I SO agree.... Amiga was an awesome computer and far better OS and system than any Microfart PC... Too bad Microfart had Gateway buy it as a front man then shelve it.
Better later than never: Scroll down to "The Team" section, where you can find the photos and the names: Olivier “John” Paroz, Uwe Kuehner and Eric "Luke" Lucas
Bookmarked it. Good read there. Did you read the forum section and Q&A ? Seems like they planned a full release as early as 2015 even on a tight kickstarter budget. Wonder what's taking so long now. They founded a "Société anonyme" in Lausanne, Switzerland, in June 2017. They also hired (at least) one additional programmer that is currently working on "live" implementation of gameplay features. This is a sensible move to allow smooth implementation of features, I guess.
The initial game has been pitched @Kickstarter, correct. But it failed its goal. The team continued never the less. Good decision imho
Wait... What... Empyrion is cancelddddd... NOOOooooo... well, at least I will get my life back... ... oh, fake news! Back to the cave, my blocks are calling me!
lol .... No "fake news" here : it's history. And of course it was a good decision to continue, seeing the balance sheet for the year 2016 shows that Early Access was a good move indeed.
@Kassonnade (kickstarter) I think they BADLY underrated the challenges of an open world survival game (lack of experience, AND lack of a good project plan / game design doc, probably), that's why the low budget goal and brave estimate on release. This genre is a nightmare and an amazingly huge amount of work - I assume that's one of the reasons large studios don't even bother to touch this, far too much risk & investment. BTW the game is at most 30% complete now as I see so... Between us, girls, I think it's going to be a vaporware if they don't find investors (or risk their incomes) and start growing very, very fast & rapidly, "fleeing ahead", so to speak. I think this title worths the investment for a real deal money-rain to pop in.
All I can say in response to the above, is that if this game is 30% complete, then I sure got my money's worth out of that quarter and a nickel. Any game I put 1200 hours into had paid for itself many times over. Yes, I enjoy watching things develop as we go merrily along. For me, the game is already a full game, and I'm having a ball.
Sure, from player perspective it is a great buy indeed. What I'm saying is, it WORTHS more investment, instead of doing it half arsed with a tiny little team, as I strongly believe there's much, much more to get out of this game both content and financial wise. [side note: I wish these guys raked in the piles of cash instead of "hello games" with their fraudulent title and false advertising (which apparently is not a crime anymore....), so they could have gone full speed on day one]
It is worth more investment no doubt about it, I could see that 2 years ago and I still believe it. The problem I see however, is we have one very recent example of that and what happens when a big company force deadline on Studios, we end up with basically less features overall and extremely buggy features at that. NMS..... So what Empyrion really needs is a long term backer that's NOT like SONY or the like where they are going to force deadlines NO MATTER WHAT. Over ensuring the code in the program is in fact stable. We need a millionaire to fall in love with the game and back it. I saw up the page that in another post it says Eleon have no previous gaming experience, but that's not entirely true either, they have MC experts that have coded MC for years and years, hence why there file system works similar. Eleon have found a way to code this type of game faster than any others Ive ever seen, we owe a big thanks to Unity for that also, if it wasn't for Unity, you ,me, none of us would be playing this game, or many others that are fun, anyone up for a game of SE ? No me either. PN is also Unity, unfortunately PN has slowly started to become more and more like Empyrion, there devs, though I like them, have added things like the multitool, if ever we didn't want another one of those over the cool tools PN had. PN is another game lacking in funding in this genre, struggling to make it, made harder by the fact Empyrion pretty much beat them to it, the whole punch line. SE also had issues in its early days getting up and running, they were lucky they had already sold us all a dud game, minerwars , which they never finished but gave owners a free copy of SE, which is fair considering all the did with minerwars was develop SEs base rendering engine and base assets. So GO ELEON ! They have been Steaming along like an unstoppable steam train for over 2 years now, they, Eleon , looking at steam sales numbers and doing a VERY BASIC estimation should be comfortable in funding, they may have employed more staff, hard to say, but the Updates from around 5.5 seemed to contain more content. Ive been in love with this game ever sinse the devs got on Skype many many moons ago and started chatting about there vision for the game. Looking at it now, yea probably 20 to 30% complete. Time is always against game studios, the threat of something better coming out before your project is complete can cost huge sales, games in this genre though, much more complex than most genres, they take literally years to code properly, SE renderer about 4 to 5 years, SE another 3 or 4 years, SE, still a bit of a mess. SE is a good example of trying to do it full on complex high detail and physics. Almost 10 years in total really. Empyrion is tackling the Entertainment side first and attacking the detailed high def and physics as they go along, and towards the end of development. This system I have seen many people be critical of, but that's a lack of understanding Unity in my opinion. This system Unity have, is starting to show over time, just how flexible it is as an engine, just look at all the different genres that have jumped onto it and literally saved themselves 2 to 3 years work instantly. Smart stuff and someone had to do it. Im just really impressed it was a bunch of Gamers that did it ! Eleon are pretty much all gamers, they even all play there own game ! Yes a lot of developers don't , they test and go play something else ! Not our devs ! Long live Eleon Studios ! Empyrion is like MC in space , only better !
10 years is quite a long stretch in the computer world. I would take the game as it is, better balanced, and crank the build limits and graphics quality (with bigger planets!!!!). Players are not drawn in by fancy O2 and heat / rads effects or precise collision damage, and a company should never rely on word of mouth only to generate sales. There is only so much a player base can do to help promote a product before losing credit, and I read that the financial "second wind" does not come at final release, the biggest income is earned at the start of early access. They need to catch the buyers with eye candy, because that's something that stands out from reviews. They can always patch and tweak after this.
I don't know, but I have been playing nms with a few mods like the realistic shader and turned off building limits and changed a few settings and it's an awesome game. My wife and I love it and compete with each other in exploration and discoveries. Great game and great fun. It's still being worked on too so it keeps improving.
