Today, I updated my Steam review for the game, and added some of my more recent concerns. I feel like reposting it here, with the intent of starting a discussion and/or getting an official response.
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+ The only game of it’s kind that’s not targeting kids
- Fun
- No microtransactions
- Updates
- One of the best devs I’ve ever seen
- One of the worst devs I’ve ever seen
Let me explain that last point. Imagine a group of friends working on a Gmod mod. The had worked on it for years, but recently, they hit Source’s (and Gmod’s) limits, meaning they can’t progress anymore. They come up with a solution- instead of moving on, they’re going to make the mod into it’s own game.
While the initial Kickstarter campaign fails, the following Indiegogo one succeeds and the game enters development. As I said, the devs worked on the mod in their free time for years and with little to no repayment. They’re all very nice people who often interact with the community and seemingly love their work.
The problem is… their development schedule. You see, the way their company functions is… strange. Every developer gets to work on what they currently feel like working on. Projects gets started and stopped. The priorities are often wrong, unimportant stuff, gimmicks, and things no-one cares about get worked on before the features most of the community wants. Time and money are wasted on what quite frankly seem to be the devs’ personal projects put into the game. Many devs have multiple projects they jump between. Big features needing most of the team almost never get worked on, since everyone’s doing their own thing. Updates are few and far between. New moneysinks and things to save money for are rarely added.
All of this hurts the community and the game as a whole. According to SteamSpy, about 145,000 people own it, but there are only ever about 300 players online. I want to love this game and I have great expectations for its future, but watching the development slowly kills me inside.
Examples to back my claims:
-Fishing (started, stopped, started over from scratch, stopped, started)
-The rollercoaster (Literally a one-time gimmick. You sit in it and watch your character have fun. The head dev claims it had to be made due to it being an Indiegogo promise, but there are many other such promises that don’t get worked on)
-The laser projector (One of these “personal projects” I mentioned. It’s a programmable laser projector. You can do really cool stuff with it, but it’s something almost no-one uses. One of the programmers worked on it for quite some time, too.)
-Project 39 (A “community condo” map. It was blocked out and left at that.)
-Planet Panic (A crappy, unfinished gamemode that I to this day think got released only to have the promised 4 gameworls “ready” for early access.)
-Containership (A map for a gameworld that’s not even started development)
-Virus weapons (A number of weapons for a gamemode called “Virus”. About three are very high-quality, about two are ok and the rest are crap. They only get worked on when a dev feels like going back and remodelling one, so the arsenal’s in this weird development limbo.)
-Weather affecting surfaces (Like snow covering the ground, or rain making everything wet. This was shown on a development stream quite a while ago, but it never got implemented.)
-The Arcade (One of the most anticipated features, according to votes on the official Trello page. Again, it only gets worked on when someone feels like it, which is not enough for such a big feature)
-The monorail (A small train that goes between two points of the main plaza. Literally no-one uses or cares about it.)
-The problems with the casino’s anti-afk system (They’ve been around for a while, and considering that the casino is the game’s most popular feature, should be a priority.)
-Really, any feature being developed