DEV BLOG Empyrion Galactic Survival: Leaving Alpha & Early Access

Discussion in 'News & Announcements' started by Hummel-o-War, Jul 16, 2020.

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  1. Escarli

    Escarli Rear Admiral

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    They might be developers but it's also a business for them as well and that's an important thing to remember, no one can truely say what the consequences will be until it's happened. They've said that developement will continue, that's fine for me.
     
    #161
  2. mr_road

    mr_road Lieutenant

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    Sorry... DLC for crouching was a bit tounge in check :) I do not expect core game mechanics/unblancing to be in DLC.
     
    #162
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  3. FrancoBam

    FrancoBam Ensign

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    This game is lightyears away from getting Gold or Release state. After playing 800 hours (which I really appreciated) it is suddenly not starting anymore. The support answer was (with some helping on a proper new installation) just: I do not fit the requirements. (Intel 530HD internal GPU on 16GB RAM). And I am not the only one...
    List of games running well: 7DTD, Space Engineers, Subsistence, Satisfactory, World of Warships, Path of Exile, Subnautica (!) and many more... List of games not running: Empyrion Galactic Survival.
    I was having a look at the bug forum many times in the last weeks and as far as I can see the list of bug reports is endless... I don´t want to blame the support or the programmers for an issue which can happen anytime and will hopefully solved at a time. But the decision to go for the release in this state is just ridiculous.
     
    #163
  4. Normal69

    Normal69 Lieutenant

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    I have high hopes for this!

    We got this team of Eleon with higher IQ than anyone in the world.
    They will fix all things with the game, meanwhile getting in the much needed new features too without beta in three weeks, or else! :) (and still retain their mental balance)
    (those features, bugs and glitches are listed above and below my comment)



    We players will give any kind of feedback they'll need.
     
    #164
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  5. Cluascorp

    Cluascorp Commander

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    Well, good luck Eleon, i think you are really gonna need it ... :eek:
     
    #165
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  6. Apollyon

    Apollyon Lieutenant

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    One thing you should fix with extra priority if you don't want to people get mad:
    - third person aiming
    I don't play much in third person, so I don't mind, but most people do.
    Some other things:
    - player character – he/she is terrible, when you see them third person
    - crouch
    - sounds (npc-s, weapons)
    - npc-s, like the arachnid, which is a default unity stuff
    - rebalance / rethink of factory
    - serious bugs... I mean glitches, which are forcing people to use the console to workaround them
    - turn off console - or at least the ability to cheat with it during game (when bugs have been fixed)
     
    #166
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  7. Addy

    Addy Lieutenant

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    I just don't see it that way, how will it revitalize the community if you attract people who expect a finished game, just to find lots of bugs and the Devs still adding content that makes new bugs, you just get bad reviews and the game gets a bad name.


    [
     
    #167
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  8. ArcticPrism

    ArcticPrism Commander

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    As many others have already said, it's great that you guys do actually want to leave Alpha/Early Access eventually but at the same time it's concerning. Why a "full release" instead of beta? The game is pretty unstable right now, especially with structures(mainly vessels) disappearing frequently. There's also a lot of other bugs, performance and stability problems that need to be addressed. This says nothing of the many features that are clearly incomplete and still in the early-middle stages of development or just not implemented at all.

    One of the biggest problems with removing the Alpha/Early Access label is that any new players who buy into the game are going to expect a complete and polished product which Empyrion is still far from being. This means there's going to be a lot of negative reviews which is going to hurt the long term success of the game.
     
    #168
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  9. Kassonnade

    Kassonnade Rear Admiral

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    I have a few years now of "bug reports" watch on the forum, and also from reading reviews on Steam, and one thing stands out :

    - a great deal of "bugs" are not "bugs" but failure to follow basic guidelines, like old saves will not work after this patch - please start new game

    Despites that being repeated regularly, players still report bugs caused by using an old savegame not supported with new version, or they used a custom config, or they have a third party software playing tricks with the OS and Empyrion, or... a combination of all this. And not even talking about private servers issues that get reported to Eleon while they are cause by server owner's negligence.

    Also, many "genuine" bug reports derive from very specific and "specialized" usage of one of the game's many tools and advanced features, that most new players will not get into before a good while or might even never use.

    And players leave negative reviews because they can't start the game, or don't appreciate that their specific suggestion was not already and quickly implemented by the devs, or because they expected AAA quality, and many more unreliable "criticism" about the game state per se.

    So when we shave these out of the lot, we may have a better picture of the state of the game. It is far from perfect, but also far from a dramatic pile of bugs and incomplete features.

    I did not waste my time on statistics, but potential customers may not be as stupid as simply basing their decision after reading a review like "game not starting - refunded - not recommended" while all the reviews before and after talk about game content from a working game, and of course everyone's bias can be very apparent. I also read negative reviews just prior to purchasing, and again when I bought a 2nd copy for my kid, as I do for all games.

    On this "ratings" question, we also have to relativize things a bit. Nowadays on Steam, some big AAA games get bad ratings while stupid 2-d or top-down "RPG Maker" student-grade games hit the top of the charts. This tells a lot about Steam ratings...
     
    #169
    Last edited: Jul 17, 2020
  10. Kasero

    Kasero Lieutenant

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    I have almost 1100 Steam hours playing Empyrion exclusively SP and so far I am still very enjoying playing it.
    I have a very old computer (Dual core E8500 3.16 GHz, 8 GB ram, GForce GTX 660 2 GB vram) and my setting gives me 18-25 fps.
    Apart from the window telling me "low memory" at the start, as far as I remember, I never had a game crash or even a significant bug, so everything is good for me.
    As long as the developers keep developing Empyrion I will be happy. So no problem for me if the game version is alpha 12, beta 13 or 1.0 as long as I can play.
    Keep going Eleon, you have my support (and surely will have it in the future).
     
    #170
  11. Sofianinho

    Sofianinho Captain

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    [​IMG]

    Called it :)
    I for one am excited for a new project !
     
    #171
  12. brecers

    brecers Lieutenant

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    Мне кажется, что из-за моего желания выйти из своей альфы разработчики потеряют не только будущих игроков, они потеряют совесть. Держите свои обещания геймплея и признавайте свои ошибки. Прости меня, если я был груб.
     
    #172
  13. monktk

    monktk Captain

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    Ohhh, goodie. Gatekeeping.

    So all of this is the exact opposite of what I've observed. I'm 37, no kids.

    When I was a young gamer, games were released as-is. On console the cartridge you got was what it was. On PC you could patch, but you'd need an extra disk you could sometimes order later. Or if you bought the game a while after release, later printings would be an updated version. Sometimes there might be an expansion pack you could buy and that's when your game would get patched.

    The ability to "grow and evolve with a developing game" was just not a thing at all when I was a kid and very young adult. It's really only even been a thing since the internet kicked off in a big way, and even then it happened first in the PC space with online multiplayer games like Diablo 2 (2000) or Warcraft 3 (2002) from the few studios able to really offer that experience at that time. And a lot of players still didn't patch those until a bit later, anyway. Note that even then those were full release games.

    Following and helping test a game still in active initial development, with major features still being implemented and fleshed out? That's new. That's very new.

    So this is something young gamers actually grew up with, but that those of us who are older didn't get to experience until we were adults. So I don't quite follow an accusation that this is all somehow foreign to them but not to us.

    Most of the time when I see older gamers complaining about younger gamers on this particular subject, it's that the kids are used to accepting big-name games initially released in a state like Simcity 2013, Diablo 3, or No Man's Sky so devs feel like they can get away with it. 2 of those games did drastically improve later, but oh my, the early reviews on all 3. So very many of those negative reviews were from gamers closer to my own age talking about how back in our day this wasn't acceptable, a game had to be in a proper, ready-to-go state because you couldn't just push it out for the players to test on release and then patch it days or weeks later.


    As for the idea that kids are part of a significantly more disposable society and just don't have loyalty to games anymore and flit from one thing to another, Minecraft was ridiculously popular among young gamers. Those who played it when quite young and who have been there through all its updates still love it. To this day it's among the most popular games. An awful lot of that is driven by young gamers. I don't see why they should be immune to nostalgia and love for the things that have brought them joy any more than we are. They're not alien entities. We don't stick with every game we've ever picked up, either. Not every game is a love affair, it just seems that way when we're recollecting and thinking about the games that really did something for us. We just don't think about the ones that didn't. That doesn't mean we were somehow lacking in loyalty or attention span. Yeah, the original Star Fox just doesn't have the same kick for them it did for me, just as I'm not quite as into old Atari or arcade games as my father is. They just don't mean the same thing to me.

    But the kids have got their own touchstones like that. They're not actually all that different from us.

    I really just don't get the gatekeeping attitude some gamers closer to my own age harbor toward young gamers. Why would we not want to share this with them, see that same joy we experienced sparked in new gamers too?

    They're often blamed even for unethical, predatory practices in the game industry that actually target them (not at all applicable in the specific case of Eleon, naturally). They're blamed for decisions they cannot possibly have any hand in making. They're blamed even, and especially, when it makes no sense at all to do so. They're ruining gaming, apparently, with their youth and their liking things I don't like.

    That's nonsense, and this is the kind of thing which helps keep gaming a really unwelcoming place for a lot of people. I'm a disabled woman, I have a movement disorder and a damaged hand. I've had full grown adults just come unglued at me for daring to use a controller on certain PC games with a lot of simultaneous multi-button inputs that my hand can't handle, screamed at that I'm the reason for the "dumbing down" of games. And there's a reason I don't use voice chat except with people I already know.

    It's really tough to explain to kids that it's not great to be unwelcoming to others who are different from them when they're constantly being crapped on by adults for the crime of having been born later, and watching those same adults crap on other adults for other nonsense. And I can only imagine how all this feels to parents who are trying to introduce their children to gaming.

    Please rethink some of this.
     
    #173
    Last edited: Jul 17, 2020
  14. Kassonnade

    Kassonnade Rear Admiral

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    Maybe because when they were younger they suffered the same, and the chain goes on like it has done for as long as humans have existed ?
     
    #174
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  15. eLLe

    eLLe Captain

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    You wrote too much to bother with reading. At 50, I can say that I have been in the gaming industry since the beginning and I have played good and bad games. Experienced and saw what the players used to be like and what they are like today. Empyrion, exactly to date I have played 2299 hours and as far as I am concerned this is the best game ever. All I wanted was for me except maybe the physics of water but who knows maybe I will experience that too. Do I play Empyrion as before? No, which is due to problems with my semi-defective ancient PC, so sometimes it is very stressful for him to run this game. But I totally trust Eleon what he’s doing so how could they not when they gave me, for so little money, so many hours of play. Not a single one in my life I’ve played a lot has spent even half the time like in Empyrion. If I wrote something wrong, that is, something you did not state in your own, I apologize. I repeat, you wrote a book and at my age it becomes too strenuous to read such big texts.
     
    #175
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  16. cmguardia

    cmguardia Captain

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    Okay. What can you say? Everything is already said.
    I hope you already have it well thought out and I sincerely hope that everything goes as planned.
    It is the game that I really expected to play so long ago (from Asteroid of the Atari 2600 I expect something like that), and I would not like to see it with bad reviews.
    The comments are already made by the community that plays, there is nothing more to add. I think those of us who comment here feel that we are part of the Empyrion development team and that is why there are so many surprise and warning comments.

    For my part I think it is an immense effort by so few people in Eleon to carry such a great game, so I am going to take the leap of faith and hope for the best.
    Good luck.

    Bueno. ¿Qué se puede decir? Ya todo esta dicho.
    Espero que ya lo tengan bien pensado y espero con real sinceridad que todo salga como lo planean.
    Es el juego que realmente esperé jugar hace tanto tiempo (desde Asteroid del Atari 2600 espero algo así), y no me gustaría verlo con malas críticas.
    Ya los comentarios están echos por parte de la comunidad que juega, no hay mas que agregar. Creo que los que aquí comentamos sentimos que somos parte del equipo de desarrollo de Empyrion y por eso se observan tantos comentarios de sorpresa y advertencia.

    Por mi parte creo que es un esfuerzo inmenso de tan pocas personas en llevar un juego así adelante, por ello voy a dar el salto de fe y esperar lo mejor.
    Buena Suerte.

    engage_star_trek_tng.gif
     
    #176
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  17. Adam Green

    Adam Green Ensign

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    Clearly there is a very mixed response to this move to go for beta release and I would like to add my own thoughts as a player with over 700 hours in game. I love the game and always look forward to additional content with upcoming alpha releases; alpha 12 has added a lot of great content which has immeasurably improved game play. The changes to detector function was a big one for me and of course the introduction of the galaxy with star class types including black holes was a massive plus. The introduction of new materials such as Titanium was great; the breadth of items is staggering but also crucial to the immersion in a truly galactic survival game.

    Despite this the game still requires some important improvements. As an astrophysicist I would like to see more planet and moon types than currently available. Even considering our own solar system there is scope for additions. I really liked the new ice moons which look like Europa, very cool. What about moons like Titan, drenched in hydrocarbons and raining methane? You could create acrid, sulphurous planets like Venus, rusted red planets like Mars, icy moons like Enceladus with geysers of water ice shooting into space. Perhaps it is a lot of effort as a small team to work on subtly different planetary bodies but clearly you, as developers, have the creative ability to produce a wealth of new environments and I would feel disappointed if you didn't bring those abilities to bear in this regard. My fear is that by moving to beta you'll abandon improvements that enrich the experience.

    As others have discussed in their comments there is a host of things than need to be improved upon to enhance immersion. Crouching, going prone, sound effects, collision, AI, the "black hole"of the factory system as Spanj aptly put it and a number of others. Another thing I'm wondering about is what the hell is Aluminium for and why can't I mine any? I wouldn't want this all to sound like criticism of your immense work but the vision you began this game development with was huge, bold, exciting and deserves the fullest completion possible.

    Anyway that's my thoughts so far on this news release, I look forward to further announcements
     
    #177
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  18. RadsK99

    RadsK99 Ensign

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    I stopped commenting time ago, with the bad CPU system that was going a little better, then the “new” Thruster system that you can't put inside your hull, that broke my b…, but ok, I let it go, was alpha, now this, “pushing” to version 1.0, WOW!!!, you really demonstrate your no-common sense. And what?, you finish ‘to add in what we consider to be the base mechanics’?, again WOW, CPU and thrust system broke the game for me, but fan boys will say, turn off that, LOL, turn off your monitor if you don’t want to read this XD, but that is very subjective. The point that never can’t refute is the walking in ship while is moving!!!, you did it?, NOOO.

    If you give up , I can’t do anything, will happened like -Fragmented- a game that looks good, was going to be a great one but is forgotten, and a simple bug that disappear the resources you put in the storage box, mad it unplayable.

    But again, is not my game, if you want to suicide, do it …
    [​IMG]
     
    #178
  19. Inappropriate

    Inappropriate Captain

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    Question: Why on earth would I spend money on this hypothetical new project from a developer that has a track record of not finishing what they started?
    As it stands Empyrion is still vary bare bones. If this is the game in a feature complete state then I'm going to be very disappointed in Eleons lack of vision. Actually that's a lie. This is exactly the sort of thing I was expecting when I bought the game back in a8. I was pleasantly surprised that I actually got my moneys worth out of it but if it wasn't for the early access title I never would have given the game a chance to began with.

    The game doesn't need "polish" right now, it needs work on the basic tech. Heres what I could come up with just off the top of my head:
    • The docking system is still a hot mess that makes no sense.
    • There is no moving around on moving vessel even though the devs were basically handed a working tech demo proving it is possible.
    • The game world isn't seamless. This would likely require completely rethink of scale, distance, how data is streamed and probably a total rewrite to get working. But it is absolutely possible.
    • No flight stick support. And I don't just mean in the UI either. The current approach to flight mechanics doesn't lend it's self well to this method of input.
    • Water is still just a plane with a shader attached to it and some alternate movement mechanics.
    • "Planets" range from the size of a small village to a very small country.
    • Interstellar spaceships can barely fly faster then biplanes.
    • The game can't even handle rendering hostile NPCs at more then a 100m or so leading to bizarre situation were your getting shot by invisible enemies.
    • LOD is barely a thing.
    • The factory system is still the same placeholder system as when I bought the game.
    • The flight model(s) is a convoluted train wreck with only the vaguest basis in reality were the devs need to constantly put their thumb on the scale to even pretend to balance large and small vessels separately, and then balance those against stationary bases and ground combat, again using a totally different rule set for each one.
    I could go on but I think I have made my point but notice that I haven't listed any of the hot button balance specific issues (CPU, Mass/Volume, weapon stats, etc) that tend to be thrown about. Many of these are issues with the fundamental underpinnings of the game.

    No, this is not to look of a feature complete game. I have no dought that some, or even most of these, could be implemented seamlessly and without major upheaval but that would require hard things like planing and good programing.

    Yeah, I'll give credit were credit is due; Empyrion is a great game if you look at it through the lens of a very rough work in progress. But it's no were near ready for beta let alone going gold. I wouldn't spend a dime on any future product they put out if this is their vision of a feature complete game.
     
    #179
    Last edited: Jul 18, 2020
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  20. JCataclism

    JCataclism Ensign

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    Astonishing news!
     
    #180
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