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Themystrix

BitCraft, wurm-like mmorpg sandbox

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They would be better off trying to fill in the barren VR mmo market, pre-alpha means it is long from even release. I never understand companies that announce a game 2-3 years before release minimum but I am sick of it really.

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Perfect youtube comment: 

 

If you could somehow sum up every failed Early Access game in one title and subtitle, it would be this"

 

Enough said. 

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It looks nice, but not sure if the gameplay can be compared to wurm just because you can build houses and fences.

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There's about 1000 early access titles with terraforming, building, hunting, exploration that are trying to be the next "Minecraft". Most of them fade away into nothingness or promise too many things at once and realise they can't deliver and turn into this Valheim-y type of game where content updates are promised and only 1 gets delivered per year (despite valheim making close to 100 m EUR in sales in 2021). See 7 days to die as another scummy example.

 

Pretty sure one can find many other games fitting the same "early access" issue. 

 

Personally I've decided to not support any game unless it actually gets released, no pre orders, no early access, no betas, release the product and then I'll support it with my money. 

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1 hour ago, elentari said:

There's about 1000 early access titles with terraforming, building, hunting, exploration that are trying to be the next "Minecraft". Most of them fade away into nothingness or promise too many things at once and realise they can't deliver and turn into this Valheim-y type of game where content updates are promised and only 1 gets delivered per year (despite valheim making close to 100 m EUR in sales in 2021). See 7 days to die as another scummy example.

 

Pretty sure one can find many other games fitting the same "early access" issue. 

 

Personally I've decided to not support any game unless it actually gets released, no pre orders, no early access, no betas, release the product and then I'll support it with my money. 

 

Yes and no.

 

For example Medieval Engineers was abandoned but despite being in perpetual Early Access, it does scratch that itch when it comes to building and a bit of mechanics+automation.

It's unfinished, it's not very exciting but the one thing i got it for, which is building massive and complex structures, works well and i often go back to it. Mostly negative reviews deter future buyers but i had lots of fun with it.

Would i be happier if they continued development? Yes.

Do i regret buying it? No.

 

On example of Stationeers, pretty much all of the systems were revamped and often rebuilt from scratch, game is still amazing and being updated often. Similarly with Empyrion, ARK, Colony Survival, Space Engineers, ECO and countless other. 

Some of the games many of us bought left EA in condition which doesn't warrant calling it a "release", some are in EA for years and are getting better and better, some got abandoned in EA.

 

I don't agree with painting all developers with one brush based on the release cycle which most(all?) games go through.

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1 hour ago, elentari said:

 Valheim-y type of game where content updates are promised and only 1 gets delivered per year (despite valheim making close to 100 m EUR in sales in 2021).

 

You do realise in the case of Valheim that they had a tiny dev team when they became a succcess, right? And that hiring and training new developers costs time, cutting into actual development time. Yes it took them a long time to get their big first update out of the door, yes it didn't have all that much content, but that's to be expected if you look at where their team was at launch. 100m euro in sales is completely irrelevant when it comes to how much time it takes to scale up your team from a really tiny one to something bigger as you stay bottlenecked by things like training your new employees. Worse, the bigger they try to scale their team the longer it would have taken them to get this latest update out of the door in the first place!

So you could say that the game being so successful is the very thing that slowed development down, because this success allowed them to really scale up their team. So slower updates in the short run for faster updates in the long run. Judging them in how long their first update took is thus quite shortsighted to be honest.

Edited by Ecrir

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Yes & no. Having worked at a software company years ago (I wasn't a dev, I was in the marketing team but they worked close with us so we can actually understand what they were working on) all new dev interviews were done not by HR but by senior devs themselves. The devs weren't so much "trained" as they were selected based on what software they worked on in the past and how long they took to adapt to new situations. You don't hire a dev to work in python if he has never worked in python before. 

 

Valheim is in Unity using C# from what I recall and honestly there's crap ton of Unity devs out there. With that kind of money the development schedule should be picked up considerably. 

The gaming market isn't new, there are of hundreds of thousands of devs everywhere with a lot of talent behind them. Not to mention the fact that programmers / devs are actually the perfect examples of work from home scenarios. You don't need "to train" them in the office, they can work from home if you give them the resources they need. All the devs I know in real life were the least impacted by covid. 

 

In many ways devs are probably the unique exception since they don't really need training like other jobs (such as a call center agent), more like a good senior dev to keep things on track when issues come up. 

 

Also, I'm tired of seeing potentially great games being held back by small teams with zero vision. I gotta ask, but if you pour years of work into something, you do it without hoping it will ever be a success? You never consider the possibility of it being a hit and have to scale your operation to a larger one ? 

 

I understand when this was an issue back in the early 2000s and small companies released big hits but their servers couldn't cope with handling such a large influx of players (see WoW initial launch, how laggy it was for example) but this is 2021...come on. '

 

Tiny team or not, when the big bucks are pouring in, that's when you have to take advantage of the momentum and scale up the business, hire more people, invest in advertising, maybe other platforms, etc. It's mind boggling for me to understand how a company can suddenly make millions of euros in less than a year, and still have issues with the occult concept of hiring people. 

 

To quote an old Romanian expression " If someone really wants to do something, it's going to get done". The reverse applies as well. 

 

 

Edited by elentari

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Why though? 

 

Six months for a major update on a surprise hit seems okay in early access. 

 

I'd say that those games are being held back by gamers who think that just because lots of them paid their $20 they're entitled to the company suddenly hiring dozens of new staff and pumping out content, as opposed to working with their existing vision and plan. 

 

But what would I know, I wasn't a marketer for a software company

Edited by Archaed

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Oh it's undeniable that many of the projects get abandoned for reasons unknown. It is sad and people do get frustrated but it's not 100% of EA titles that end up in the trash. Some of the unfinished and abandoned EA titles are well playable and will give us hundreds of hours of fun.

 

My point was that EA is sometimes a necessary part of the development cycle and unless i try the game my self, i can't have an opinion about it. Going by reviews helps a bit but again, on example of Medieval Engineers, the game is clearly abandoned and unfinished but the part of functionality which interests me is well done, so for me, it is a complete product (it's not but i hope you know what i mean).

 

Similarly with WO, if the development stopped right now and only the final bugs were fixed and an announcement was made to say "this is the final product", would i stop playing? No, WO already has enough to offer to keep me busy for a long time.

 

I agree that the paid EA is abused by people who slap free assets and systems together in Unity, get few sales and forget about the whole thing. They simply don't care and that is rampant in gaming industry but if i didn't get Satisfactory in EA, i would have missed the entire journey it's going through. Factorio is the next one, it took years for it to leave EA but each next update made me play it again.

 

Could it be done without EA? Sure, released games can be updated as well and companies which can afford that kind of development cycle, morally should do that. Build and release the game and then keep updating it.

Except...

If there was no EA, we would complain about games being released while "not ready", despite any releases being pushed out later. Because some of the great dev teams simply can't feed their families for 3 years from their savings alone, unfinished products would be going live.

 

The EA tag lets people know to lower their expectations i guess. Any EA title gets a bit of slack from me when it comes to minor annoyances and bugs i can work around. It's the lack of control by the platform (e.g. Steam) that ruins it. If a game has 1 positive to a million negative reviews, it still won't be taken down by the platform because it might get that one more sale to someone who didn't check the reviews.

 

It's not the premise of EA or our past experiences with EA titles that make the concept of early access wrong in any way i think. It's the lack of control and accountability for failed products or even scams.

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1 hour ago, Archaed said:

as opposed to working with their existing vision and plan. 

Call me a skeptic, but when their initial "vision" gets thrown out the door from the middle of the year, kinda tells me their vision isn't that great. 4 hyped content updates reduced to one. 

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/892970/view/3056224118622201244 

 

I've checked the update myself, and it's not much for half a year of work. It's barebones content at its best, if even that. Some of the changes weren't even that necessary to begin with, like the food/stamina balancing. 

 

Maybe I've gotten jaded over false promises over the years in the gaming industry or the rise of so many "scummy business approaches" but for me it seems that for every game that actually makes it out of EA when it has enough funding, there's 50 games that fade into obscurity and 100 other games that either never make it out of EA (thus selling a forever incomplete product) or they get released in a broken unfinished state and never get updates again. 

 

When I see a game earning millions of dollars in a few weeks, yeah for me it comes with the expectation of said devs to kick things in gear. Personally I think the EA model now is too deregulated and easily abused by people. The fact that Steam keeps hosting such games on their platform compounds the issue. 

 

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it'll turn out to be a great game. Maybe Bitcraft will be awesome too. But at this point I'm seeing too many patterns repeat themselves and would rather just buy games that are already finished. 

Edited by elentari

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Valheim is already a great game, wouldn't have made so much if it wasn't. 

 

Seems you've just picked an amazing, fleshed out game in early access as an example of the complete opposite

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Agree to disagree then & time will tell about its performance. For me it simply has the same red flags of a game that will be kept in early access for years while asking the same price released games have. 

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I went to the site and filled out the survey and it asked what games do you play.  And I was amused that wurm was not in the list.  Not that wurm is a huge user base but the preview and discord makes it out to be a clone.

 

Kit

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20 hours ago, elentari said:

Call me a skeptic, but when their initial "vision" gets thrown out the door from the middle of the year, kinda tells me their vision isn't that great. 4 hyped content updates reduced to one. 

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/892970/view/3056224118622201244 

 

I've checked the update myself, and it's not much for half a year of work. It's barebones content at its best, if even that. Some of the changes weren't even that necessary to begin with, like the food/stamina balancing.

 

They've done a lot of ground work in this update in order to ensure that future big updates don't become one giant performance/bug mess, as is unfortunately the case with plenty of other early access games. Performance has for example massively improved in areas with a lot of construction. Honestly I'm glad they've actually spend a good amount of time on performance and bugs, instead of just pushing content out of the door until the entire game falls flat on it's face and becomes nigh unplayable. Too many early access games just do the latter and then give up on performance almost entirely at the end because it's now a giant unfixable mess.

 

So there's a lot of invisible stuff (not content) in this update, which they also pointed out in a news message all the way back in June, including that there'd only be 1 large update this year because of that, instead of the planned 4. Maybe you missed that?

 

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/892970/view/3059613869759649545

Edited by Ecrir

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I registered for the alpha test. And I'll play and test it if I get picked. I like the idea of the game. But I won't give exuberant amounts of money to them. A standard 30 or so USD is all they'll get from me. I've been burned too many times by alpha-Kickstarter-gofundme-patron-steamearlyaccess games that promise so much and then fail spectacularly.

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On 9/22/2021 at 5:31 PM, Archaed said:

Valheim is already a great game, wouldn't have made so much if it wasn't. 

 

Seems you've just picked an amazing, fleshed out game in early access as an example of the complete opposite

I have more faith in BitCraft than Wurms future, but opinions are like a.. holes, everyone thinks they opinion is the best one yet it smells just as bad :) valheim is great cant deny.

 

I like the goals where the game is heading, will it ever reach it? I guess we will find out, at the current moment they aint asking money so thats nice. Wurm asks 8 euros per character and yet you might get banhammered without actual reason. I have talked loudly in past for bad customer service, if this new game have at least some, its already better. :)

 

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