I do agree with you up to a point, but I have reached that point, and I have shelved the game for now. I play solo, and so must be very stealthy and tactical at all times.
However, this is impossible when enemies can sense you through 10 feet of concrete, and can clip into closed buildings to attack you, and respawn continuously.
Not to mention the worst inventory system I have ever encountered in a shooter game, the items disappearing from that inventory, the wacky ammo system, the barely usable stealth system, the vague and broken quest lines…too much for me right now.
The game is often enjoyable, and always beautiful, but alas, heartbreaking.
I agree with everything you said. Like i said before in someone’s post, requesting i quote “Food and Water, Hunger and Thirst” (probably a H1Z1/Day Z fan), it requires a fine taste and at least a small amount of education to appreciate something (in general). I mean they ask for hunger/thirst system and cars. So they can speed up, passing by all of this incredible beautiful world they created. I love Avalanche Studios. I love Generation Zero. I loved Mad Max (one of my favorite games of all times, have 400 hours in that game and it’s a single player). I will support Avalanche Studios with everything i can. I don’t say they will never mess up, but until then…
As for the gamers today…i don’t even wanna start on this subject. Peace out!
While I have no problem with people respectfully requesting survival elements be put into the game, I’m comforted by the fact that Avalanche has no intention to compromise their vision of the game.
You know, I’ve been avoiding weighing in on those survival threads… But it might be about time.
I agree the game is far from perfect and could have started in a much better ‘state’ (though I must say i play on PS4 pro and bugs are very very scarce for me) but there are so many great things; the graphics, the general design, the sound(!) and teh atmosphere. There are a lot of other excellent things andmany very good ideas.
There are gameplay elements I don’t like (the number of enemies sometimes) but, for now, I am still loving the game.
Since I’m atm sticking to solo play I had 0 crashes and very few bugs, loving it so far.
However some of the quest bugs you can experience are gamebreaking. Like in some of the bunkers if you do stuff out of order the quest breaks and you can’t finish it, that should have been discovered during testing, especially on the main quest line. That’s pretty much my only problems at the moment.
But since i read how many times other people crash in coop I’m kinda worried now that my brother is buying the game so we can play coop together…
I agree in principal with @Vasdema here. What turned me on to this game was that it was different to all the copycat BS that’s being produced these days. It’s not like other games out there. It’s an open world action game that takes us to a different time and place not seen in other games, and the overall story (from what I’ve seen so far) seems pretty meticulously crafted and works well. The game looks great and the mechanics work well (for the most part). And the premise of the game with the robots is quite unique. Ok, the variety of robots is a bit weak, but overall, the game is fun, with some caveats.
That said, it doesn’t excuse the sorry state it was released in. This COULD have been an amazing game at launch had they held off and released it when it was ready vs hitting a date likely arbitrarily set by a marketing department or company management. Or if it had been released as Early Access in its current state, it likely would have received a lot of praise from reviews rather than being panned like it was. The hype train for the game was ploughing full steam ahead, and the potential it had was huge. However, the release of a game as “complete” so loaded with so many bugs (many of them utterly game-breaking) is inexcusable, regardless of the company or size of the team.
And the excuse that it’s not a AAA title doesn’t make a difference. Let’s say you buy a new car and are looking into a budget vehicle vs a high priced luxury vehicle. You expect that at the very least, your vehicle will take you from Point A to Point B reliably and safely as advertised. The ride may be rough, handling less than premium, acceleration will be poor, and overall it will look drab, but it serves its purpose. You got what you expected. It’s not a luxury ride, but works as intended.
Now lets say you discover said car came without rear brakes installed, constantly stalls on you and is hard to start, at first rain, you discover wipers don’t work, on first fill discover that the promised 10 gallon gas tank only actually holds 1 gal and you didn’t know because the fuel gauge is defective. Then the manufacturer, rather than addressing these issues immediately, tells you that “sometime within the next 30 days, we can MAYBE fix some of your problems” then has total radio silence, would you think the the car deserves a glowing review? Would the manufacturer? Would you say that customers who bought the car and are publicly complaining on social media because they can’t use the vehicle they just bought are doing “irreparable damage” to the company because the cars they bought are pieces of junk?
Likely not. And it’s no different here with a game. Gamers and reviewers aren’t causing any damage. What’s causing damage is that unfortunately someone at Avalanche made an executive decision to ship the game despite knowing it was nowhere near being ready for primetime. I’m a programmer (not gaming related), and I know from my own experience, usually the launch decisions are made by someone above the devs’ pay grade (typically the bean counters in marketing) and devs have zero say in these decisions. And its unfortunate, because those who made the decision to launch the game in this sorry state are the ones responsible for the damage being done to Avalanche’s reputation.
All that said, I still have high hopes for this game. I’ve enjoyed the gameplay so far, despite being stalled now because game-breaking bugs have halted my ability to progress. I’m hoping that the devs can release a patch SOON that at least addresses some of the major issues. I don’t agree with their “we want to fix as many bugs as possible in 1 patch” approach. That would be ok for minor glitches, but there are so many large, game-breaking bugs that render this game pointless for many people. A quick patch to address critical issues followed up by other patches to address more minor bugs would likely be a better option.
Anyway, I’m just hoping that they can repair the game soon, as I’m itching to progress farther.
I feel a lot of people think it’s easier than it is to make a game like this, and that achieving this level of game with a team of less than 20 people is God damn impressive. Comparing it to buying a car is a poor comparison imo. I do of course understand your points, and yes, maybe this would have been a good option for early access. But seriously, people need to appreciate the level this game is at for such a small studio. It’s better than some current games released by studios like Bethesda and Bioware, and they have big boy publishers backing them and massive QA teams to iron out bugs and glitches.
What bugs me most is this game should have been labled early access and not a full finished product.
Theres a good idea for a game here but that kind of goes out the window when basic theres a multitude of very basic glaring faults with a lot of the game and its systems.
What bothers me is that the list of noted bugs are those found within the early points in the game…the same parts that the half-witted and lazy game journalists reported their impressions on.
I want to platinum this game on PS4, but NOONE has platinumed it because multiple trophies are glitched. Not even Bethesda had glitched trophies with Fallout 76, which is a complete waste of data on any harddrive. If they don’t give noteworthy attention this game is getting dropped, which would be a shame because it’s a pearl waiting to be polished.
I’m a programmer. It’s not gaming related, but I know what it takes to roll out large scale projects. I work in a team of 2 programmers and we develop large-scale applications used nationally by our military. QA is paramount for us. We test the crap out of everything before rolling out. Inevitably, there will always be bugs. That’s the nature of software. You can’t test for every possible permutation. You deal with the bugs as they show up and patch accordingly. Annoying bugs crop up, and sometimes things don’t work exactly as expected, but overall it’s useable and the “game breakers” have been removed.
I don’t mind small bugs in games. They’ll be there and they’ll be fixed (hopefully) in a timely manner. My issue with this game is that there are SO MANY of them, most of them are glaring and terribly obvious due to the sheer number of people experiencing them, and many of them are outright game breaking and prevent you from being able to progress. There’s no way that they could play test this game and not encounter the huge game breaking bugs present at launch. The sensible thing to do would have been to push back the launch by a month (like UbiSoft did last year with Far Cry 5) and get those big holes patched before rollout. This would have saved them from the fallout of negative reviews and customer complaints.
Again, I quite enjoy this game. I’m impressed with all aspects of it - except the execution. It’s just extremely frustrating to not be able to play it because it’s bugged so badly that I can’t progress. I’ve even tried uninstalling and killing my old save game to start over, yet still experiencing the same bugged missions that prevent me from progressing farther.
I’m betting the devs knew of the issues, informed management that they needed more time, but the bean counters / management wanted to start recouping their investment right away and pushed for the release anyway.
While I agree that the game is indeed awesome conceptually (and I love that it’s given me some small vindication for having learned Swedish), some of the bugs that are present are sufficiently bad that I can’t honestly recommend the game to anyone. The co-op bug that causes you to lose all open missions is a good example, the game is obviously designed to be played co-op, but doing so puts you at a huge risk of not being able to progress solo at all.
Now, that said, I don’t blame the developers, I blame management. There’s an increasing mentality in the video-game industry of needing to get things into production ASAP, no matter whether it’s ready or not. I can’t remember a single big-name game in the past 5 years on Steam that didn’t have obvious bugs on official release (not early-access, but actual release). It’s not necessarily just in the video-game industry, but it’s a lot more noticeable there than other development industries because:
Gamers tend to be pretty vocal online in a much more public way than many other consumers. Even if you aren’t really a gamer yourself, you’ve probably heard in passing how buggy some games are (I know people who don’t even own a computer or a game console who know Fallout 76 was in a horrible state on release).
There’s little to no vendor lock-in with video games. For many types of software, you have no other practical options to fill the same role, so you just work around the bugs. With games though, you just go play something else instead.
Unlike some industries, bugs in video games often go untouched for a long time, sometimes not even getting fixed in remakes (see for example the remaster of Borderlands that just got released, which has all the annoying bugs the original did). This is mostly just a side effect of how insanely complex video games are, but it really accentuates the fact that a game may not have been tested as much as it should have been.
This sentiment is really dependent on what you consider makes a game ‘good’. Conceptually, it’s awesome (even if it’s not entirely new other than the setting). I’d argue that the execution is even worse than Fallout 76 though, there are multiple bugs preventing completion of missions, some of the achievements/trophies are impossible to obtain due to bugs, and there’s a huge bug that causes you to lose all open missions without any way to get most of them back that doesn’t even have a known trigger condition yet (other than playing co-op with someone else hosting, but that’s not the full trigger because people have done so without issue).
The fact that they managed to get something of this size that mostly works with such a small team is indeed impressive, but that doesn’t at all make up for the fact that the game is essentially unplayable for many people right now because of all the bugs.
Well I have been very lucky with regards to bugs, I haven’t actually had any that are game breaking or really detrimental to my enjoyment of the game.
I just hope that all the people who are raising the negative points regarding bugs, are also posting them as actual bug reports as well, so that they can be fixed and are addressed quickly.
I would also like to say, at least give them time to roll out an actual patch. As I’m sure you have all seen the same point rinsed over and over again on the forums.
After that I am confident, given their communication so far have been very transparent, that they will fix a large majority of the problems people are facing.
And no, applications aren’t games but you have a way better handle on how challenging it can be to turn something big out with a small team than most. Thank you for taking the time to reply to my post, and I really hope they fix the issue you have been having in the next patch so you can have as much fun as some of us are.
Also someone said it’s worse than the release of Fallout 76, well that’s not really the point I was making. The point was the team working on Gen 0 is around 20, the team who worked on Fallout 76 at Bethesda Game Studios Austin was around 400 people. And the fact 20 people have turned out a game that imo I enjoy way more than a game made by 400 people is impressive.
Which aspect of management would be to blame for letting the game launch around other triple A titles? Because I’m certain they’ve had a negative impact on GZ’s sales. I would have easily paid double the price if GZ had these bugs fixed prior, and released later.
The only way I found to survive on solo without driving myself nuts on restocking is only fight enemies when it’s part of a mission, and always use a medium+ sized building to survive, otherwise I’ll get shot, exploded, clipped, or hit through the walls.
I’d honestly be surprised if the majority of the bugs reported weren’t already on the devs’ bug list at the time of launch. These aren’t hidden bugs that you need to search for. They’re pretty overt and easy to find for the most part. You just have to play the game. Some of the more obscure ones related to missions when you play coop are a bit harder to find, but it just takes a few sessions of playing coop as a guest vs host before they become pretty apparent.
@Crunchmeister, did you seriously have to rebut a 7 day old post? I’m not even sure where to start with this one.
That post is a 7 day old Call to Arms. A Call to Arms against circumstances that largely no longer obtain.
My comments about the press were largely a self-indulgent rant. The reviews from the ‘gaming’ ‘journalists’ (and I use both of those terms very loosely), were invariably:
The game is too hard - seriously?
The game is too empty - the idiots never left the Archipelago. Imagine them up north, creeping across a field with no cover because there’s five T3 Hunters moving along the road to the left and a T3 Harvester with its four T3 Runner escort in the woods to the right; and
All the buildings look the same - yes, this was a fair point. I would have went for a smaller (but not condensed) map with a bit more asset variation. They could have then opened up new areas with new assets (in the form of local flavour) as DLC.
But in this circumstance I find myself in defence of the journalists. Judging from the YouTubers and Twitch Streamers that (despite being actual gamers) also failed to find any early bugs (even though many were playing co-op - the Russian Roulette of Generation Zero), it seems that in pre-release, the game was far more stable. So it seems the devs broke something important in their efforts to get it out the door.
Of course, quests would still have been broken, assets would still have been floating in the air or clipped into the wall or ground and containers would still have been unreachable. So no matter what, this game wouldn’t have been released in a pristine state.
But back to the other main reason for the Call to Arms:
The state of the forum at the time… Well, feel free to dig through old posts if you want to see childish, self-entitled tantrums from teens and adults. Worst of all was the constant repetition. Why post your concerns (usually in the most dickish language and tone they could come up with), in another topic, when you could start your own? So, we had topic after topic of:
This game is frakked,
Plz patch now; and
Devs respond!
The total value of which was zero.
No doubt the devs were already feeling terrible as the bug reports rolled in; recording a litany of failures. I imagine for most, their stomach acid was churning as they read (or heard their colleagues read), those posts. Some were probably even heartbroken; and for what?
Not one of those topics or posts changed a god damned thing.
The devs are unable to turn back time after all. The moment the bug reports started rolling in, they started identifying issues and fixing them. The community leaders kept the playerbase advised, but in their haste to denigrate, the whingers buried those threads.
So at the end of it, those people were left with the exact same choices they had at the start:
Get a refund,
Shelve the game and wait for patches,
Help the community and devs by providing bug reports and feedback; or to
Simply shut the fuck up and play the game.
Which brings us full circle back to @Crunchmeister’s original post. Most of it is a whinge. It’s an eloquent whinge. It’s a well-reasoned whinge. But it is, nevertheless, still a whinge; and it helps no-one.
So simply ignoring the four paragraphs in the middle, we’re left with some constructive comments:
Both true. The inventory management system drives me nuts, and the skill tree is the weirdest thing I’ve seen in ages; and that’s just two examples. If you have some ideas on how the game mechanics or robot varieties can be improved, start a new thread or find one that’s similar over in Feedback.
As for this last point:
(Emphasis mine)
You’re assuming that they’ve found the major problems.
The quest guy might be chasing down bad triggers because the multiplayer guy is still stumped as to why everything is going to shit on his end.
Anyway, I’ve spent an hour on this on-and-off, and the following posts, at a glance, seem to simply be a repetition of your own arguments and/or more whinging, so I’ll sign off.
The repition, as you articulately pointed out is by nature a form of whining. I’m unsure if you referred to my whining, which I will admit is what is because I unfortunately paid the $40 and can’t receive a refund. My ethos in all of this complaining, although I can’t speak on behalf of others, is to light a fire. I hope that by constant whining they’ll shut us up by providing what was paid for. I’m tired of feeling as though my time was wasted on a game that I have high hopes for just so the org runs away with our money. Not trying to be presumptuous, moreso cautious. If you don’t ask you will definitely not receive. Kudos to your civil retorts.
To be honest, I wasn’t going to respond at all. But I always feel the tiniest bit guilty when somebody writes a response like that and I ignore it. Plus, he was completely civil and had well-reasoned points; I just found them pointless.
You might very well have a point. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, after all. Ultimately, all anybody can do is decide for themselves what course they’re going to take. For me… Well, it hasn’t even had its first patch yet; and if the game is still a mess afterward? Well, I think Iron Rain comes out tomorrow and Rage 2 next month. I’ll come back to GZ later.
Not all presumptions are bad. After all, if you presume the worst in life, everything else is a pleasant surprise.
But I hear you, mate. In regards to Kickstarter and Early Access games I’ve been far too generous with my wallet over the years. Even Julian Gollop’s Phoenix Point, which I backed years ago, is now becoming an Epic Games timed exclusive. Ugh.
