Its been 2 months since the live demo and still not a peep? If it is gonna be a long time yet just say that. Being straightforward with bad news is much more commendable than just keeping your audience in the dark
The good news is that there is no bad news to report in regards to development. Things are proceeding. There has been no major issues or setbacks, but in general things have generally taken longer than initially hoped. The "bad" news is that until we get closer and submit final approvals to Sony, we won't have an official release date.
Thats fair. "longer than initially hoped" is much more than we have gotten up until this point. A general time estimate such as "late this year" or "late summer" would be nice. But if it isn't far enough along to even give a general timeline I am guessing that means it is still a ways off
Honestly, taking advice from players on a game almost always ends terribly. Players, even the least bias, all have an agenda that involves helping themselves. That being said, I agree with the loss of hype. They announced way too early if they production was still a ways off. Poor marketing decision. By the time it releases on playstation hype will be very very minimal
I disagree. The problem with players isn't that they're biased, it's that they are players and not designers. It's like asking a casual movie fan to direct -- their taste is actually crap and they have no idea how the creative process works. Having clear vision is very different from having unclouded eyes.
I can understand that point of view. However, playing mmos for quite sometime has showed me it is very hard to make a decent game by listening to consumers. I used to believe it was incredibly important that players be heard. After playing WoW where devs nerf anything a player demands and changes anything some players deem "too hard/easy" I've learned its best to leave the process of game design to the professionals
Regardless of the reasoning, my point is simply that a player made expansion sounds god awful. The current game already has a fair share of balance issues, the last thing we need is a 60 nora unit with 100 attack and 100 health for fs because an fs player thought that would be a cool idea. Obviously it wouldn't get that bad, but that idea in general is cringy
Note that from our POV this type of thing is very... unfair? We don't talk about it, people ask about it constantly and want more information. We give information, and then that gets criticized for "too early." In either case though, keep in mind that it was largely Sony that was announcing it at their Press Events, so it really wasn't up to us when they wanted to announce things coming to their platform.
There is nothing wrong with "announcing" as long as its done in a rational timeline. If that was out of your hands that sucks, but it doesn't take away the fact that it was a harmful decision. Once announcements start, stopping them for long stretches generally isn't a good move. In your case this clearly couldn't be helped, but it is much easier to stay involved in something when there is bi-weekly or even monthly updates. When they are so sporadic, its harder to keep up and usually people lose interest when announcements are handled this way. I have seen many steam early access games fail due to developers having poor communication, and by the time the game came out, no one cared. Everyone moved on because it they figured the game was never coming
And it was. It wasn't as though the announcement came randomly. We intended to launch in the window indicated. But due to various factors that wasn't achievable ultimately, and we haven't chosen a new date yet, thus none has been announced. Also, just as a sidenote, but the event at which it was "announced" was also more of a press event, and not a game specific announcement. I mention this because those events are really more about branding and showing off to stakeholders as it is about hyping the games. As for Early Access, those are a different beast altogether. Those games are usually mostly broken, and if the developer (usually one or two guys) goes AWOL, you really have no idea if they are ever coming back - and people paid for that which generates a lot of NEGATIVE hype when they go AWOL like that, often for months at a time and you don't even know if they are still alive. On the other hand, us not having a firm date on the release on PS4 is a different animal as we have a live product that is online and we are communicating regularly in general. Remember that earlier on I was sharing some screenshots and WIP, but there's just been nothing new to report which is why we more or less say the same thing each time the question comes up. All that said, we'll be providing the support and providing more previews as the final launch date approaches. You may have noticed I was doing this earlier, but at this point I have ran out of things to previews that I am allowed to leak
