Al_B on 30/11/2018 at 17:35
I'm sure that the team cost more than $5000 each :)
From what I can see the problem wasn't one of time or money, but rather direction. Twist's comment about it being an empty shell sums up my feelings on it - it's by no means shabby but it's just missing a bit of spark and personality. I wouldn't mind the game being smaller as long it had the character to make you care about the world.
ZylonBane on 30/11/2018 at 21:47
That's one of the things that bugs me so much about this. From a technical standpoint, good writing is basically free. It costs just as much to record a terrible line of dialog as an Oscar-worthy one. We know these LGS alums are good writers. So WTF happened? We ended up with this bland, generic gamey game world that I couldn't care less about. It's like OtherSide invented the unimmersive sim.
I'd be really interested in seeing the first couple of levels redone in the Dark engine. I bet it could do a superior job of it. Just replacing those silly clickety-clackety skeletons with hammer haunts would be a huge win.
Nameless Voice on 30/11/2018 at 22:21
[video=youtube;W30IdKUhZ98]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W30IdKUhZ98[/video]
Somehow this reminds me of all the bad bits of working in software engineering, where you spend more time having meetings about the process of doing things than you spend actually doing those things.
Edit: They deleted that video and re-uploaded it for some reason. Fixed the link.
Except they changed the content of the video as well, re-recorded it from scratch?
It originally started with project planning / management talk, mentioned aggregating data from player feedback, reviews, and their bug lists, then talked about the costs of working on things in terms of time and people, before moving on to what they were going to push in the hotfix and what they were going to push in the next big update.
ZylonBane on 30/11/2018 at 22:44
Huh, so the mission levels were originally much smaller and only supposed to take around 15 minutes to finish, hence OtherSide not feeling the need for in-mission save.
twisty on 1/12/2018 at 05:32
I'm more or less treating this as a demo version that I will pick up and fool around with from time to time until they release some significant patches (save game implementation would probably be my earliest entry point). Having played 40 minutes or so of it after downloading their latest fix, it's apparent that it still needs a lot of work to make this a minimum viable product. Around 10 minutes of this time wasted trying to get myself out of a chest that I somehow got stuck in after opening it.
While player movement does feel a bit better than before, it still feels unnatural and awkward at times, particularly when walking down stairs. I also laughed when I tested out the new "swimming" functionality -- which essentially just means crouching underwater -- and discovered that you can stay underwater indefinitely. I mean c'mon guys, that's either just utter laziness or sheer incompetence to release a new function with such little thought behind it.
icemann on 1/12/2018 at 13:32
I will say that that video sounds quite promising. The general gist I get from it, is to wait 6 months to play the game, after which manual saving will be in + a heap of other improvements. I'm cool with that. It's not like we don't have other games to play in the meantime.
Shadowcat on 1/12/2018 at 23:18
Oh man, if they could *afford* to spend a bunch more time making fixes, why release in such a broken state?
Normally I'd imagine the answer would be "because we need sales from the release to pay for the ongoing fixes", but the release looks so disastrous and the reviews so scathing that it's hard to imagine much money actually coming from it; and it's almost impossible to imagine that the long-term prospects haven't been badly damaged by it. Even if they fix a ton of things, how many potential customers have already been put off permanently?
Pyrian on 2/12/2018 at 02:17
Word is they'd already extended it a few months past where development was funded.
ShardofTruth on 3/12/2018 at 17:33
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
Huh, so the mission levels were originally much smaller and only supposed to take around 15 minutes to finish, hence OtherSide not feeling the need for in-mission save.
If you compare the ingame maps from Upper Erebus with (
https://otherside-e.com/wp/update-hints-of-the-stygian-abyss-and-backer-rewards/) this post from 2017 it is a huge difference: (
https://i.imgur.com/Gwso6AS.jpg)
They probably combined area of former smaller maps for the other levels too.
Quote Posted by Twist
As far as layout, connectivity and atmosphere, the level design
is often fantastic. If you can enjoy exploration for exploration's sake, there's good fun to be had.
Unfortunately, even at its best it's largely just an empty shell. Sure, there are treasure chests
everywhere, but they're all randomly populated with the same mostly useless loot over and over (and over). Oh gosh -- my 50th pair of Deteriorated Leather Boots! Yay! When you see a relatively large number like 50, you might think I'm exaggerating. I'm not. I'm pretty sure I "found" one particular rune 100+ times.
I wholeheartedly agree, it's a shame that the level design couldn't be used to pull off greater things like real secrets or some sort of storytelling. They should salvage the whole thing to make a real Thief game out of it after all.