[2012] TotalBiscuit Interview with PA Devs [2012]

You talk about people 'dumb' enough to make slow maps, however the performance characteristics have not been made clear. Mavor has spoken about not having limits on the planet sizes, and the Uber in general have spoken about this being an 'Epic RTS'. It's limitations have been less well publicised by Uber. It should not be up to the user of the game to understand what will make the game unbearably slow, when they are presented with various options that don't give that warning. Someone told me that a size > 800 planet will lag, but 800m is neither a big radius or diameter for a planet. People should not be considered dumb for assuming it will run fine on a planet of that kind of size (or even a lot larger) when they have heard Mavor talking about his vision for a game performing smoothly on a massive scale, then Uber say they have realised this vision in the 'release' version of the game.

The pathfinding is still seriously flawed (or at lease was seriously flawed a couple of days ago). I had lots of fabs building a bunch of factories in a line. Quite a lot of them got stuck behind a factory they had completed, and did not get to the position where they could build the next factory.

The problem is that once the abstract monniker called 'released' gets slapped onto something, there are certain expectations that come along with that label.
Such as finished product, no more mayor development (short of patches/bugfixes), all mayor features present.

And while I and many people on this forum know (or expect, or hope: I'm hoping) that this isn't the case here. It's hard to to blame people for not knowing. These are industry expectations, by developers, publishers and consumers. And with each passing day after release I find it harder and harder to justify defending Uber.

Don't get me wrong I love PA. But I think slapping the release label onto it was a poor call. Since what is basically announced to the world is that (true or not) Uber is done developing PA.

(Disclaimer, I don't know what was going on in the offices, I don't know the financial state of Uber, I don't know anything of their internal workings. All I know is what I see, and what is announced to us. And for the consumers not on the Uber forum, that's just really little.)

Release = done is a horrible definition that's just wrong for PA and for most games in general. Release is a meaningless word to what PA is or will become.

That definition died when the Internet Age was born.

But now we have patches.

I'm not disagreeing with 'released' being a horribly abstract and ultimately meaningless definition.

But this doesn't mean that this word doesn't carry a lot of meaning for a lot of people. Or puts a lot of expectations into the minds of those people.

Edit:
Also 'released' gives free reign to reviewers and critics to approach your game as a finished product and review/critique it as such. Uselessly abstract definition notwithstanding.

How much spare money do they have to put into this game? They said multiple times now that 2.2 million was not much for such a project...
If they worked with 30 people on this game for 2 years? Thats something like 6 million dollars.

In addition, how much money will they keep as profit for beeing able to start their next project? Are they already working on their next game? Do you think pa sells well enough to justify ongoing developement?

Yeah from the company size that kind of money has been spent by now probably.
I do know that Ubers plans for PA are much bigger(especially in terms of modability and long term revenue generation) than what we currently see and the plan is to reinvest every $ from PA sales back into PA. There is no project after PA in the foreseeable future.
What we also know is that Uber hired more people after sales were good and that they moved to a bigger office just recently. Really nothing looks like they are running out of money.

That may be true on a technical level, but think about it, it might be easy for us on the forum and maybe on reddit(lots of crossover) to understand that, but as per Uber, we are a tiny minority of the overall player base and not even really the "Target Demographic" as it were either. Which makes it really odd that Uber haven't done anything to communicate this method to anyone else. For me this makes it very hard to side with Uber on this because aside from the occasional forum post here and there to re-enforce it there isn't anything else from them.

On top of that, I don't agree with the idea of using "Release is only an arbitrary point in PA's Development" as the reasoning behind a release like this, especially following on the comments of "We're releasing PA when it's done." from Uber. I'd have expected PA's release, while not Feature complete, as least having what was there polished to provide a solid release.

Mike

I agree with that actually, Uber did make some mistakes in terms of communicating why to release now imho. Though I am not in a position to judge why that did it, I am sure they had their reasons.
But all we can do now is to accept this has happened and realize that it's all just words and nothing really changed, development continues and PA is still on course to become much more than it is today.

My comment about maps was more related to orbital scenarios... What I mean is if you design a map with 2 large, high mex planets on separate orbits you can create an orbital stalemate from the start...

Lower metal output planets that orbit each other and have a few small moons play much better. The problem is conveying the mechanics of orbital isn't easy... As for planet size, well r800 is very much playable, I have an r800 planet I use loads and its fine. R1200 is feasible too provided you have the ram. The issue is people don't understand the memory implications so build 12 planet systems with multiple r1200 planets and wonder why they can't load it.

Edit, I have suggested in the past that uber implement a system to indicate memory requirements for different maps, as if a map is larger than the available memory it's just miserable waiting for ages whilst it writes it to the page file...

Edit edit, that path bug isn't something I've run into recently. Any chance you could find the lobby id? Might be worth mentioning to uber... Also I think fabbers may be dealt with differently to other units in terms of pathing...

Personally, I don't understand how any of you can be so confident that PA is going to continue development all that much. We've seen time and time again game shops close up not long after they release a game that doesn't review well or generate strong sales. Hell, it's even difficult to stay above water financially when your games do sell well but not *exceptional*.

You can see from the Steam best seller lists - which let's be completely honest, is the strongest indicator one can have as to overall sales bar having the exact numbers; developers have repeatedly confirmed this - that Planetary Annihilation is not selling well. Regardless of Uber's long term plans, they practically have no other sources of income besides this game. No sales = no money to keep developers employed = no more updates. Wishful thinking doesn't change the reality that PA has bombed on launch and will require a hail mary to live beyond the next six months.

As I said, if you guys are fine with this, that's good for you.

Personally I have an different opinion. It should be fine as well.

Pa has been at the top of best sellers after each major update... I don't think it's as bad as that. Also they can do allot in 6 months... Pa has been built with longevity in mind, a big part of that being its extensive mod support. At some stage uber will have to hand over to the modders, I guess sales will determine if that's in 6 months or 2 years... Still in either scenario it doesn't mean the end (similar to ta if you think back).

That's so BS. PA is a video game not the next vaccine against Ebola. No one is gonna die if features will be released later than expected.

The real issue is that we are left in the dark since day one. Telling us "soon", it's not how communication should be handled about a product that have been pre-sold to customers.

It's so simple that hurts. How's that that's so difficult for some to understand?

I'm sorry, but that's what's happened every time they give a date, people got really mad when they couldn't make it. The easiest proof?

Erm well... For quite a while they thought offline would be at release, turns out it's still just not ready. Guess what? Everyone exploded.

Any source about Uber publishing a releasing date for any feature, or a more or less precise roadmap in the last two years?

http://www.reddit.com/r/planetaryannihilation/comments/2hh2o7/player_base/

What exactly does that have to do with anything?

You just asked for a link where they said something about when a feature would be complete, shortly is pretty subjective I suppose, but it still fits the criteria.

Define shortly after. Can you? Otherwise is just as good as soon, and soon in matter of timeframe really means nothing at all.