A breath of life for Generation Zero

General Discussion
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This is a thing that’s been bugging me.
I really wish for someone to breathe life into this amazing game. I’m not talking about what the developers are doing, because they are doing a fantastic job! No, I’m talking about repairing or building up the game’s public image. I can imagine how much GZ is suffering just from the reviews it received back in march. Let alone all the undeserved trash-talk it has received by some AAA-biased gamers throwing a tantrum fit on various forums.

Where do people go if they hear about GZ and wants to find out what it is before buying it? If they’re lucky they end up in here and they read all the praise before the bug reports, or they end up on YouTube and watch some of @tene’s videos, or videos from others who are enjoying the game.
It’s worse if they decide to read some of the reviews from the time of release. Some reviews were fair, considering what the game was, and pointed out it’s potential.
Others basically raped it! They disregarded all promises of future improvement and potential, and left the game stained, discouraging new players from trying and deciding for themselves.

I don’t know how many people are playing GZ as of now, but I know it could be more. Much more.
I’m sure there are lot of players who would love this game, but have been scared away by an undeservingly bad review. With all the work and love the dev’s are putting into this game, it deserves a second chance from many of those discouraged. Bugs should not be a reason to turn gamers away anymore. More bugs have been fixed than I ever would have expected a dev. team to do, and for my own part I played GZ from release, and I never once encountered a bug that made the game unplayable in any way. The game has run really well for me.

The reviewers should re-review the game now, that would be something!
Great features and bug-fixes have been added monthly, and Alpine Unrest will be the icing on the cake.
I know there’s a ton of great games out there, and I myself am currently torn between 4 games i want to play, but I believe now is the right time for people to re-discover Generation Zero.

How could we get the word out there? :slightly_smiling_face:

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Well, the developers did do a free weekend, and gave a discount. I feel like they did a good job letting people try it for free, but I think we as a community could do some more, like posting fan art or something like that on social media pages, or filling the Internet with them, so if someone Google’s the name of the game, they are in for a pleasant surprise!

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Steam chart
Month Avg. Players Gain % Gain Peak Players
Last 30 Days 710.5 +547.0 +334.36% 6,312

I peronally tell my friends/ppl I talk to about the game and have lately gotten a few to get the game. Some wanted to look into them, as expected.

I told them it´s solid gameplay and somewhat intresting story, but that the dev team is active and there has been so many improvments. Also they have 1x HUGE update every month so far with loads of fixes and new stuff. It´s a small team and they work as fast as they can :slight_smile: also they listen to the community.

Basically that if they want solid gameplay, good coop and singelplayer that is also pretty casual and gets updates every month with new stuff. Then this is someting for them.

I try to bring it up in conversations. So ppl can “see” the game once again, as many ppl has forgotten about the game now.

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I agree, GZ deserves much better that the reviews you’ll find when google’ing the game. Sometimes I wish that you could review reviews :wink:

We can spread the word, though. We can recommend it in our circles, and try to keep our frustrations over the remaining bugs in here. As @Bootie said, being “part of the solution, not the problem” (I have to give proper credit as he is quite sensitive in that regard :joy:). Then we can give good reviews on our platforms. GZ has a topscore on Xbox in my region.

But there is s bit of timing to consider too. I’m sure that Avalanche has a staged roll-out strategy. They probably had the “play for free weekend” because they felt the game was ready for it. That probably gave some feedback that is currently being processed. Now “Alpine Unrest” will soon be released. Let it land first. Then, if that proves to be stable, we fans should start to push the game more enthusiastically.

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I 100% agree @NJR87 when i see the popular youtubers videos in the search for gz content i always shudder. So many of them ruined this games public image by just shitting on it, ripping into it for the bugs instead of appreciating what it is and what is has the potential to become. I’ve done everything in my power to reach a wider audience and kinda, idk, shout from the rooftops about how great this game is. I’ve managed to gain over 2,000 subscribers that agree with me about how great this game is, but youtube is fickle and won’t show my content to the hundreds of thousands of people that were steered away by those major content creators and game reviews.
I love the community i’ve managed to develop, i think i’ve taken alot of people that just kinda liked the game and thought it was fun, and turned them into life long fans by simply just pointing out how deep this game truly is, from gameplay to story to where it could all go in the long run, to how awesome these developers are and how lucky we are to have a game company that isn’t trying to screw us over, they’re just doing the best they can. And the best they can is damn good.
Alpine Unrest is a huge thing for generation zero, and this is definitely the time to be playing, i think having a paid island a year would be so awesome and would give this game the lifespan it needs to shed its horrible reviews, and at a certain point the devs could even charge this as a full priced AAA game, because dangit it already has more than enough to justify at least a 60$ price tag.

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tl;dr There’s no second chance for a first impression.

I think we’re looking at two distinct kinds of complaints there.

Bugs happen, but if your impression of the game was “I played 50 hours, then my save got corrupted.”, I understand why you would be angry, and write a bad review (especially on platforms where you can’t easily back up and restore your save files).

Similarly, “quest progress sometimes only registers for host” was a pretty serious issue (and I wouldn’t have bought Car Fry 5 had I known it to have similar woes), and I don’t even know how “anyone can join my session” ever made it through QA.

If the game frustrated you, it’s fair game to write a review that says so. In fact, doing so is arguably a function of personal integrity, and most sites will put a date stamp on a review, so anyone with a brain can think, “They complained about this thing a year ago, let me find more recent reviews to see whether the issue persists.”

The other kind of complaint is a a rephrase of “This game is not for me! How dare you!” The ones that say, “Encounters are sparse! There is a very limited amount of enemy types!” like it’s some sort of accusation. If you report the fact that it is so, fine. If you report that you don’t like it, fine. But as someone who’s been waiting for a game that does just that, I bristle at people treating these features as some obvious defect.

Another one I “love” is, “But it’s just an asset dump of Hunter with 5 robots, cookie cutter houses, and 8 lines of backstory added!”
Like, suppose that’s exactly true, so what? Who cares? Shouldn’t the question be, “Is it fun?” People need to get offa my lawn. :smile:

</rant>

So personally, I’m sad so few people see how great the game is, but a fair bit of it seems down to different people liking different things.

What, like “It’s a great casual game to play while listening to audiobooks or youtube” or something? That’s certainly true as the mechanics are comparatively simple and the story pretty much non-existent, but that way you’d miss a lot of atmosphere that makes the game great. :crying_cat_face:

Of course, everyone can play in whatever way they fancy, and I guess with Challenges, the developers have openly encouraged throwing “atmosphere” to the wind, but I still get to be sad about it on a subjective level. :smile:

What I’m kinda hoping for in my heart of hearts is that eventually, there’ll be a lot of auto recommendations in our favor, of the form, “People who enjoyed STALKER have also played Generation Zero.”

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If I didn’t have to worry about my 4 year old I’d be streaming this game for sure.

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I normally don’t give a crap about achievements, but yesterday I noticed that the typical late game achievements were only achieved by 2-3% of players. Does that mean that 97% of those who try/buy GZ will abandon it before even completing the story? :open_mouth:

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What most people need to start realizing is that video game media is driven by developers to promote their games for sale. They can and will pay anyone to promote their “AAA” title so that it make them more money at release. These AAA companies have the funds to do so. I have witnessed this first hand with Beth’s horrible, horrible, trash of a game Fallout 76 (I have some deep-seated hatred for Bethesda). I understand that there are still legit sources from reviewers on sites that play a game for anywhere from 5 to 60 minutes and, just because it’s not what they expected, will criticize someone’s work.
For me I like to give the Devs a chance to redeem themselves, usually a year or how the game changes with each update.
Avalanche has proven to me, thus far, that they care. I praise them for their efforts and hard work in producing and maintaining GZ. I want to see this game progress into something more wonderful. Maybe we’ll even get a sequel, but lets just focus on how good this game is for now.

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That’s really sad if they abandon it that early.
To be honest I had a hard time finding a physical copy of GZ. None of the stores around me had a copy and I was told that it is “one of those off brand games.” or “limited run games.”.
The achievements in this game are handed out like candy too. I’m at 90% achievement completion and only had the game two weeks.