Detailing secret features before release ruins the wonder and excitement of discovery. If I have any sway as a long time backer, this is where I am putting my foot down and saying ***NO!***.
#Absolutely do not spoil secrets before release!
If it’s a major and mundane game mechanic, sure, we need details on that. But if it’s something new that sets Boundless apart from other games in the genre, give us the sense of mystery and let us discover what we can, if only for a week or two.
I will be accepting any hate mail, rage replies, or butt-hurt comments that anybody wants to hurl at me. I like seeing my inbox light up, and then ignoring it.
This is my wooden axe campaign! (Turns wooden axe sideways and writes on it like a protest sign, SPOIL-ME-NOT!)
Well, its not like anybody is asking them to share detailed numbers and crafting recipes of new stuff.
But giving us a general overview of what is about to hit us sounds quite reasonable to me.
Especially since it allows them to make changes based on feedback before a lot of work is put into it.
(Remember when @olliepurkiss confidently shared his first-pass guild concept which wouldn’t have allowed us leave a guild once entered? And how like 99% of the community was against that idea? Luckily he shared it when it was just in a concept state, not in an almost-ready-to-be-released state)
And if you dont’t even like that, well , then there is still a spoiler function james can use in his devlog
i don’t understand what the fuss about update features that’s not detailed before the update, you need to be more patient since that is the main key for us testers. we can’t test updates anyways before its released in game.
Another voice for the 'I’m happier when there are still a few pleasant surprises" camp. I like to know roughly where things are headed, but adding something unexpected is welcome (unless it’s a terrible, terrible secret idea. Then it’s never welcome, and I shall stamp my feet and whine about it a lot).
Admittedly it’s a very difficult area to manage, not least of which because managing other peoples expectations is practically a full time job in itself. Release too little information and people feel like nothing is getting done. Release too much information and people don’t get excited enough when it eventually does arrive to go and check it out, resulting in a lot less people testing and reporting bugs than you could have had. They’re basically screwed whichever approach they take. There’s probably a sweet spot somewhere in the middle of that, but it’s a moving target and even just releasing secretive snippets requires ongoing community engagement to build expectations while also keeping them realistic.
I think that given the amount of time they appear to be able to devote to posting things on the forums (being a small team really sucks for finding time to do this stuff, let alone doing it well), they’re doing just fine. Mostly we know about things. This upcoming stuff will probably be a nice surprise. Even if it’s not a nice surprise, as pointed out earlier in this thread, it’s still pre-alpha. It’s something that (despite making it a bit of a waste of precious dev-time) isn’t set in stone and can be changed. Either way, I’m more excited about it because I don’t know exactly what it is than I would be if I had it all laid out before me as a forum post.
First of all it’s important to say that discussing “game-mechanic” and “game-play” is hardly a “spioler of all secrets ingame”. If we talk about features it’s most likely that they are not brand new and that most players know the concept from a lot of games (e.g. @Vastar argument with the initial guild idea. Leaving guilds is not a new concept, but the original idea for B< was a horrible idea [sorry @olliepurkiss])
This is the core problem - We need details about major game features and game mechanics but unfortunalty we haven’t got a lot in all the time. The devs stoped answer the FAQ thread AGAIN (and most of the answers are insufficient - especially the answer for end-game-content)
It’s totally OK that we wait for the next big batch of features (which was the purpose of the original post in this topic) but it would be good if the ideas behind the features could be “shortly” discussed before to much time is used to get them ingame. If all of this features are “old but gold” (no new ideas but proven concepts) this shouldn’t take to much time (a well made “copy” can be better than a stupid inovation - e.g. CS:GO is an old as hell concept but it’s well made and therefore successfull) and if they are completly new communication is a key aspect for player satisfaction (e.g. Guild Wars 2 utilizes a completly new combat system [no holy trinity] and their devs talked a lot about it in EA befor players where able to test it).
Somehow I can understand both sides. Dev’s and community.
We come to comparisms like GW2 or CS:GO, i think those cannot be considered. In this case you have to compare the amount of dev’s developing. In giant names like GW, there were probably several just being active in community platforms and condensing feedback. I don’t think wonderstruck has the capacity here at the moment (even though i think it’s worth to stack up - but that’s leadership and finaciating decision @james).
Furthermore there is an internally timetable, not exactly communicated here to not raise wrong expectations. Maybe there is no time to implement too much feedback. Even though again, I think it’s worth to consider community feedback as much as possible and refine best proposals to convert to the game.
Those 2 points are imo point of view of devs.
On the other hand the community can with reason demand more interaction. Since everything started on a “backer-level”. Just now I don’t know how dependet devs are from the Backers, since they have Sony i.e. in the background that probably also delivers financial support.
Also (I don’t know if that’s the case) if Sony has his fingers on developing schedule, their marketing department might have influence on what may be published / discussed and what not? Here I hardly assume, since I am not aware of game developers relation with publishers.
So I personally don’t have the overview across all those facts. Hard to say what is possible and what not considerings community interactions - testing as well as discussing / refining.
I compare it with Factorio for example, the game has just 5-10 programmer/developer. And I get every week detailed Dev Logs, with information about what they did every week and what they have planned. With detailed information, and there are regular patch with bug fixes and new content. And it come out on a regular basis patch with bug fixes and new content.
yes, this is what i mean. its EVERY Friday not on a other day is every Friday and this EVERY week, and this all since a long time. Therefore, the community knows at any time what the Dev`s make. And if they has a new feature, you can test ist in the experimatle version, they dont wait till they have 20 new feature. if they have a new feature they add it in the experimantal version and let the community test it.
edit:
you can see in every version what they like to add in every version. and it need normal only a couple of weeks to add a new feature not over 3-4month
In the devs defense, the weekly devlogs are pretty detailed in comparison to those of other studios and I really don’t mind if they are a few days late sometimes.
Only thing they miss is:
If they really want to surprise release something they should do it with fancy new GUI-graphics or cosmetic props, not with stuff like XP-progression.
PS:
They told us that the current situation is an exception because releasing the new features in a batch is faster & easier for them and that they’ll go back to weekly releases as soon as it is possible for them.
this execption is longer as 6 month now, and we have never weekly releases, a long time ago we had 2-3 weeks where they have add some new things but only 2-3 weeks.
I like the game really, but it was in the beginning a lot of promise which has still not been complied with. and after 1.5 years I expect just a bit more as this all. the release date of the game was e.g. moved already 2 or 3 times backwards
i have ~400 play hours, 350 hours i played before the c++ port, and ~50 direct after the c++ port. all new added feature since the port till now i have tested in just 2-3 hours.
i have payed a lot of money for this game and played a long time, I think that’s enough reason to say something and to expect something from a game that has promised much.
No, the community is not with you because that’s exactly what you have to expect when you buy an early access title.
Sure, if the updates are for a finished game, then you are right. But not when the game isn’t even out of the alpha stage.
I’d say the cycle for an early access game should be as follows: Release → Players break stuff/discover bugs/dislike features → devs fix all the new issues → Release (repeat that until the game works.)
If you delay the releases of new features to fix every little bug you basically delay this process which in turn delays the release of the finished game.
(Note: That doesn’t mean they should release stuff which has glaring bugs that could be fixed in an hour or so.)
There’s a big difference between us and most EA games which I think people are often overlooking when complaining about releases (i’m not saying we can’t do things better).
We’re a multiplayer only, MMO game with a small number of servers running for the EA, that means we ‘cannot’ release possibly unstable features that could crash servers or else as soon as someone crashes the game, it’s crashed for ‘everyone’ and no-one can play at all…
If we were making a single player game, it’d be much, much easier to just release features that are even partially developed and unstable, because hey, it’s just your game that will crash, so if you’re messing around it’s not a problem. We can’t do that (or we could, but it’d be really expensive, as we’d need many more servers running different versions of the game for different versions of clients to connect to, rather than just the current stable/testing)
This is NOT ■■■■■ ing as you said so charming (and neither is @Saint_X) . We are all grown up adults (at least i hope this) and as you can see, other devs doing EA different (some would say “better”). This is not an offence against anyone - as i said some times before (in other posts) - this is an attempt to make things “better”.
Did you ever asked why there are only few players ? EA is not the correct answer - a lot of other games are EA too and have a LOT of players / buyers (e.g. Factorio (500k +), The Universim (23k+) and B< has only 10k.
Did you ever asked why B< has only “Mixed” steam reviews ? Read some of the Reviews and you’ll see most of the people missing content and updates.
I’m part of the community since a long time now (late '14) and a lot of things changed in this time (not only in good ways). You can read my complete statement with a detailed description of my main concerns HERE and HERE. But to name only a few:
No more dev survey (they have been one of my main reasons to buy this game as EA)
A lot of things change without any announcement (this is a bit better in the last time, but not much)
Only few information about key gameplay aspects
And yes, i’m totally willing to play a game that crashes every 20 mins. This is (as @KuroKuma said) what EA is all about. Test, Feedback, Fix, Test again.
@lucadeltodecso: This is right, but wouldn’t it be possible to have e.g. at least a few servers (6-12) to host different versions (at the moment, there are only 2 servers up and running. In the past there have been a LOT more servers with no one playing on them. What has changed ? ) ? You could set up a Cron-Job to restart the server every time it crashes and store the server logs or am i wrong ? (Yes, i know you might not get the Client-Side error log but you have at least the last server-client-interaction)
thats what we said sice a long time, a early access game is for testing ánd finding bugs, and it is for helping the devs to decide ehat is a good feature or not.
it is useless if a dev spend 200h on a feature what the community dislike.
me too, if i get some new content i have no problem with it if the game sometimes crash. this time i spend for testing is time what the devs can use for fixe a other bug or adding more feature.
what is better 3 dev for testing or over 100 player with diffrent systems ?
i thing we need only 2-3 server:
1 Stable server, with no buiggy feature
1-2 experimental server with all feature for testing.
i know that we have at the start over 20 server, therefor it should no problem to host 3 server.
i’m sure that all the features are/have shown or discussed in here at forums before they release it so there’s no way for them to do features what people dislike. anything they release is already kind of accomplished by us. is the feature good when we personally test it is a different case. this is the reason why im wondering why u feel this “no detailed info before update” so negatively? i’m sure there will be detailed info when the update comes like every game does (patch notes)
It is a difficult balance. On the one hand we have a very passionate and dedicated community who want to try new mechanics out as soon as possible, no matter what state they are in. And on the other we have the players who check up on the game and play it every few weeks or months. If we update the game too often with game breaking updates a lot of players from the second group might be driven away from the game and we risk missing out from their feedback. Feedback from both groups is important to any early access title as the second group of players will not be up to date with the game’s progress or how the new mechanics work when compared to players who follow the forums.
I am still relatively knew to the Wonderstruck team and this is the team’s first early access title. The process is certainly far from perfect but we are learning and hope we can improve things.
I would like to add that a lot of the individual mechanics being worked on are linked so it made sense to release them together so they are reviewed as a group and so players can see how different systems crossover.
Oh, by the way I am happy to chat anytime. So please send me an @ if you want.
