Geothermal Plants and Liquid Metal Processing Mines

Really? I don't remember that, if you could link it I think more recent discussions on the unit cannon have suggested it's further away than that however would be great if Uber prove me wrong on that one!

I don't think that's the case. Uber have to balance their priorities not only in terms of what is best for the game, but also in terms of the cost of implementation. I can imagine that gas giants are a fairly 'easy' thing to do - mainly additional artwork.

Offline play and 40-person games are much more technically involved, and I imagine involve many more man-hours.

Really? You're going to take a quick answer to a Q&A at the start of alpha as a promise? That sort of attitude severely discourages any red names from posting on this forum.

On the one hand we all want more openness from Uber and more communication, and we all love it when Jon goes on one of his epic posting sprees, but making statements like that is only going to convince them not to put anything in writing ever.

That was an older thread from before the whole unit cannon debacle, so don't get your hopes up.
Just wanted to point out that is was clearly said at one point.

Yes I absolutely do.

Despite everything I just said about why that's an incredibly counter-productive attitude to have?

In all honesty the key point here is what Ace63 intends to do in the event that this 'promise' isn't met?

I think we're all of the same understanding that the Unit Cannon in 1.0 is extremely unlikely, now at the point this is confirmed (i.e. we get 1.0 in hand to play with) we can either:

1: Throw our arms in the air and start complaining about everything that we perceive as missing or
preferably

2: Really get to grips with the first retail version and enjoy it, give Uber a bit of a break (as they will have been working really hard to get this out the door) and then provide positive and constructive feedback to help them prioritise what to do next once the dust has had time to settle.

Personally I intend to be in the second camp....

Now what could I do? I already paid a lot of money for the game - it's gone and won't return.

Don't get me wrong, I don't care when a feature arrives. I just want it to arrive at all.
I can easily see a scenario where the game is released in it's current state and fails because there are tons of promised features missing. In this case all further development would be in limbo and we might not see any additional features at all.
Now I would certainly not go around telling everybody how stupid this game and company are - I'd still have hopes for continued development- but Uber's reputation is in severe danger if they release the game like this and people realise about the missing stuff.

In the end they promised way too much for this timeframe and budget and sent people's expectations skyrocketing.
Lets hope the backlash (if any, who knows at this point?) won't be too harsh.

Well I'm not sure it's as much of a problem as all that. The 'promises' you speak about are really only relevant to the Kickstarter backers.

What is important is that when they officially release the game, the game gives the players who buy it what it *says at time of purchase*. Now I'll note that Uber have been updating their info lately to better reflect the *actual state of the game* rather than the *long term design goals*.

Thing is on release a load of players are going to get access to the game who may never have heard of it before, anyone who has followed the project closely is probably aware of the issues anyway.

Reviewers may be a problem if they decide to attack they do have things they can go on, although I actually think with a bit more tweaking (mainly relating to performance / stability) the game does stand up quite well in it's own right now. I think TotalBiscuit will rip it to shreds, but then that's what he always does. Hopefully other reviewers will be a bit more objective

Ah TB and his super bias.

Personally, I feel exactly the same way. Will I bitch a fit about it over the forums? Not likely. It's a feature that was cut and there's been many, many statements made by the userbase and the devs about it. Was it a promised feature? Yes it was. We simply know it likely won't make it on launch. Such is game development. It's understandable. I won't fault anyone for being mad that it wasn't there on release, but I also won't be joining anyone in their pitchfork-raising mobs.

Not unless it's permanently removed from ever being released on the game ever. At that point, I might have something to say.

Edit :
Also, to stay on the topic of the thread, I'm hoping both items in the OP are added and explored. Geothermal was awesome in TA, and I'm looking forward to seeing how the other side of the spectrum will change gameplay.

Geothermal would be cool, and I'm all for it, but it could potentially be a balance nightmare. With the prior games the geothermal locations were balanced and I liked for instance the idea of having multiple teams fighting over a resource rich part of the map in the centre.

However, with maps and spawns being random I envisage any implementation of geothermal would just make things uneven and when you look back at the replay you'll be saying "He won simply because he had a geothermal vent in his base".

Of course, if you nerf them to counteract this then they would be useless, and if you made them as common as mass spots some interestingness would no doubt occur but it would probably go against the fundamental design of the resource model.

I'm a little confused and perhaps i'm missing something. But under kickerstater rules and regulations, isn't uber legally required to deliever on all of their promises and features, including stretch goals, upon the games completion? Which would be 1.0, not later when and if they feel like it? Otherwise couldn't any company indefinitely sit on a ks project or promised features under the guise 'soon', 'still in progress', or dukenukemforever 2.0, ect.

I'm not saying grab your pitchforks if features are missing at release. But I am curious on how a situation like this is handled. Because I feel like they're going to be a large number of complaints come 1.0.

From my understanding they aren't really required due to the risk nature of Kickstarter.

Uber could close up shop and walk away and be just fine.

They wouldn't, but they could.

Plenty of other Kickstarted games and products have done just that.

Please come on, don't you think they, at Uber, are not already doing their best for releasing this game? Don't you think it's not enough having trollers talking about currently missing features on the forum all the day, to remind them their initial promises?

Even if we actually paid for this game, you got a far better game that any game you could ever expect in your best dreams, so please admit it, enjoy the game, and stop crying. With such "thankful" members in the community, I would be tempted as Uber, as said earlier, to release a buggy game with no other future improvements... But, as money is king, you would be forced to release the game, with minor promised requirements, no more, no less.

Please be more constructive and positive!

So, I wanted to take some time to address this sort of thing generally since the thread is turning this way.

As a supporters, backers, and friends you've had the unique opportunity to see a game coming together and helping us build it, too. An integral part of the creative process is imagination. Early during development, we looked towards the stars and openly wondered what was possible. You got to hear all these early ideas, see them evolve into better ones, and then become actual living things in the game. That's incredibly special, I think, and it was cool to do it alongside you. We wouldn't trade it for anything.

On the other hand, sometimes these ideas didn't pan out as we imagined them. Either the idea ended up being bad for the game or the idea had to be prioritized differently as a result of something else more important requiring more attention. We're a small dev, so it's not like we have unlimited bodies to throw at problems. We have to be able to stay nimble and be efficient in order to deliver the best game possible.

The Unit Cannon is a great example of an idea that we had to prioritize differently in service of making a more fleshed out and fun game. Will we add it later? We'd love to. It's obvious our community wants it, so of course we're always thinking about it. But, production realities set in and changed our perspective when it came to implementation and design.

Most of the time when you see a new game, or a game gets announced, the feature set is, well, set. You didn't get the opportunity to hear the game's devs talking about all the great stuff they wanted to implement but couldn't. You didn't get to share! Or even get to hear the pitch. I mean, just think of all the potential heartbreak out there, all of those missing features that you haven't heard about in your favorite games but could have if it was being built in front of you for over two years. It's kinda maddening.

And, look, I totally get it. It sucks when we don't get something in. We want to get all our ideas in -- and we plan to support Planetary Annihilation well down the road.

Wow. That is a really well written response. I'm going to bookmark this so that I can point people to it in the future instead of trying to say it all myself.

I totally agree and support this.

Game development is fluid. Not all ideas pan out and actually work in implementation.

Well the disapointments probably comes from the fact that we have put lots of hope in very cool features and we did not figure out it could happen that they are simply discarded or limited in such a way it's not that awesome we expected them to be.

- Unit Canon : Come on, It really made the kickstarter trailer very appealling .... So exciting weapon ....... and .... nothing.
- Biomes : So exciting when we saw the first concept art, and apart from ice and metal planet, it's hard to match concept art and current biomes for earth/desert/lava planets : We're not art designers , nor coders, so basically, there's no way for us to know until which degree of complexity final biomes can match concept art. There's one thing for sure, it's not so obvious to many of us that so much stuff has been put in place for earth/desert/lava planet (I'm not talking about the procedural generation, but definitly about variety of brushes et arts).
- Planets being procedurally generated : So exciting, but in the end it's hard to generate very different planets we can recognize among others. And in addition, no way to take advantage of terrain height.
- Then you simply remove wreckage. Man we're not that idiot. Why not simply say it brings too much complexitiy and that according to your current schedulle, it will have to be delayed ? a complex issue resulting in giving up !!!!! And you dare to say you're the right team ? To me the right team is also able to recognize that something gets too much complex and is delayed for later. But not justifying it's useless so that it's discarded.

This might sounds like details for a few people, but for many of us, these things being addressed would make the game as awesome as it was promised to be.

Don't get me wrong, we all know you're putting lots of efforts, but at some point we feel disapointed not having all this right now. And when you use "conditional" statements (for example regarding the unit canon), it usually means to us : Well it will probably never come. Probably because over 2 years we've been used to this .

Perhaps Uber went to just simply way too high for goals in the original kickstarter plan because a lot of it feels like it is so below the expectations of what was described in the original kickstarter and this thread yet another great spot by brianpurkiss again is not in the game still. The lava planets I have talked about very early since alpha and so tired of the lack of response I have actually given up on lava and general biome improvements all together really. Maybe we'll get some stuff added back in next year some time but Liquid processing mines? sounds so awesome... errrr where are they? lol...

Going under the impression of what I had to go on when I actually paid for this game I was so excited for this game, it was going to be the replacement for supreme commander and commander and conquer series for me but as we edge a little closer game in general just feels so under-whelmed at this point it still feels like they are going to release it in this state which still feels like beta really. If the game wasn't going to implement proper lava trenches, or the ability to play offline mode at launch, asteroids, the massively awesome biomes like real canyons to fight and create choke points in the gameplay, laying buildings and turrets on top of higher ridges ect.. I probably would not have ordered this game quite so early if half the stuff from the kickstarter was never going to be implemented to the level that was originally described. If it was technically too difficult for some of this stuff, then perhaps it should never have been in the original kickstarter to start with? and figure this sort of technical stuff out before you put out press releases guaranteeing this stuff that can never be done?

This is still early access and so much room even after launch and as far as early access games go this is probably one of the best games that has ever been in early access and Uber definitely have been open, and invited us to be part of the development of the game (tho sometimes feels like we're not more often then we are). There are just certain things that a lot of people feel let down by and thats where a lot of the criticism comes from lately, I'm thinking perhaps so much time has been spent on unit balance, that perhaps far too much time was spent on just that over the last 3 months that everything else got put on the back burner and now we have a game where the rest of the features feel half finished at this point.

My hope is by 2015 we will get the game that was promised in the original kickstarter. Cannot see us getting that game anytime this year not at the current rate of development speed.