1. Campaign/Meaningful objectives/Persistent world By persistant I mean, anything in the world of arkhona which has an impact and remains stable until player actions make a change, i.e territory control, holding "strategical" assets, having a campaign where doing something matters more than just: win or lose the lobby shooter match. 2. Game balance by balance I don't mean simply faction balance, but map balance and chances to win based on being attacker or defender. everything should be pretty close to 50-50%. So far, according to stats, ork vs chaos and anyone on attack was pretty bad. I want to feel that ork on attack vs chaos on defense has as much a chance to win as say, eldar on attack vs marines. etc. game balance is required because if you don't have balanced maps and factions people will just ragequit the maps they don't like especially when they are on attack. So basically people will play matches on pegasus and olipsis and all other matches will end with the defending team always winning. Will be hard to make territories matter if no attack is ever successful for anyone. 3. Customization (both visual and advancements) Because that creates a feeling of relatively constant progression which gives some kind of sense of achievement (combined with campaign/objectives/strategic gameplay) In summary Those 3 elements are a priority compared to anything else to me for the simple reason that without game balance I'll just quit playing even if I'm a founder, currently there are some matches that annoy me to the point where I just downright close the game rather than log out and in to find another one. Just too many bad matchups for orks. Even worse if you are on attack against a full guild team on harkus when you play with a full pug team. If I don't get a strategic layer and lots of customisation, I'll likely play the game for a few months, than quit and never come back. I need something to keep myself playing in the long term. the three elements are in no specific order. To me they all are mandatory to having a good game. Failure to deliver any of those 3 before launch will be bad for the game, but with little more than a week before launch, I don't believe it will happen. Does it doom the game, I don't think so, but launch will be suboptimal, and the game at launch won't be enjoyable for me. Right now, even with the increased xp gain, I have only played ork, up to level 3. Too bored to level past that because the matches are too frustrating to play. The simple fact the game has become a frustrating experience where I feel failure is a 90% chance on any match I play because of map/being ork/attacking/pugs vs guild. Evalutate the probability of NOT being EITHER on attack, playing a map you don't like, playing with pugs against guild, it's likely pretty low. In the end the few match I'd enjoy would be olipsis or pegasus (defense or attack) VS anyone but chaos. I used to play chaos, but easy wins aren't any more fun, and even as chaos it's still hard to win as attacker on maps like maggon and harkus, that's telling something. I'd give the game a 4/10 until game balance is fixed and I feel everyone has an equal chance at winning. When that is at least achieved, the game becomes a 7/10. With visual, the game becomes an 8. Add campaign/persistent world/strategic layer with map interraction it becomes a 9. Add all this plus the future plan of MOAR war, tank battle, flyers?/artillery/grandeur scale/guild ships, leman russ MBT, etc. and I'll feel like it's a 11/10.
I have a OC PC and i can play with 90 fps or more with full quality, etc, because now we can choose the fps. But the Lag / teleportation is real sometimes. And i not talking about the bugs, and my 2 hands are not enough to count them (sorry). For me, it's a very very good Alpha.
Oh, also, I find it weird that we have absolutely 0 word on Agnathio map. It is still listed in the steam achievements, but still hasn't made it into live yet. With one week to go, one wonders if it will even make it to launch.
This is how I feel about the game. There is a great jewel that many have been searching for, but there are rough spots around the edges that blemish it. There is a good core, but small issues that frustrate greatly. And those stupid heavy bolters need to be nerfed!
I'll just be happy if the netcode issues were fixed and i had my MKIII helmet, i'm even considering lighting a candle for the Omnisiah on my computer before getting into a match so i don't get the huge lagspikes that gets me a frozen screen between 2 and 10 seconds.
Delay the game, because I don't think anything that I've read so far could be accomplished in little more than a week. However since that's unlikely the thing to focus on is the stability of the server and eliminating lag. New comers will notice that the most and new blood is what is needed to keep a game going.
I pretty much agree with all you say but I wanted to expand something. First of all to the part about "Campaign/Meaningful objectives/Persistent world" I would add the story/lore background depth. Lets not lie to ourselves, what brought most of us here is not the dream of playing a lobby shooter, or even an open world shooter, but the logo of Warhammer. By that I mean the depth of background story this universe has. For now we only know who are the leaders of factions fighting on Atkhona (with only Abaddon being poor choice imo). Apart from that we got several short stories, that are rather vague and written all around the conflict, not really revealing what it is about. Lets face it - even the game, which I consider to be crime against humanity on the level of storytelling - Dawn of War 2, had a plot of its own (ridiculous but still a plot). EC is lacing that. I have no idea why the war is fought and over what spoils. Second point that I wanted to expand is the customization. I really think that without an attempt at allowing players to customize their characters at least as the basic boxed miniatures set allows, the game will be considered a poor joke on the level of customization. I think majority of the player base of EC will be WH40k fans, also in love with GW and FW miniatures. Not giving them opportunity to create "models" just as on table top will result in huge disappointment. That on the other hand should not be that hard since basic boxe set of LSM allows for only several variants of certain pieces. Yet we still have no sight of it happening at the beginning.
Personally I want to see if angry Joe does a 180 on his glowing beta review from a year ago. With everything they have to get right that they have no time to make right, the hope has long since left me.
They need a new Balance/ lagg solving/ bug fixing patch. That will fix at least 50% of the present issue, if not i can already see people on steam yelling and crying for a refund or simply put negative recomendation for this game. That alone will hurt the sell on the game making it harder to get new fund for new developpement. Like nathan said on 7 senario 2 are closing up the game.
Bought access a while back, played quite a bit over the last few days and OMG possibly the laggiest and least balanced experience i've had in a game. Good luck with the release cos this is gonna get hammered with negative reviews on steam. I regret buying into this.
