In Defence of Generation Zero

General Discussion
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As a member of this forum I can’t hold my tongue any longer.

Every few years a fresh new (or freshly rebooted) game idea comes along. MMO, lane defence, team shooter, battle royale, etc. These type of games cater to the masses, and as a result, we have to suffer insipid copycats, sometimes for years afterwards, as publishers ran by CEO’s that come from industries such as packaged goods demand their studios crank out similar crap.

Few publishers are willing to buck this trend. Even fewer still are willing to risk everything on a new IP.

Along comes Avalanche Studios, creating a brave, new, open-world IP about fighting a guerrilla war against machines in 1980’s Sweden. From what I understand, they felt so strongly about this game that in order to avoid any publisher compromising their vision, they published it themselves, absorbing the financial risk.

What happens? Everybody and their dog attacks it. We finally have a fresh and weird and awesome new IP and everybody is jumping the queue to be the first to tear the game a new one. I can only imagine the heartbreak the devs must have felt reading all those shit reviews and posts. Even worse, we have a non-AAA game, built by a non-AAA sized team, sold for a non-AAA price and yet reviewed with AAA blockbuster expectations.

I can understand this stupidity from the journalists on most of the gaming sites. They’re primarily staffed by non-gamers desperately trying to maintain relevance in a world where people can go on YouTube or Twitch and know whether a game is for them or not within heartbeats.

What I can’t understand is my fellow gamers attempting to do irreparable damage to the reputation of this game. Yes, the gameplay loop is very weak at the moment. The much touted Persistence system, one of the main reasons I myself bought the game, resets every time you turn off the game, and respawns broken machines constantly when you don’t. Worst of all, there are all the bugs. So, so many bugs. However, the devs are on record stating this game will be supported for a long time with free and paid DLC. So the bugs will get fixed and the other issues will be addressed in time.

I’m not trying to defend the state of the game at release. I am asking as a fellow gamer that you have some perspective and some patience. The game has been out for a week. The PS4 version hasn’t even received its first patch yet. I’m asking that you not kill off a daring new IP while it’s still in its infancy.

Guerrilla war against machines in 1980’s Sweden. What a premise for a game. :smiley:

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I agree with a lot of what you had to say. However I don’t see how asking for information from the devs or letting others know of bugs is doing irreparable damage. The damage was done by not properly testing the game before release for whatever reason. I wish I would of seen a post stating don’t play co-op or you risk breaking the game to where you can’t play it anymore. Staying silent is not the answer and the dev team needs to address this situation as well. They have been transparent with live streams all the way to and on launch day. Now it’s been pretty quiet. We need to hear an apology of some sort and any plans on how or who is working on the fix to get us playing again and get us off this forum.

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I agree with liking what Avalanche Studios has released - A persistent gorilla open world where you are the squishy. The error I see is that it was not released under an “Early Access” tile; with which would be ok with the bugs.
To be fair, as it was released as a complete game, I can agree with those complaining about the bugs.
Those complaining that they are too squishy, things don’t die really easy, too much space in the world as you don’t get to mow down waves on enemies - Yeah, I don’t think that is what this game was supposed to be, was never advertised as that, so these complaints aren’t really warranted.

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Yes there has been little communication from Avalanche, but it is there buried in posts. The reason they are not responding a lot is that they are buried with reading all the input (This forum, steam, discord, etc), prioritizing what needs to be done, and programming (There was an apology for lack of replies, but this is also buried in posts, steam I think).
On discord, it was said they are aiming for a major patch in early April. This may be a bit vague, but considering the amount of feedback and bugs that need reprogramming, they may not be sure just how big the patch will be, so its hard to give an exact date; and if they gave a hard date and missed it, they would never hear the end of it (cause I know I would complain on that too).

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Well, that’s it. People have a right to be annoyed by the bugs. Especially ones destroying save files and the like. But the people filling up the forums whining for the sake of it, not filling out a single bug report, all the while making it harder for people to find temporary fixes, really annoy me.

As for Early Access, I feel EA is for games that are stable but lacking content and may have minor bugs. If not for the bugs, this wouldn’t qualify as an EA title. After all, while most people are wishing for more content, it’s enough to justify the price.

However, this level of bugs, including unhandled exceptions that hard crash your computer/console or the entire loss of character saves are the sort of thing you’d expect from an alpha or beta. Which is pretty terribad. I’m not sure what went wrong there.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to reply. I always appreciate a measured response on the internet. It’s so rare these days :slight_smile:

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I love the game when it works, but it frequently doesn’t. That’s why I’ve asked for a refund - if everything gets fixed I’ll buy again but if not then I’ve not wasted £35

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Vasdema - I’d also like to add that I was reading some of the Beta tester posts on Discord. One was complaining that Avalanche did not put in suggestions (I.E. Storage boxes, etc I think); this however is not a bug but game improvements which still can be added later.
However, what was also mentioned by other Beta players, was that many of the significant game stopping bugs (no saves, loss of data, etc) was not encountered in the testing, but showed up on release. I’m going to take them on their word on this and give Avalanche the benefit of the doubt. But still holding to my “Public Relations / Industry Standard Fix” thread - they should re-release it as Early Access until they get the major issues resolved - This way people know it’s safe to play/rebuy if they do not want to be involved in the debugging process.

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It looks like BruWarden beat me to it, but yes, the community leader and a number of devs have been through the forum when they’ve had a chance. They’ve explained that they are fully committed to the bugs right now, but to feel free to keep submitting feedback for improvements/additions. They’ve also reiterated that there is a proper template for submitting bugs and asked that people use it. Which happens about 10% of the time, max. lol

As for not properly testing the game… This wasn’t built by the entire Avalanche Studio with the entire studios budget. Besides, for all we know, it was fixes made after the beta that broke the game. All we can do is continue to report the bugs… Or request a refund.

However, I object to people filling up the forum with posts labelled ‘Devs Respond’ or ‘Patch Needed,’ when a cursory search would reveal that there must be a dozen of those posts by now.

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Yes I’m believing the game breaking bug was introduced in a post release patch. Regardless I’m hoping someone from the dev team addresses this very soon. At the very least letting us know they are aware of the problem. It’s not a good feeling having a brand new game in my disc drive that can’t be played. That is all.

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Yeah mate. Game’s buggy as hell. You do what you gotta do. :slight_smile:

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On March 28 the developers made the following list of known bugs - although I have not seen much since.

https://forum.generationzero.com/t/known-issues-2019-03-28.

Geez - I think I took over someone else’s post - Sorry @Vasdema .

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lol. All good, matey.

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I am on PS4 with my wife we love this game it’s way better the. Any other game out thier right now but I can’t stand playing for ten mins then it crashes or picking up yellow wepons and then the inventory glitches where everything disappears

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I got my £35 refunded.

I took no pleasure from this but the game was released on Xbox in a completely unfinished and broken state. In what other industry would this be acceptable?

I would like nothing better than to buy this game again when fixed and wish the developers all the best as the bits that work are exceptional.

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My thoughts exactly, just waiting on the refund

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There’s no way for PS4 players to get a refund so all we can do is wait. On that note, where is the console support?

@BruWarden thanks for the link to known issues. The issue some of us are having is not there which is that all our missions were deleted and no matter what we do we can’t progress the story so essentially we are stuck.

If we could play the game bugs included no worries but we can’t even play the game.

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Ouch - Yeah, that is not good :frowning:

I’m just waiting with my fingers crossed that we get a working game soon.

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Just watched their stream. A patch is coming this month. Could be this week next or the week after. Patience is really going to be needed.

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They streamed? Bugger. I missed that. It looks like they’ve set it to unlisted or private; it’s not coming up. :frowning:

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I watched it on Mixer. It was called Q&A with devs or something like that. Maybe it is still there.