Review of a unfinsihed game?

BadVoltage

Join Date 06/2015

Review of a unfinsihed game?

In reading this forum, it seems the devs / stardock staff go out of their way to try to get "better" reviews or counter their perceived "low" reviews scores without looking at what pretty much all those reviews are saying. Looking at http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/ashes-of-the-singularity for user reviews, it pretty much shows that, AotS is a average game.

At this point in time, the game shouldn't be getting anything higher than a average rating, which is backed up with most user reviews that I have seen on this forum, and others.

It was released too early, and screams of being unfinished.

The biggest selling point was that it is one of the first DX12 games, and people so much wanted to see what DX12 is capable of.

Take that away, and you are left with scratching your head. As a tech demo/benchmark, it is pretty darn good!

The campaign game is just not working. There is no real story telling, no way to immerse yourself into the game. When you look at the buildings and units, nothing really stands out about them, and have that overall generic look to everything. The explosions are dull & bland, the textures are bland as well, and this also applies to the terrain textures. Where are the environmental effects, the day/night cycles? What about terrain features? Nothing can deform the terrain either, not even a hint that something happened there. Is everything just barren land? The same goes with the sound cues, boring, hard to understand, and way too repetitive. Yes, I understand that these issues should (will?) be fixed with proper voice overs, and a revamp of the campaign at sometime in the future, but, that only proves my point in that it was released too early.

The UI interface itself is just not customizable enough. The only option there is, is scale, and that is done in an odd way. Instead of using truetype fonts where there will be little if any degradation in quality, it seems it is currently vector based, or is resampling down very poorly. Why not offer sliders like what browsers do when you have more information than can be displayed?

The sound controls are odd, why is the voice tied to music? They need to be split apart.

The mouse cursor itself tends to get lost in all the action, so you spend lots of time trying to find it again.

How about the current units available? The selection is minuscule compared to other titles out there, and why is it you can't design your own as was done in another RTS game (Warzone 2100)?

The amount of support structures is also limited to just a few. You can't even build walls or anything of that nature. No mines, no VTOLs.

I could go on, but, I think I have made my point.

Creating your own maps is a very difficult process, as you need a machine with insane amounts of RAM to get it working correctly.

On the modding side, I suppose a SDK of some type will be released at some point, so, can't really comment on that.

For those of us who could care less about MP games (way too many obnoxious, foul mouth brats out there), this game just doesn't offer anything new that other RTS games haven't done before, (with the exception of having a ton of units).

I know the fanboys will throw a hissy fit over this, but sorry, I call them like I see them, and I have been played pretty much all RTS games ever made as was shown in another post https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_real-time_strategy_video_games

Thus, I don't see how it is possible to review something that isn't finished, and from looking at the roadmap, won't be finished until sometime in '17, without giving it a well deserved average score.

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Ticktoc

Join Date 03/2015

+85

Quoting psychoak,

reply 20

When you live and die by your metacritic/steam review aggregate, spending twice as much money to get a 90 average instead of the mid 70's isn't a bad investment. You guys barely hit the top ten with Ashes, it's so not cool when it deserves to sell way better than it is.

So if they have a $3m budget for the game then they just double that to $6m? How does an indepentent studio do that? Borrow a massive amount of money? They could possibly do that but then what if the game doesn't sell well? Unless you're Starcraft or another well establish game series then RTS numbers are not that high. So now you have to sell the company or its assets to pay back the loan which didn't pay for itself. As the CEO you now have to call the staff into your room and say you have to let them go. I am also in my 30s and have seen successful game companies go under because of one expensive flop. I submit that Stardock has outlasted them all for the very fact they they stick to reasonable budgets that they can afford.

Quoting psychoak,

reply 20

And Supreme Commander lost millions of dollars and GPG is gone.

The days of the $20 million RTS game are long long gone. Ashes doesn't have the scope of SupCom did because it had 1/7th its budget. But that doesn't mean it's not finished. It just means that it will take time and money for Ashes to evolve into whatever it is to become over the next several years.

Going bankrupt several years later after a string of flops, including the sequel, doesn't really apply to Supreme Commander, which did better than a million copies. I'm not expecting Ashes to manage that.

They were so strapped for cash I believe they had to surrender the rights to the Supreme Commander name with SC2 so making a loss on SC was in fact a mighty blow that lost them any strong bargaining position and losing their IP, which is a huge thing in business.

Quoting psychoak,

reply 20

Unfortunately, if we had shipped a game as you describe, we'd be talking about massive layoffs because no PC game can justify the budget you speak of to deliver the ideal game you speak of.

If you had waited until summer and released with your deluxe campaign, which you're clearly paying for and implementing regardless, most of the bombed reviews would be much better. They don't care about your development model. They ignore you while you're in beta, and they'll continue to ignore you six months from now when they'd rate you in the 90's if you were releasing the game as it will be then. I'm not seeing any monumental cost increase here, just a steep hit to your sales because half the reviewers are bombing you over the campaign.

I believe summer is well known for being a bad time to release games, especially new IP.

Quoting psychoak,

reply 20

The basic problem in this discussion is that you are assuming we lack the imagination or design capability to deliver this ideal game you want.

Patience, actually. Based on your previous entries and the reasons reviewers are giving, I figure another three months and you'd be riding high 80's, six and you'd still be in the top ten at this point with most reviews being 90 plus. My depression is over your results, not your end product which will surely be fantastic, and played by a small fraction of the people it could have...

No, not patience, budget. Time = money.

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Quoting Frogboy,

reply 25

To get an "overwhelmingly positive" rating (and you do want that right?) you can't just be the best RTS, you have to try to be one of the best games ever. Ashes has the bones to be top notch amongst all games, and I fear you are aiming low hoping just to be the best RTS game, which in today's field is like saying you hope to be the best Dodge (zing). If I have $50 to spend on a single game of any genre, I'm going to try to find the one that offers the highest degree of fun. Do you want me to buy Ashes with my $50? Then make it the game in all genres amongst the highest degree of fun. That's a high bar, I know. But if Factorio and Undertale can do it, why not you?

(from Eviator)

Just to emphasize this point: I agree with your earlier break down of the pros and cons you listed.

To answer your specific question here:

The reason is the genre, budget, and price. First, price is a huge factor. If you're $20 most people will let it slide. Have you played Factorio? While I personally like it, if it had been priced at $49.99 it would have gotten murdered in reviews. Should Ashes have been priced at $19.99? Who can say. HomeWorld: DOK is $49.99 and has a higher review score than Ashes and Ashes will pass it in sales probably the end of Summer.

In short, new engines are hard. New IP is hard. Putting them together is super hard. Petrologlyph is releasing a new RTS today (8 bit armies). It's the Nth RTS they've done with that engine and they're pricing it at $14.99. We'll be watching closely to see how they do.

tbh. i dont take 8 bit armies serious

it just seems like a one man project, a homage to C&C, it adds absolutely nothing new or better to the genre

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eviator

Join Date 08/2014

+62

Quoting Frogboy,

reply 25

The reason is the genre, budget, and price. First, price is a huge factor. If you're $20 most people will let it slide. Have you played Factorio? While I personally like it, if it had been priced at $49.99 it would have gotten murdered in reviews.

I hadn't considered this. Now your earlier comment that you wish Ashes was $39.99 makes sense, and I agree. That feels like the correct price point. Thanks for your response.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2317

Quoting eviator,

reply 28

Quoting Frogboy,

reply 25

I hadn't considered this. Now your earlier comment that you wish Ashes was $39.99 makes sense, and I agree. That feels like the correct price point. Thanks for your response.

I appreciate your comments and responses.

When making a modern game, there are so many variables involved, especially new IP. I have a really really long gamasutra article coming up that will go into extensive depth on these things.

For example, when we budgeted Ashes, I didn't expect the game to be successful at all. It was funded so that Stardock would have access to a 4th generation game engine for future games like Star Control and other titles we have in development that are using it.

Remember, when we started Ashes there was no DirectX 12 or Mantle.

It wasn't until last Summer that we realized that Ashes was turning into an actual, pretty damn good game. But it was all theory craft until then.

Contrast that to say Offworld Trading Company. It was a fully playable, fun game a year ago. It gets released next week and it has both a bigger budget and bigger staff than Ashes had and has been prototyped over a period of 8 years.

Game development is our business. We have finite resources and have to make our best guesses on how much money something is likely to make. Offworld Trading Company will be the 5th 1.0 game I've shipped in the last year. And in recent history, the most polished one, Sorcerer King, is by far, the weakest one.

Now, I'll put out there that Offworld Trading Company is the best game we've ever released. It's the game that has every checkbox you guys mention in it. $39.99, great campaign, great single player, great UI, truly unique, low system requirements, super fun, good multiplayer, weekly challenge modes, etc. And it'll probably end up with an amazing metacritic score.

OTC was our "safe bet" and Ashes was our "risky bet". And we budgeted accordingly.

Now that Ashes is out and successful, we can iterate on it. If people are currently turned off by it for some reason, that's fine. There's always sequels or what have you. Unless someone else shows up with a next generation RTS engine, it's unlikely anything is going to overtake it.

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Quoting Frogboy,

reply 29

does that mean you are already thinking about a sequel?

if yes, this would be bad, Ashes is far from beeing as amazing as i want it to be

(please dont abandon the game too early like so many other developers do)

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psychoak

Join Date 07/2007

+225

And: You are moving the goal posts. None of your arguments indicate that Ashes was unfinished.

I'm not the OP. He's quite critical of a variety of things that I don't see as being important, nor indicative of whether a game is finished or not.

Will Ashes sell a million copies over time? Who knows. What I do know is that it will make a profit which will allow us to keep working on it -- despite the implication by you that we should just give up on it (unless you're just trying to be a demoralizing for the sake of being demoralizing).

I made no implication, I stated, quite clearly I thought, that I saw two problems which were hurting your review scores. I am assuming, since this will be a commercial success even with half the reviewers tanking you somewhat unfairly, that you plan on continuing to create and release video games, and I think your iterative development methods do you an injustice in today's media environment where pretty much everyone reviews major releases in the first few days of release, and then ignores them completely afterwards. You're not stuck in the retail environment, where all the money is made right after release, but you're still stuck with the reviews. The reviews are demoralizing...

I believe summer is well known for being a bad time to release games, especially new IP.

No worse than Spring. Late fall is the only "good" time for game sales, just like any other entertainment, you get a massive Christmas boost.

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Ticktoc

Join Date 03/2015

+85

Ha, so many replies while I wrote mine and since. I agree the pricing should have been £30 instead of £40, or the equivalent in $ you guys mention. It would likely have lead to noticeably more sales. But who knows, perhaps the weaker campaign would have meant a lot more negative reviews leading to worse long term sales. So making a push for further sales once the improved campaign is done, along with all the patching etc. done in the meantime, may in fact garner similar sales but with better user reviews. Even hindsight does not really give you 20/20 vision.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2317

Quoting psychoak,

reply 31

No worse than Spring. Late fall is the only "good" time for game sales, just like any other entertainment, you get a massive Christmas boost.

Unless you've run a game company, you really should refrain from making comments like this.

June and July are utterly dead months. Dead.

If I had a time machine and saw that people wanted more campaign content with VO, I would have moved the date to May to deliver that.

The reviewers who have given Ashes less than a 70 have no demoralizing impact on us. I just think of them as too dumb to be reviewing games and will avoid them in the future. This forum gets more hits than most of these sites. Seriously. Thus, they aren't really of value to us and can only harm us in the future.

For all I know, half these guys have some boner with us because of #gamergate. I've seen sites that have given HW:DOK a 90 and the same guy gives us a 60. My take away isn't that that reviewer has something valuable to contribute. It's that they have no business reviewing games and should get back to their classes.

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Quoting Frogboy,

reply 22

Most of the things listed are not unique to AotS though,

I take the time to list 10 unique things about Ashes and your response is to hand wave those things away? I'm done talking to you.

But, they were not unique, that was my point, the games I listed have every single one of the items you posted except for the eye-candy item, fine, you may not have played any of those, and you may not believe me, but, apart from you actually playing those games, I don't know how to convince you otherwise. Nothing that I have said is inaccurate, and unfortunately, you chose to gloss over what I actually write, both responding to the items you posted, and the OP.

As I said, I am not trying to be mean or anything, the game has sold ~50K+ copies, which is pretty good, and only a small fraction of those translate to the MP side of things which seems to be the main focus in these forums, the rest are pretty much all SP users. That isn't a bad thing by itself, and lots of people are waiting for the reworked campaign which will hopefully fix the issues mentioned in the OP, and bump up the user reviews. I know I haven't posted a review in the Steam / metacritic review section, and, am willing to wait for the game to be finished in order to do a proper review of the full game.

As it stands now, when my friends ask me how the game is, I am honest about it, it just is unfinished for what we are looking for. When they come over to play a LAN game with some other RTS games, I do show them AotS, and pretty much universally, they all say they won't buy the game at this point in time. (Yes, I said LAN game, I know that is another one of those evil terms that nobody likes these days except for users, but, it IS a blast, and doesn't require external interruptions!)

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@bad voltage..the game is complete..just because your opinion warrants more content..it doesn't make it incomplete...i believe it has been stated even the campaign was an after thought...games have done well without a campaign anyways...and if you have followed this game or even know stardocks business model...them adding a third race..naval and other stuff...doesn't make the game "complete" just expanding it even more...i personally think ashes is ok..but with the support it will get..it will become epic...when sins of the solar empire came out..i thought it was just ok also...now with all the stuff added..basically a diff game...and my favorite game that i always play...and it has sold very well..but i suspect not at first..this is why i became a lifetime founder because i see the untapped potential that this game has...and they will tap that potential..i still have a lot of fun playing ashes thou with my friends, and i have recommended it to my sins buddies which they agree also.

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