Even AAA games are prone to this. I love Fallout and Elder Scrolls and spent hundreds of hours in those games but there is no denying they can be buggy at times. And those games are supposed be in finished state.
Even SWTOR, which is now almost 10 Years old, has still bugs which I know since the Game started. Even if sometimes Painful to see them happen I started to love them
Well... I have used it as an example of great joystick support and how Eleon could do something similar to attract all those frustrated players... But I would never say it's better! But then again, is there anything better than EGS?
Is Elite: Dangerous better than EGS? In terms of flight model, joystick support, and *ahem* CPU allocation, absolutely. The economy, also. It would be pretty hard to argue otherwise, and I'd encourage Eleon to take inspiration where it can. In terms of what to do when not flying, or in terms of being able to build your own ships? Not so much. I have 2600 hrs in EGS, and probably only a few hundred in E: D... because as pretty as it is, it gets boring fast, so these are suggestions, not being detrimental to EGS
Since there seems to be a lot of uncertainty about "alpha", "beta", "release" states, and since the developers appear to deviate from the industry norm in this regard, here are the industry "common definitions" for each: alpha: The game is (partially) playable. Features are still missing. For example, it may still be lacking any quests/missions, it may be limited to parts of the full game world, systems and user interface may still be buggy and preliminary etc. beta: The game is feature complete. And I mean feature complete. Everything that should be in the game, is. Bugs, even terrible crash bugs, remain and are intended to resolve during the beta phase. Some polish may yet be added, but in general, this is to squash bugs. release: The game is feature complete, finished, and stable. Going off these definitions, Empyrion is still in the alpha state, or maybe somewhere in between the alpha and beta states (which technically still puts it in the alpha quadrant...). It doesn't matter if Eleon definies this differently. This is the industry standard, and this is what customers expect when they read this terminology. What happens when you define things differently and publish an alpha state game as a finished release is what you see in the steam reviews now. If you limit those to reviews starting yesterday (day of "release"), you get mixed reviews, and that's only because longer time fans post their positive reviews to offset the numerous new player disappointments. Several people warned about exactly this happening, and it has. Good luck to Eleon, you have your work cut out for you in managing customer expectations and delivering LOTS of improvements quickly now. If you really think taking a summer break right at this point in time is a good move, you'll come back to crushingly negative customer reviews afterwards.
That is not accurate : many of these recent negative reviews are not from new players, but from players that have owned the game for some time, and they are frustrated by the devs decision. I can copy-paste them on the forum if you don't believe me, but needless to say that this was already mentioned in another thread just earlier today, and @Fractalite can confirm this.
Okay, so old players are still reviewing on both sides. Have you looked at the quotas between new and old players here? I'll give you some current numbers: If I filter for... positive reviews, all purchase types, all languages, date range August 5 until now, playtime 0 to 40 hours, Steam shows me 4 reviews. positive reviews, all purchase types, all languages, date range August 5 until now, playtime 40+ hours, Steam shows me 28 reviews. negative reviews, all purchase types, all languages, date range August 5 until now, playtime 0 to 40 hours, Steam shows me 12 reviews. negative reviews, all purchase types, all languages, date range August 5 until now, playtime 40+ hours, Steam shows me 14 reviews. In short, the negative reviews are split almost 50:50 between old and new players, while the positive reviews are overwhelmingly from old players. The bias you mention works both ways, and we will see lots more reviews from new players now due to the game being out of early access. In my opinion, if the game doesn't improve very much in a very short time frame right now, we're going to see an abundance of negative reviews, and so far, I see nothing in the numbers to convince me otherwise.
Sure. The developers took their summer break, so let's look again in 1 or 2 weeks. I put some of these reviews in another thread: https://empyriononline.com/threads/version-1-0.95281/page-10#post-413800 .
And do you think new players will look into the reviews as deeply as either of us did? Or will they simply look at "mixed" or "mostly negative" reviews and just browse on? Yes, let's look again in a week or two.
I check these on a daily basis, and did so for years. They change fast, and when too many negative, many positives come in to balance. It may well be a not-so-smart move to get a sudden cash income, but what is important is that they hold their promise to continue working on the game. And upon this, it's their reputation that's at stake, obviously.But for cashflow, I showed the numbers in another thread, and they mentioned they did not do it for money. So off goes the "cashgrab" theory. We simply can't rule out anything because "everything is possible" when we're speculating. I just think it's not reasonable to believe they will not honor their promise, and many players are much closer than me to these developers and consider them highly. I trust them.
I am not saying they won't uphold their commitment. I'm simply saying the stakes and customer expectations are now vastly higher, combined with far lower tolerance to "wait and see" with a released title compared to an early access one. And if the negative reviews take over, it can be really hard to bounce back from that on Steam.
Sure, like Rage 2 ... When the price gets low enough, I buy it, and I don't have to look at reviews. It's not just a question of "volume" of reviews, but of content. I bought games that had more negative than positive, and most of these were because players were unable to start the game. But in some of the positive, players were pointing to the problem and solution. It worked for me, but I could have missed an opportunity. Some simply review-bomb for unrelated reasons, to the point Steam had to make a safety mechanism to prevent this - not saying it's perfect, but it shows the very relative seriousness we can attribute to reviews and ratings. And now we have "frustrated" players that played the game without any complaint, and they react to this v1.0. Let time pass and we'll see. Many players don't care, there are between 500k - 1million owners, and many of these may want the game to move forward enough to weigh in their appreciation too. We only have around 15k reviews on this number. Players sometimes compare Empyrion to NoManSky, and that's very ironic, because that game went through a very chaotic launch, and despites that the developers are still updating it, and it still bears the "negative" marks of its launch. And players still buy it, even at that high price tag. So the same can apply to Empyrion, I have no problem with that for 10-20$.
I agree with this. I must say @lendarker has a point, and I'm concerned for the point he makes about a lot of people just look at the numbers and don't bother to read the reviews, I agree with that assessment. That said, it's way to early to tell. Pulling up and presenting data on reviews at this point is worse than useless as it gives a false picture, there are FAR to few data points at this time to make any conclusions. Look at the numbers posted. The biggest one is 28! The points made are valid, and I have no problem with the method of comparison but less than 60 reviews tells you nothing. Wait a month, then maybe you'll have a little real data, but even then it will be on the edge of too small a sample, and perhaps skewed due to it being launch data. The real tell will be long term. Will people believe the Devs that they'll continue fixes and small upgrades, and of course there's the question of if they really do ... Best intentions don't always survive meeting the real world. The comparison to NoManSky is valid. I'm very selective about my games. I looked hard at NMS and went with EGS instead. I read the reviews, and wasn't convinced the Devs there would fix the glaring errors. So my rather limited data set of ONE says the the comparison is real.
Having both games, I can honestly say: NMS has really improved immensely. If Empyrion improved only half as much....well, one can dream.
