I spent a lot of gameplay in 1.0 release. I think it is a very good game, fun to play, but still there is a one big turn off for me. The sheer amount of bugs. Not severity, but the volume. For example I try to a journal task, it turns out bugged, so I try another, turns to be bugged too, doing so evil monsters literally spawn in the air before me, and drop to surface (I think them spawning before my eyes is a bug), so I turn around and running on almost completely flat terrain I somehow manage to hit surface for xxK damage (if I am the one getting injured, shouldn’t text say “surface hit you for…”, For the sake of consistency?), So I dig deep to recouper my health, which takes ages, and somehow get hit by soil or rock again, I don’t know how, when mining it. I don’t even mind that dying to that bug is simply unfair. I respawn in sanctum, go to world, and get on my back cuttletrunk that just won’t stop chasing me. So I somehow manage to teleport back to sunctum, look through portal onto the abbys of cuttletrunk eye, bump the portal (the first bump never does anything), bump it again it to see my nemesis from the other side, bump it again ( to safety ) and again and again…
Anyway I’m a programmer myself but I do something completely different than wondeerstruck (really does not matter what), and the volume of bugs in a “release” version is astonishing, it wouldn’t pass QA in any company I developed for. It’s like you had completely no QA, because most of those bugs are not some edge cases, but things you discover by simply playing.
It’s looks almost like you run out of funds and simply had to cut QA, release it in this buggy (somehow very playable, I’ll give you that!) state, or just abandon project altogether.
That’s what turn me off. A bit.
I really wouldn’t mind a bit less often patch releases, if only they wouldn’t introduce more bugs, like recipies crashing the game, or not seeing wear bar when mouseovering the machines (power coils especially).