarter or else campaign ?
I know developers will continue to follow their baby after the release, but how ?

"just ui"? I'm pretty sure if it was that easy, it'd be done by now.
What I've done is help compile the features, it was difficult for me since I'm not a dev who's done this for years.
I'd say that's the easiest part... it was time consuming but necessary grunt work.


All I've done is help build the yardstick to measure how the UI stacks up against the suggestions from the community.

Wll said Garat

From what I have seen since the start of Alpha, the devs are working hardcore to make this game happen. All you naysayers can go jump in the creek, until you have actually done similiar to what the PA devs are doing now...which you haven't, because this is currently a first in gaming history. I for one, am proud to be a part of it and I hope Uber need a big truck for all the money they make.

Cheerz.

Sales. A good game that gets content added to it along side modding and more will continue to sell.

Quality goes a long way.

Mike

What he said.

Uber doesn't have a publisher with their hands in the cookie jar.
Aside from sales cuts from other online stores, the profit is all theirs, forever and ever and ever...

I just bought another copy of TA on GoG...
If the game is worth it, they will still be making money from it a decade from now.

The simple fact that a real honest to goodness dev actually reads these forums and posts on them is enough reason to assuage nearly any fears I might have.

If they feel that delaying the release is necessary, then they probably will. If they don't, then they wont. Either way, we will get an amazing game. They are fully capable of judging the impact of a delayed release vs a lack of polish, assuming that there even exists a reason to delay by then.

I just downloaded the BETA and played my first match. I'm a backer but I never followed the live streams or watched the alpha. So this was really my first contact with this game after seeing the initial trailer.

I must say I'm quite disappointed. These are my impressions:

- Overall, the game feels unresponsive and laggy, its not always clear if an action took place or not sometimes.
- VFX, explosions, and particles effects look very very bad. Looks like they were made in Unity in a couple of hours by a beginner artist. And I'm not complaining about the cartoon look, its a matter of quality.
- I only tried the metal planet, and the unit navigation was clearly *broken* units got stuck all the time and moved in circles or not at all, and ruined the overall game experience.

Being a programmer myself, Im ok with the crashes, bugs and performance issues because its BETA. What Im really worried about is how the game feels at this point, which is the whole point of doing the public beta. Im new to the forum so I dont know how many times some of these issues were discussed, but I just wanted to give my first impression.