Eleon needs to stop making releases live before fixing all the critical bugs. This is no longer an early release game. No one needed 1.5. All where nice to have changes. It should have been delayed and all critical bugs reviewed and fixed. But now we have the jump pack turning on/off during quests. We have players warping around when talking with NPC's during quests. I heard one of the developers talking about changing how they do development and releases but so far nothing seems to have changed. Game development is hard but making updates that have critical bugs just make people not want to bother playing. If Eleon does not care enough to make sure a release is the best they can make it why should the players care. If Eleon wants to grow the player base the game must be relatively bug free and must stay bug free when updating the game.
Never. This is still an Alpha game, feature implementation (hard to guess from outside and without a substantial roadmap) is somewhere around 60% to 70% done. Beta isn't on the table, at least not as far as we know. As far as i know there is a closed beta tester (you can see the person spamming the forums all the time, i guess that's why there aren't that many bugs found before the release of an experimental version ) but with only 7 devs (inclusing art guys) according to their own statement there isn't a lot of QA to be done. Eleon is kinda NoMansSkying it. "Release" the half finished product and fix it up afterwards. Basically an even worse version of a Live-Service-Game: the half finished game and no option to at least buy a shiney breastplate for 25$ to make yourself look good while standing in the dumpster. Discussions like these are best postponed a few years. It usually just ends in a standoff between people bashing Eleon for it and a ever so slowly shrinking bunch of white knights. Basher out, good night.
Actually there are more, and it's a bit unfair for these guys to expect them to be able to cover all what can happen due to different systems configurations, multiple scenarios using different configs and PDA setups, and multiplayer which can't really be properly "playtested" by lone players. At best your assessment is a very sketchy attempt at trying to blame someone unrelated for the bugs found after a release by lots of players. Even in a few years if you find nothing better to defend your point than using a wide sketchy brush to paint everything all black or all white, you will still be wasting your time. As for this "white knight" meme, what about introducing some novelty here : the "grey nights". They're players that are not as stupid as you may think and see the game moving forwards, carrying many bugs with it, but sporting some new facets and surely lots of unseen under-the-hood fixes and changes. As such, there is no need to defend each and every aspect of the game as it is now, but there are aspects on which many players are just speaking nonsense and patting themselves on the back for it. When players speculate, they can go from one end of the spectrum to the other and this doesn't bring any more facts to the discussion, but it sure makes them feel important. When someone chimes in with a more moderate view on the subject and gets painted with the "white knight" brush it only shows how shallow some player's analysis can be, and you can be sure the developers are able to see it too. That may be why some representatives can simply use PR tricks to tend to the fires here and there, but real information rarely comes forward because most players are just not interested in this. Serious discussions on these forums are not really possible because some players suffer from severe entitlement syndromes or just lack basic education, but they still have "The Power" to criticize all and everything (even "lazy closed beta testers"...) hidden behind the anonymity of their remote screen...
The answer is: When it's ready for release. There's still a lot of things to be done - ever seen the Radar device that does nothing but look kind of neat? How about the Capacitor Deco item that specifically states it doesn't have a function yet? Sit back, relax, enjoy the ride, and when RTM time comes you'll be able to look back and go "I remember when..." like the rest of us who understand how these sort of seemingly perpetual project games really go.
I can put a dog into a skirt, put him some lipstick on and teach him how to sway to Lady Marmelade. It's still going to be a dog. This is not a finished game. Thus it is an Alpha. And i really don't care if somebody wants to sell it as something different to me, its simply not true.
Actually yes. It is still very much in Alpha development. Eleon just decided to remove the "Early Access" tag from it on the store. Which falsely makes it appear as if it is a final released product. Probably one of the stupidest moves they could possibly make IMHO. Sits right along side enabling workshop support before the majority of the core mechanics were even developed, much less complete. At a guess probably 2/3rds of the blueprints in the workshop are complete garbage for the current game version.
An Example World of Warships got released 2015 and is yet not FINISHED! It gets constantly reworked, rewritten, turned around, edited, changed and gets worst by each of its, what?, 200+patches? since its RELEASE V 0.1 (they are now at 0.10.4 or so). Oh., and btw., THEIR Devs give a damn what their Players want and therefore do not listen to them.
Stay away from server play and MP, play only single player vanilla game and chosen custom scenarios for single player. This until what you think is a 'released' game. By doing that 90% of the bugs I read about don't happen to me and I have a fine gaming experience. Of course, a lot of 'placeholder' game mechanics need to be refined, improved, fixed, but until then it's advicable to stay in single player. I actually find it amazing that apparently people are willing to PAY to play on a server...They don't deserve else than paying for their stupidity, sorry to say it so openly.
Since Steam is not the developer, what they say doesn't really matter. Steam isn't even a publisher, so what they say also doesn't matter. There is also no "Alpha/Beta/RC#" category, so basing anything on what Steam says... you might as well ask an 80 year old homeless Amish person for advise.
No, totally false. Steam is a platform which has precise rules that apply for presenting games which are released or Early Access, for you this doesn't make a big difference maybe, but it does for developers in terms of Search Visibility which is an important financial and marketing aspect.
Instead of quoting what has already been communicated in detail, please read over here about the reasons and other thoughts: https://empyriononline.com/articles/?page=3
https://empyriononline.com/threads/leaving-alpha-early-access-some-clarifications.94900/ https://empyriononline.com/threads/empyrion-galactic-survival-leaving-alpha-early-access.94778/