Change my View: Generation Zero is over

General Discussion
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Edit :
I want to make clear that this is a thing I am afraid off, not something I’m angry about.
I really hope that the devs keep fulfilling their vision for the game, but I am afraid they might not be able to dos so.

At this point, I don’t believe there is a future for this game, for multiple reasons :

The game did not do very well at launch, that’s when most copies of a game are sold, so it probably didn’t make much money.

It has, as far as I know, no exposure from any big streamer or let’s player, so not many people who aren’t already part of the community even hear about tze game. There are a few channels who almost exclusively do GZ content, but most of their viewers already know the game.

Then there’s FNIX Rising.
While the first dlc was quite well recieved, this one, not so much. From what I’ve heard, it’s supposedly to short, seems unfinished and feels more like a techdemo for new game mechanics, for example moving vehicles and artillery.

The console updates are another issue.
The april update alienated a lot of players.
On PC we got a patch, but on PS4 and XboxOne people are either still waiting for a patch, or the patch they got destroyed their saves. Also the fact that for some reason the devs insist on releasing the patch together with the dlc seems to annoy some people.

Then there’s the updates in themselves. Often times they break things.

Second Extinction.
A service game based around online interaction and a persistent community war effort. A game that can make them much more money, so they’ll probably put their effort into this instead of GZ.

So with all of this, I predict the following will happen:

They patch the game on console, and then that’s it.

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@Fraeddy Pontus wrote this 6 days ago. :smirk:

GZ isn’t dead.
Sure, it didn’t get a great reception at release. IMO, that’s not the game or the dev’s fault. Gaming media are painfully biased toward AAA games. Smaller games like GZ get run over and left behind. It’s fans and content creators who have to do the hard work in promoting games like this.

I understand the console issues are a major problem with regards to recruiting new players today.
However, I’m sure they will manage to fix the issues eventually, and when that day comes the fans have to be out there again and speak out about what makes this game so great. The PC version is running very well, on my part at least, so hopefully you console guys can look forward to the same. There are still some bugs, and the occasional crash, but nothing game-breaking.

I think the most important thing is, if you’re having problems with GZ right now, report the problems in a proper fashion, play a different game while you wait for a fix, and please don’t go around spreading toxic comments and discouraging new players from even giving GZ a chance.

Also, it’s been made clear several times that Second Extinction is developed by a different team, and that this won’t affect further development of GZ.

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Well, my two cents…
GenZero is a really interesting project that is WELL worth the time and patience required to actually appreciate the game.

I know, its a bit lacking in a number of areas, but you gotta remember, this is NOT a triple A studio.
Everything IS getting better, it just takes time, currently mainly due to corona, but overall, the funding isnt endless.
And this kind of bites, since the shortcomings kind of exclude casual gamers (that dont come into contact with the game) and therefore renders alot less revenue compared to a triple A title.
And that in turn makes it harder for the developers to fund (ie: employ more people to fix) the bugfixes.

In the end its all a matter of taste, if you like the game, you will learn to live with its quirks, otherwise it was not a game for you.

But my personal opinion; loving a good sci-fi “endgame”-scenario and demand a good story out of any game i play; i simply LOVE the Generation Zero universe.
The fact that it takes place in Sweden is even more interesting, since im playing a game that could be taking place in my back yard.

I dont know if GenZero will ever be fixed enough to be called “perfect”, but i will settle for far less and still call it the best game ive ever played… :stuck_out_tongue:

Its not really there yet tho, but its easily among the top 10. :slight_smile:
And i will be buying any DLC´s that comes out (exept mere clothing packs… :wink: ).

But whatever happens to Generation Zero, i sincerely hope that they do make a sequel. :slight_smile:

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Yes, the game definitely didn’t do as well on launch as any of us would have liked and it’s incredibly hard to come back from a rocky start, especially since most of the bad reviews are gonna stick forever, even if they fixed all of the issues.
It being a small dev team makes major updates a long and tiring process.
However, I don’t think it’s dead. A game is never dead as long as there is a base of people who love it, play it and cheer the devs on. And this community, as small as it may be, is amazing. Whatever happens in the future, I’m 100% on board and will support the devs whichever way I can.

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@SR_Carni I think that game is very far from being at the end. I can see that there is more stuff. And I hope the devs will be working on it

I had a look on the webpage from Systemic Reaction and i saw under the topic career, that they would employ a big among of programmers. Of course it is not easy to find good programmers and devs.

Pherhaps they should think over a dual study for interested young people what like programming games it could be a oportunity for both sides to employ young people they be trained on the job and a few days in the week they go to school. At the End they have well educated homgrown, they kow their job.

In Germany there are such dual studies for example for young engineers. They learn a job in the company and they go to the professionel school and when they made their approval they are well trained engineers. :smiley:

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IMHO, it’s the games content for a part.

People asked things that were not there in the early days, and those thing didn’t make the game better.

They asked new weapons? OP Exp weapons they get.
Transport? In came bycicles.
Storage? Plundra.

They had to put in a lot of effort to make these, and still some just don’t like it, byciciles are buggy, it all seems a waste of good time, somehow.

Now, please do not get me wrong here, I’m not asking to remove this.

But I would love to see a story board for the game, that they will keep to, if you get my point.
Too much effort and time has been put in a few silly objects, that in no way improved the game story wise.

We have a game in which 4 machine types!!! (not counting Ticks and Seekers).
But we do have like 20’ish different weapon types?
Machine AI is bugged, been bugged for a long time now, which for quite a few makes the game “meh”.
There’s no fear, there’s no threat, how on Earth did 4 machines do all this damage?
How did they cause such chaos?

The game is severely conflicting with the story, continuously.
But we get silly OP weapons, we get bikes, we get Plundra, so all’s well, right?

A good movie sticks to a story board.
Not doing so, results in a mess more than a movie?

Besides, if we know the story board, we could actually make suggestions that would actually matter. :slight_smile:
Win-win seems. XD

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@Xogroroth I think they have a story board. Without that you will really fast stick in a mess. When I write a story then the first thing that i do is a storyboard a raw gathering of the Ideas for the story, sometimes i have an beginning and an End for a story and sometimes i don’t look for an end because it is interresting how the end will develop while writing.

As you said, we have only four machines but four different types of that machines what have increasing difficultly (proto, mil, fnix and apoc) so that we have 16 ! different machines.

Pherhaps there comes a new one pherhaps the Armageddon Class :grinning:

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Could be worse. I mean look at Borderlands 3 and the the cluster release they had and that is big box developer. They won’t even communicate with the fan/player base and most dropped off the face of the earth months ago. Most would have stayed had a peep even came from the developers or addressed any feedback and instead we had a bunch of literal ‘crap’ put in game nobody wanted. They forced patches across all boards that literally broke consoles(xbox), constant crashed PS4’s and corrupted saves across the whole board, made the game unplayable(still an issue) on PC because of HUD scaling. They broke the scaling system and now the weapons in the base game are so overpowered that a strong rarity weapon will last you over 20 level.They also dare to say the game is in a great spot when their forums are on fire and bugs not even addressed from day one launch.

Like I said, at least stuff is being worked on to address fans and I am on PS4 and would rather be running the old ‘stable’ version than something new keeping me from playing/enjoying the game. Risk of Rain always patches to PC at least one month before console to monitor for bugs/balance/stability.

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But then why do they halvelly add stuff like the, if I get it right, broken bikes?
I do not see those in the originally story board.
Is actually anyone using these?
Or, what is the point of an option to remove them [settings], but it does nothing?

While many said, the game is too soft, why did they add even stronger weapons for us?

I find it odd, that some more logical requests got ignored, but then things like that get added.
Sure, many asked for transport, and a bike, but others, more even, asked for other machine types, or other more related content.
There’s a post for machine ideas that’s quite long.

I’ve seen ideas for other things that could be really well implemented.
But we got Plundra.

So… bizarre…

Sorry, I think it’s nice to take ideas into a game, but let them be story compatible, please.
A Plundra that magically follows us (nighly giving me periodes of paranoia XD ) seems just not that GZ, does it?

One of the true uniqnessess of the game was the very lack of human NPC’s.
All we ran into were machines aiming for our behind.
When we finally had someone on a radio… he died being overrun by a Runner.
Brilliant.
But why, oh why alter that part…
Twice even.

I loved the core game, awesome setting, awesome period, dead people, more no that alive people, then some horribly dead people… that feeling is gone with the introduction of human NPC’s.
Only because one or two brought them up in streams…

Ah well… sic vita est.

I can only hope the Devs know what they are doing, really… story/content wise, I mean.

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Well, when the bicycles appeared, I tried them out once and then left them because I prefer to walk around the map. As I said before, the game is too weak for some, too strong for others.
Here we come back to the point that you can argue about taste excellently.

The problem of the devs will be, since they have to satisfy as many people as possible, to find the happy medium. I still remember that this year, shortly before the beginning of summer, a survey took place where one should tick one’s wishes.

Probably so many have called for the melee weapons (baseball bat and sledgehammer) that they have been integrated into the game.

Here too, opinions differ as to whether that made sense.

Ever stronger weapons?
Until now nobody has forbidden me to blow away some hunters with my rusty old KVM59.
I don’t have to use the overly powerful weapons.
I use the experimental weapons very little. I can hardly tell the difference between the experimental Klaucke and the golden Klaucke, except that the golden one looks more chic with its nickel-plated slide.

I’ve played most of the game with my golden AK4. And mostly I always have the same weapons with me. The 5 * AK4, 5 * KPIST and the 4 * Magnus revolver.

Of course, a storyboard is alive and can change during the story. As I said, I’ve already written stories where almost at the end I had no idea how they should end. Somehow it then developed.
It will certainly be the same here.

But the studio also has to see it from a commercial point of view and address as many potential players as possible, because unfortunately only with money can such a game be kept alive and developed.

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Another indicator for the community being very much alive is the fact that IGP uploaded a GZ video 2 days ago and it has 270k views, here are some positive comments about the game and their upvotes:

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I think this is a pretty good indicator that many people are still at least interested in the game and following its development :slight_smile:

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That’s actually bloody nice, sir!!!
Good to see positive vibes for a change.

I really hope, many will actually buy the game. :slight_smile:
GZ, the Team and the Community deserves it.

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And for anyone who has been wondering what devs have been up to all this time, since GZ’s release, here’s: Content chronicle of Generation Zero

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Someone’s been busy.

Good stuff

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GZ was/is part of the September Humble Bundle so there might be some new players in the next time…

And/or because of that the “usual supects” (aka Keysellers) have some Keys for cheap in stock, too…

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I meant outside the bundle, sir.
Actually interested because of that video.

There’s been FAR too much negativity surrounding GZ.
Some might be true, but most, IMHO, is not…

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Gotta understand some people will be sour without expectations met. A lot of games, even AAA titles go through or are going through similar things. GZ crew is at least addressing and working on it even if people don’t agree with the timeliness.

Dev response is a virtue if you ask me and gets my respect.

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Generation Zero being “over” is only negativity, but i´m curious, what other games are having similar situations?

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Borderlands 3, they lost about 85% of players even before the last 2 DLCs were released. I am one of them. I haven’t even played half the content I paid for because they changed the game literally 5 months after release to something NOBODY asked for. I paid for the Deluxe editions ($240 for my wife and I, we are huge Borderlands fans) On release of patches the game BRICKED some peoples xboxs and Gearbox just told the people it was a Microsoft issue and need to contact them. There is still constant crashes on PS4 and graphic issues on PC rendering the game unplayable. The GBX team does not communicate or let know what they are working on. They still have day one bugs they don’t even address or talk about. They changed ALL of the end-game content that messed up the base game and they can’t even fix it (they could just revert it and people would be happy), instead they just unbalanced the game further and said “everything is in a good spot” when over 99% of the weapons are worthless with the new content they put. They don’t respond to feedback AT ALL, and just keep adding stuff that makes the game worse not better,… instead of just listening!

Risk of Rain 2, Hopoo, rolls out updates/fixes on consoles always at least a month or more after PC to monitor the fixes since PC is easily patched. This gives them time to adjust for consoles with a more stable update.

Hello Games went dark after No Mans Sky release with the negativity and came back over a year later with a fantastic update and brought new life to the game.

Techland who made Dying Light and in development of Dying Light 2 still made a DLC to a ‘scrapped’ title and brought it to Dying Light as a Mideval Fantasy theme and people were pissed the DLC was too much money and didn’t add enough to the game. So Techland literally added more things to the DLC as an update and as a way to make people happy.

Sure everyone has a right to feel the way they want about a developer or game. I am sour at Gearbox right now for literally changing the endgame to something trashy I and all my friends didn’t like when they had it right the first time. Difference to me is the way the devs respond and handle feedback. Don’t get me wrong, I just started this game a week ago on PS4 and came to the forum to see the community spirit. I am having a blast so far and have some of my buds hopping in as well. But what I liked a lot about this forum is that the devs respond and are actively progressing. Not at everyones pace, but a pace. They literally could have just dropped the game and said “there ya go have fun!”, but no, they are working and staying in touch with their fans. What more could you ask?

TLDR:
(Techland, Hopoo, Avalanche, and Hello Games all show signs of developers who are there for the game and their fans)
(Gearbox/Randy Pitchford seems to be for greed and could care less about the actual game or players and screws its own developers(and players) out of money)

Sources to see recent reviews of the DL DLC and BL3 DLC: (negative reviews)
(NOTE: the Hellraid DLC by techland is trending upwards with positive after developers added more content to it to please the players)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1233061/Borderlands_3_Psycho_Krieg_and_the_Fantastic_Fustercluck/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1300710/Dying_Light__Hellraid/

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I asked “having”, Hello games messed up at Launch and in the following months, and from 2017 to now they surpassed themselves
Dying light is also a bad example, because the game always pushed forward and it was always great, it´s almost 6 years old and they keep giving support to the game (usually in most games they stop after 1.5, 2 years), Hellraid was a side project from them, so it´s a bonus if anyone wants to kill medieval zombies.
Now about Borderlands 3, I feel sorry for you and for everyone else, and I have to be on the side of the players, but you know something?
Since PS3/Xbox 360 and early development games first appeared, there is a Simple rule one must follow, never but never buy a game at launch or in the following months because they always mess up! Unless they are from Japan, it´s always a bad move and it´s a constant thing. This days products are not well tested at launch either because they are greedy and clumsy or because Companies push too much the development teams.
Now about me? It´s almost one year since I started playing this game and I find it unique and special, one that even after being 100% completed, I keep playing.
The problem was that even with some bugs, the game was Fine till April 27, then all changed, and the team did not made a patch to fix it. I just stopped playing the game, it was not the same thing and it´s unfortunate.
Now, no one can contest the devs don´t communicate, it´s a thumbs up for them, well done, it´s just unfortunate things had to be like this for the 5 months(soon 6 months).
That´s it, now, some people get a bit crazy with some hate, one thing is acknowledging the mistakes the Team did, other is hating them and behaving like little spoiled kids.
I look forward for the day the game is back on track in all platforms.
I´m sorry for this being so long, and I´m glad you are another fan!

Note: I feel your pain about Borderlands 3, a 4x space strategy game called Stellaris was great from 2016 to mid 2018, the devs just changed everything and did not fix the late game lag and bugs, and each expansion adds almost nothing and it´s worth a small fortune (20 euros/dollars!!!) that is the price of many “Normal” games, i´m glad GZ DLC is always cheap.
Paradox Interactive are thieves (shame shame shame shame)
Good thing there are many mods or the game would just suck.

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