General Category > In Case Of Emergency, Release Raptor

Time for some straight talk: Release Raptor is being pulled and refunded.

<< < (11/11)

Misery:

--- Quote from: logorouge on August 29, 2016, 08:17:09 pm ---
--- Quote from: garion333 on August 29, 2016, 07:41:15 pm ---Things Misery said earlier in the thread sound great, but would those tactical/strategic elements have been apparent to the players? To me it seemed better to run and attack than to think and sneak.

--- End quote ---

I think that's just a consequence of the speedrun mode being the first one released and the abnormally low enemy concentration. Tactical elements and the importance of sneaking/thinking would quickly become evident after the player gets killed a few times from rushing at the enemy. But when you got infinite health and enemies are a rare sight, why bother with tactics?

A comment I heard often in the last few days is "What's the point if you can't even die?"

--- End quote ---


Yeah, pretty much.

One way or another, the enemy bots absolutely would have probably hit you a million times (or in other modes, outright killed you) until you learned to deal with them by actually thinking about each situation (hell, I was worried that some of it might get too difficult).  But with such an early version of the game, it was just impossible for it to really be shown off. 

And such is part of the downside of the EA process... I've seen this one happen with a variety of other games (and I'm sure many others have seen it too) where you get a game that's so early in development that you have no bloody clue what's going on, and it loses potential sales because of that.  And then later you find out what it's really about, and it's pretty darn good, but those lost sales are a lost cause at that point.

Captain Jack:
So I've been trying to think of something I could say for days now that could capture how I feel about how things turned out and nothing's coming to mind that might actually help. So I'll just say: I wish you the very best of luck. You've always have the skills and mindset to succeed, it's the luck you need now.

Soupinator:
I'm sorry to hear this.  Hopefully your next release will get you back on your feet.  Personally I'm greatly looking forward to Stars Beyond Reach (which I hope you get back to soon, especially after the massive disappointment of Civilization Beyond Earth) and despite it selling poorly, Starward Rogue is actually my favorite game of yours.

Bluddy:
Just to give you an idea of why I wasn't interested in the game, first of all there's the Jack of All Trades issue. It just can't be done, certainly not with a tiny team. 3d games require lavish effects and models and compete against all other 3d games out there. This has been mentioned already on this thread.

But here's another aspect. I never wanted to play as a Raptor. But I could easily get into that fantasy, if it was fully fleshed out. Imagine a game where you can play as a Raptor. You have your pack, and maybe you start off as a baby Raptor, some members of your pack die, and eventually you can be the alpha male, or you can leave and be a lone wolf. You'd have random procedural adventures in the ancient savanna, or maybe have to survive as long as you can in the extinction phase (kinda like a zombie simulator for dinosaurs), and you could definitely try to take down a T-Rex. The animal survival genre is horribly underserved (anyone remember Lion or Wolf?). I could totally buy into this fantasy, and I believe many others could as well.

However, placing the Raptor in a building, and making the opponents robots... well, that's like taking a swashbuckling pirate and placing him on Mars. It breaks any notion of the fantasy we might have in our head and just seems random. The Raptor in this game could be any avatar fighting robots. In fact, if the plan was to not make this a mindless action game, a more vulnerable avatar would probably have been preferable (something akin to Abe from Abe's Oddyssey). To see the power of tapping into a coherent fantasy, just see the recent controversy with No Man's Sky.

Developers break players' narrative expectations at their own peril. Sure, you can come up with a complex narrative explaining the particulars of any situation, but you lose the passion and narrative flow that players already have. If your game follows expectations, players will supplement the narrative with their own personal stories.

x4000:
Cheers folks, thanks for all your support and suggestions.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page