2 things that will never change for Pox

You support your local business by buying their products and immediately using them, at a fair price.
You "support" the game industry by buying a product before it is even created, then hope and pray it actually becomes something usable in 1-5 years.

They are deceived and misled by a decade of propaganda from the Industry.

You haven't seen lines like:
"Without you Kickstarter support, this project can not happen."
"We've released these 50 DLC, because the cost of developing is so high these days!"
"Show your support buy signing up for our Early Access and help mold the game!"

over and over and over?

In the late 90s, if it didn't have a Demo, forget about it.

More propoganda.

Twitch Streams are bought and paid for by the studio to sell their product, shortcomings are covered up and skipped over, and anyone pointing out flaws is kicked and banned.

Likewise, reviews are completely bought out. The only review site you can put any stock into at all might be Metacritic, but even then, there exists a huge number of people that review things positively based on name or studio alone. Warhammer Total War, for example, was reviewed by 2000+ people as Overwhelmingly positive on Steam 6 minutes after the download started. Ends up, its a steaming pile of crap. (One would expect nothing else from Creative Assembly)

Let's Plays are often done by only the most dedicated white knights and are also, often, a complete misrepresentation of the game, having its flaws completely skipped over.

Exactly.

One that was forged by the industry itself, and one that was accepted by its consumers, out of their desperate need to alleviate their boredom, their horrible addiction, and inability to resist.

Developers, as in programmers themselves? Probably not. Marketing and Producers? Absolutely.

Some?
90% of games go Early Access today.
You mean, I can get money, before I even do any work, and any flaw can just be excused away by "There will be updates", and in the end, I don't even have to finish, with no repercussions what so ever?!!!! Hell yes, I'll take your money.

Sure, there are some. There may be some 1 in 100 games where any suggestion from the players actually sees the light of day at all. But that's not why it exists. It exists because it's free money.

That line is the charity case propoganda. "We can't do this without you. Players have the best ideas. They see things we can't. So sign up now for my unfinished, unthought out, steaming pile of crap, that will probably never get done, and pay me full price for it, today!"

Most games had _one_ expansion, priced around 1/3 or 1/2 the cost of the game. Additionally, they were actual expansions, not content of the game that was held back at initial release only to make an extra buck a month later. Games are now released bare bones, and if you know what you are doing, you can actually see the content they are going to charge you for, already there and ready to go, at release.

It is now quite normal now to pay 6-10X the cost of the game in DLC within the first 2 years of its release.

Example of some of the worse offenders:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/236850/ $250 of DLC
http://store.steampowered.com/app/214950/ $86 of DLC for a game everyone reviewed as suck!

I never bought a car where it didn't start, paid the dealer an additional cost, had him pop the trunk, and scoop out the key.
I never had to buy a additional package to steer the car and another to brake either.

 

Quite funny you use cars and cable service as examples; My brother works on cars and I have a friend that works at Comcast; pretty much have had this same discussion with them and how each thing kind of compares here and there.

I'd like to mention that DLC was bound to happen, have you seen how many Discs came with Unreal Tournament 2004? There's no reason for that many discs to be released nowadays; especially when as Sok stated, Betas are less about testing and more about advertising; and so at game launch you are expected to have more content because your time invested during the beta should also get some form of return once the game title has been launched; It's all about demand, and let's just say that back in early 2000 our demand was still just as high, the technology just wasn't there. It's always been about more and better which is why DLC is a thing.

Unreal Tournament is in pre-alpha, and I wouldn't expect them to ever remove that tag; there's really no need. It's just to show that the state of the game is expanding. EQNext also has no reason to remove their tag, Sandbox is entering into almost every genre and that is because the developing tools we have now are so much more powerful. Certainly from UE2004 to UE4 there has been a significant increase in things I can do and I'm barely scratching the surface of what I can do.

How all this translates to Poxnora? Well imo I think the community would have been able to better support Pox had it been on UE4 and let the players get some developing tools (I can dream) however Unity is certainly a good engine, I just prefer it less, I've spent too much time in Autodesk and UE to prefer anything but those. Really though idt anything is wrong with what's going on, the console release has pushed Poxnora a few years ahead of development schedule, but it's not like what was on the table for change is getting looked over. I'm certain though that the PSN trading restrictions has played a role in decisions here or there, as with controller support, it's going to have taken away from something but the game as a whole still benefits from all this funding/change.

 

You seem to have a short-sighted perspective.

 

The fact that you used balance to validate your position is curious since you admit balance can not be achieved. You need to check your logic.

 

Some reviews are still pretty good, like mine for Poxnora; go and up vote that on steam for me.

 

@Fleshbits Out of curiosity - why do you think TW:WH is total crap? I enjoy it immensely and had no troubles at launch. Care to elaborate?

 

I've got some things to do today. Maybe I'll come back to this discussion later.

I'm learning UE4 myself, so that maybe I can get something on Kickstarter, and make millions without any repercussions if I don't deliver, then go into Early Access for the next decade on Steam.

 

Well, if any of you Ue4 uses can start me off with resources on how to do a Hex Grid, or Mouse Object picking in Ue4 that would get me started.

4 days of Google searches and all I continually find is some guy's paid "Turn Based Grid" asset. I really don't want to reverse engineer some other guy's work in order to learn the engine.

I'm getting frustrated that I can implement both in my own engine, but can't do it in Unreal 4

 

The forums there have most everything you'd need to know although perhaps a bit buried.

I'm still working on a Pox clone, although it's not isometric and more similar to Beta Dwarfs games; those guys really did a good job imo. Pretty much a TD - Pox, but I like the idea of Sandbox games that you navigate the environment/ingame menus to interact with different games modes. More time playing the game and less time roaming so the game can be played.

Pox has a lot of genres it could break into imo.

 

Haven't played it for months but my only complaint with it was the power of agents. Almost made it unplayable (still had a ton of fun with the game tjough). Is this any better now than on release?

 

Ah, the good old days. Brought a tear to my eye.

Remember when games came on cassette tapes?

 

A friend came over to chill last night, wasn't expecting to see him for a couple days cause he just got Gears of War...I was not aware the new Xbox requires you to download the game onto your device/hard drive before you play it.

What's up with that?

 

#1: Any Warhammer fan could jump in, change settings to the most difficult, and live stream on release, but never lose a single battle.
#2: Released with 4 races rather than the usual 15-20 in previous titles and immediatly released races as paid DLC for $15+ dollars a piece.
#3: Released with no blood and gore in a warhammer game?! Released as paid DLC a week later
#4: Dumbed down the Total War game even further than they've dumbed it down in previous titles.
#5: Took out seiges, because they haven't been able to get them right since the original programming team quit CA a decade ago.
#6: CA deletes and bans any negative posts about thier games on any forum they have moderation control over, including steam, and have since the terd that was the Empire Total was release. (This is why I have blacklisted them)

I could go on...

 

The Commodore 64 is still my favorite PC experience ever.

Going to the grocery store was a treat, because I knew Mom would buy me an issue of Ahoy or Byte magazine and I'd be able to type in a 2-3 page listing and have a new game to play.

POKE 53280,0 baby.