Agreed. The thing is, Stellaris is just a strategy game. Most people would finish a particular game in a few days. I think breaking a strategy savegame is OK sometimes, with adequate warning. I've seen games other than Stellaris do it also. But for a survival game, or RPG, where a person might have a playthrough that lasts weeks or months, it is not acceptable to break the savegames. People will get angry about it. It is solely because of the EA label that few people have complained thus far. It is possible to do savegame conversion/upgrades but it does take some work, and it seems like the right time to do it is in the versions prior to the final release so they can work bugs out of the process.
As I have mentioned in other threads, with the release of 1.16 for Minecraft (23rd June 2020) many people had to delete the Nether file to get the full affect of the release. With 7D2D ( yes this is still Early Release) when A18 came out (8th July 2020) it was advised to start a new world.
True, but in that case it was not required because of the entire savegame becoming corrupt, rather it was an optional recommendation in order to take advantage of new functionality due to a drastic change in map generation.
I've found that it's the nature of sand box games that if they do major changes then you may have to restart the game. I accept it. I could on the other hand ask the devs not to do any major changes that may break the game, but who wants that in an ever evolving game? Personally I would rather have the new features.
They can't simply "remap" changes in code. Most changes that affect devices are unconsequential it only the moel/ texture changed (does not "break" the savegane). If a device changes size then it can cause problems, but that can easily be fixed or avoided. Mostly, "visual" and "sound" changes will likely not break an old savegame, but players might not see the new content if it's part of what is generated at the start of the game. For "scripts" it's different and dependant on context. That is a very general statement, as even prior to updates there were bugs, so we can't really isolate all "prior" bugs as if they would magically disappear with a version change. This kind of general statement also includes all problems caused by something else than the game itself. Sometimes the developers make a special fix for specific hardware configurations to accomodate players, and it can cause problems for other players. I'm not going to criticize that, as they are trying to make the game playable for a larger audience with more "average" computers. That's just one example. There are ways to avoid Steam from updating the game that were put on the forum recently, and I hope players will take advantage of this to "protect" their savegames instead of asking for something very hard to achieve for a small indie team : continue development but don't affect "my savegame"... You can bet that half the players here want to see the game move forward, and are ready to deal with it. Since I have been on these forums people constantly complained despite the EA tag. In fact the EA tag even became an object of complaint ("sooo long in EA") so this point is moot. Regarding the "RPG" aspect we don't have missions that last for "weeks or months" where the player can't pick up in the middle of it with the way scenarios allow manual completion of tasks. Plus players can make blueprints of all their builds and use codes to get back their inventory as a last resort. Everything is possible. But as I wrote previously, players can protect their savegame either by copying their entire game folder elsewhere on their HDD or by editing a single digit in a Steam file. Even if they forget to do this they can still download the exact game version they need in case an update "broke their savegame".
Factorio is a great example of a game where even though they were early access, they found ways to dynamically migrate savegames, even in the case of massive changes, but in some cases if you tried to open a really old savegame in a newer version, they told you to open it in an interim version and re-save it, then you could open it in a newer version. For the matter of blocks, Empyrion has actually approached this sort of issue before, with the "legacy" cockpits. You could go a step further by making the old block be a sort of alternate right-click variant of the block that doesn't show up in the menu, where you can retrieve the block with the multitool, but if you try to place it again, you lose that option and have to place it as the new type with the new dimensions. Certainly there's always a solution, but it is a matter of effort which may be better spent elsewhere. Now that the game is no longer in Early Access, people will be expecting those solutions. There were certainly an unreasonable amount of complaints about this game remaining in Early Access for 5 years (particularly while remaining so buggy), but there are going to be a whole new level of complaints if the expectation of "if you don't want it to break well then don't update it" persists. I also think the devs are in for a shock when they start to discover that the new players think that them spending 90% of their time over the last 5 years on graphics improvements is not appropriate for a game that's out of Early Access, especially when the game still has objectively inferior combat gameplay, collision detection, NPC AI pathfinding and animations, and balance, compared to 25 year old Nintendo 64 games. A Lamborghini is indistinguishable from a Honda Accord if you crash it hard enough.
I don't think they will get a shock facing comparisons like this. This game is not a "Hollywood hollow scenes" corridor shooter with full control on player freedom and AI containment, plus zero building. And no one here can say with any amount of certainty like you do that they spent the last 5 years only on graphics, and that's just an exaggeration that doesn't help pushing the devs in the good direction, IMO.
I have been reading the summaries of every Alpha release since I first started playing in early 2016, and I am a software developer, and the general conclusion I have drawn is that they have spent the great majority of their time since 2016 working on the graphics. Graphics are important, but indie game developers rarely try to compete with triple-A game studios on graphics because it is just not possible; so the typical approach is to instead make sure the underlying gameplay is solid and enjoyable. However I concede your point that I do not know specifically how they have been spending their time as I am not in the room with them. I can understand and accept why you or the developers may object to me comparing Empyrion with Nintendo 64 games, after all they are quite different games. But I can't help but notice that I made comparisons between specific elements of both games, and you failed to push back on any single one of them. Would I be correct in interpreting that to mean that while you or the developers may find the comparison offensive, you still concede that my specific claims are true. If not, I would be interested in knowing which of the following statements you disagree with: - Goldeneye 007 (1995) has superior combat gameplay to Empyrion - Goldeneye 007 (1995) has superior collision detection to Empyrion - Goldeneye 007 (1995) has superior NPC AI pathfinding to Empyrion - Goldeneye 007 (1995) has superior NPC animations to Empyrion - Goldeneye 007 (1995) has superior overall gameplay balance to Empyrion
What kind of software ? I did answer "This game is not a "Hollywood hollow scenes" corridor shooter with full control on player freedom and AI containment, plus zero building" to your "especially when the game still has objectively inferior combat gameplay, collision detection, NPC AI pathfinding and animations, and balance, compared to 25 year old Nintendo 64 games." Now you can't imply that because I did not dissect each statement it's because I agree with them, and my general statement was just that. I never played that game, so I had to look at youtube to see what it was. -"superior combat" is subjective and a bit vague - maybe you could expand on this ? -"superior collision detection" can't be compared because Goldeneye is obviously a game using fixed levels and static geometry while Empyrion is based on a voxel engine for terrain and buildings. As far as I know, in a simple model vs model situation (ex. player vs zirax) there are no "collision detection problems" and weapons perform "as intended" (not meaning "fine tuned" here) - "superior NPC AI pathfinding" can't be compared for the same reason as just above : games with fixed levels/ terrains (ex. old bsp format) use path nodes and meshes that act as beacons for AI pawns to make "decisions" and look "autonomous", and these "AI helpers" have to be placed by hand in a level like this. In Empyrion, given the random nature of terrain and the freedom for players to build anywhere they want makes it impossible to use a similar system. For what I saw, the AI is doing a decent job given circumstances, so here we have a "orange" system and a "apple" system we can hardly compare. A proper comparison would expose what system they use presently and see what another game does with a similar system. - "superior animations" I'm not even sure, for a game that age. Some critters got reworked animations, but all the new NPCs are... new, and they have minimal animations. I want better animations, I can give you that point, but I don't want 1997 - level animations. -Superior gameplay balance... very different contexts here again. But to answer that I would need to play the old game. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What most players see in Empyrion is the possibility to play in vastly different styles, even when tackling the same objective (ex. hostile POI). And if I was to use your point-of-view, I could say that Goldeneye has no building, restricts players to predefined routes, arenas and levels (like most games from that epoch), has boring visuals and washed out colors, no vehicular combat... in fact they are way too different games to be compared. It's not a Lamborghini vs a Accord, it's more like a Jetta and an Apache helicopter.
I'd rather not get into that now, I'd rather avoid the chance that this becomes about me rather than my concerns. Generally speaking, anyone in software development has significant insights into this sort of project compared to most of the public; enough to appreciate the scale and difficulty, and enough to see how easy it is for the developers' interests and objectives to diverge from the customers at many stages along the way, which is what I am implying is going on here with the focus on graphics and comparative negligence regarding basic gameplay elements and the multiplayer stability. That's not an answer, that's an ad hominem attack and/or whataboutism. True, which is why I asked if it was a valid assumption, or if not, if you could elaborate further. Fair, I assume the earliest major game most of the people here have played is one of the Halo games, but the oldest Halo game is 5+ years newer and 10x as good as anything on the N64 other than Perfect Dark regarding the specific game aspects I mentioned. I agree that "superior combat" would indeed bee way too subjective and vague, but I said "superior combat gameplay" which is far less so. Collision detection is a basic fundamental principle of all 2D or 3D software where objects are being modeled and can interact with each other, and thus it can absolutely be compared. When you shoot at a target in a POI and it hits a corner of a block that has no corner, thus you see ricochet animations in midair, that is a collision detection error no matter what game you are in. The objective measure of whether you have good or bad collision detection is not altered by other features the game has, or whether a level is made out of blocks, dynamic terrain, or both. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_detection Pathfinding is just as general and linearly comparable between games as collision detection is. If an NPC gets stuck on something that a player would easily avoid, you either have bad collision detection, bad pathfinding, or both. The objective measure of whether you have good or bad pathfinding is not altered by other features the game has, or whether a level is made out of blocks, dynamic terrain, or both. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathfinding I'm glad we can at least agree on this, however the point I was making is that triple-A games were producing vastly superior walking animations in 1997 than many of the trading station NPCs in Empyrion have today. Granted, this is not a triple-A game, however it is not 1997, and they're working with the Unity engine and tools like 3DS Max, which do a lot of the work for them, they're not building a game for some closed-source proprietary hardware where you're limited to a few megabytes of video RAM and the entire game has to fit in 8 to 32 megabytes. If an NPC that does not add critical functionality to the game is clearly not finished being animated, it clearly has no place in a game that has left Early Access, which means half the trading station NPCs should go. There was a game called "Detective T. Pose" which was made to make fun of bad or glitchy games where the characters revert to a t-pose; in Empyrion's case they actually threw characters into the game which were essentially trapped in a permanent t-pose. Generally this has to do with how "fair" certain progressive aspects of the game are, such as damage levels, costs to produce certain components, etc. It's quite evident in the POIs in Empyrion that because their AI is bad, they compensate by making the NPCs way more deadly, and add things like random directionless sounds in POIs so you can't tell when something just spawned behind you. Again, I only suggest a comparison with Nintendo 64 games because I feel they are much more fair comparison, as most games made in the 21st century would so clearly blow Empyrion (in its current state) out of the water in these aspects, that mentioning a more recent game doesn't do justice to the severity of the problem in this game. If I compared both games in their entirety to each other, then that would be a fair argument. However, I would never make such a silly argument; so instead I opted to compare those two games on just a few specific criteria where I felt it helped demonstrate how far behind Empyrion is in many aspects, despite being considered a "1.0" release.
You used your personal qualifications as support for your opinion, but everyone knows that making desktop applications and 3d games (and even that is very general) are very different things. But I can see from your answers below that you are not into game development. Stating that "This game is not a "Hollywood hollow scenes" corridor shooter with full control on player freedom and AI containment, plus zero building" in answer to your "especially when the game still has objectively inferior combat gameplay, collision detection, NPC AI pathfinding and animations, and balance, compared to 25 year old Nintendo 64 games" is not an Ad Hominem attack nor anything like the "whataboutism fallacy". I suggest you try to understand what are voxel based game packages and open worlds before referring me to wikipedia for collision detection and pathfinding. This shows me you don't understand what Empyrion is about, you're surely not into game development, and you are wasting my time / pulling my leg.
If everyone knows they are different, why did you feel the need to point it out? Am I not contained within the subset of"everyone", or are you trying to imply that this is something that somehow "everyone" except me knows? And no, you cannot see from my answers that I am or am not in game development any more than I can say that based on your answers you probably bag my groceries; you can see that you disagree with my answers and have confused thinking with feeling. Yes, it is. You dismissed the argument out of hand after constructing a sentence filled with words with very clearly negative primary connotations, which you were using to describe the thing in question. A game having "zero building" does not make its FPS mechanics worse, and calling something "Hollywood hollow scenes" does not improve the FPS mechanics of the thing it is being compared with. Unless you are about to try and convince me that you thought that "Hollywood hollow scenes and no building" can be a compliment perhaps, but for those of us whose first lanuage is English, that is quite clearly an insult. When you use insults in an argument about the thing being argued about, that is ad hominem. When instead of defending a thing, you point out something else about a different thing, that is whataboutism. I suggest you read the Wikipedia definition of the word "comparison", as it may help alleviate your confusion as to the difference between comparing specific attributes of one thing to another, and trying to determine which one of two things is "best" as you seem to be doing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison If you can't help but think of comparisons in term of which one is "best:" overall, then out of Empyrion and Goldeneye, Empyrion is clearly "best" at the building aspect, because it has one, and Goldeneye is clearly "best" at collision detection and pathfinding, because its works correctly a percentage of the time very closely approximating 100%. If you personally feel insulted at the prospect that this game needs a great deal of work in very basic portions of its gameplay, I did not intend to personally insult you, I simply wanted to emphasize how lacking the programming behind several important portions of this game are. If it upsets you that some might claim that a 25 year old game compares favorably with Empyrion in several aspects, perhaps that just serves to further prove my point.
That's what you've been doing for your last 2 last posts. Why do you insist on having a discussion with me ? I stated things clearly from the start, you went on multiple tangents to try to make up for your lack of comprehension of what game development implies in the context of Empyrion, trying to pull me in your nostalgia for old 90s games. Plus you suffer from the "progressive post inflation syndrome". If you don't like the game it's your problem, don't try to compensate for your frustrations by harassing players who like it. Or get some friends, an try this on them instead.
I try to always treat people well in my first interaction with them, and then I move toward mirroring how they treat me after that. Given your long history of behavior in this group, it was probably inevitable that a conversation between us would go this way. Wow, that is a staggering display of projection there. - I made a provocative but fair comparison between aspects of Empyrion and the same aspects of a game about 25 years older than it and stated that the older game is superior in those aspects. You primarily engaged in avoiding addressing that comparison, trying to dismiss it on weak grounds like "but its got voxels, so they're too different, so that magically makes Empyrion's awful FPS gameplay not awful" - You insulted the other game, calling it a "corridor shooter" game of "Hollywood hollow scenes" instead of addressing the question of why it's "shooter" aspect is objectively superior to Empyrion's shooter aspect despite the near quarter-century gap. - You responded to my series of precise follow-up questions that were designed to elicit "yes/no" type responses to allow us to have a more precise conversation as to why we disagree on those yes/no answers in a similarly emotional and/or sophistic fashion. - You ascribed false motivations to me as a means of attempting to justify avoiding my argument; just now, you essentially declared that in your expert opinion of the contents of my mind, my comparison is "just nostalgia" and that I "lack comprehension" on the subject of Empyrion game development, without explaining why with your allegedly superior understanding and lack of any "nostalgia" clouding your judgment, you are still apparently unable or unwilling to address my argument in something resembling an intellectually honest manner. These are things that you have done in this discussion. What you have described above is not. If long posts bother you, you can mitigate that by not constantly veering off course, but that would require you to address my argument; which involves objectively examining why Empyrion, which is allegedly now no longer of "Alpha" quality, is somehow trounced in its FPS aspects by 25 year old FPS games, let alone newer ones. As for "suffering", it sounds like you're the one suffering, not me. I recognize that when people are losing the debate they often try to obfuscate or to deflect with tangents into several other topics, but I find that if I just crush every single tangent and demonstrate that there is no level of obfuscation that will work, while it leads to long replies, it tends to either lead the other person back toward a reasonable discussion, or they shift into ad hominem and embarrass themselves in front of everyone else. Either is fine by me. I never once said that I do not like the game. Nor am I "nostalgic" for Goldeneye 007, an extremely popular late 20th century game that I maybe played for a few dozen hours, tops. These are both emotional projections that distract from addressing the argument I made, no doubt because you'd probably like to not address the argument in an intellectually honest fashion, because of where that leads. The fact is, we who complain about this game do so because we love its potential. We have been very patient over these last 4+ years in the hope that it would result in a game with stable multiplayer, among other things. Many of us are astounded that we are supposed to believe this game is "not merely Alpha quality" now, despite the severe multiplayer instability, and the awfulness of some of the other aspects that I mentioned being very much something that would be fair to describe as "Alpha quality". When we make such arguments, and are met with other people who have apparently decided that it is a good idea to be extremely rude and alienating to the fans for daring to criticize a game that they are passionate about, few people see how that does anything to improve the situation for the devs or anyone else. Ah yes, more ad hominem, surely it'll work this time. Sorry, but telling people who have 4,000 fewer forum posts than you do to "get a life" falls a little flat, especially when so many of yours are so rude, snarky, or combative. That is not the sort of attribute that people want in the people that they go to for advice on how to build functioning relationships with others. Despite all that, if you would like an amicable resolution to our argument here, I will set the bar very low. We are not going to agree on everything, but I think that at least agreeing that my selective Goldeneye 007 vs Empyrion comparison, while intentionally provocative so as to make a point, was within the bounds of reason for me to have made. I am not saying "Goldeneye 007 good Empyrion bad", merely that if you objectively compare just the FPS aspects of Empyrion as it exists today, on aspects such as collision detection, AI pathfinding, stuff like that, then the finished product of Goldeneye 007's FPS gameplay was hands down better in nearly every regard the corresponding FPS gameplay aspect of Empyrion as it exists today. At the same time, I am also assuming that if the game continues to be updated, at some point in the future, it is reasonable to believe that Empyrion will have superior FPS gameplay in every or nearly every aspect.
