I would advise everyone to wait few more hours, see the twitch stream and then start losing their shit if it won't be satisfactory.
Unless you have some real starry eyed Indi Dev, who still believes the dream, every developer is EA. Behavior has been around for 20 years. For the majority of those years, they created Movie Tie-in shovelware or handheld ports for GBA, DS, PSP and whatnot.. Its why i didn't throw money at them when they first announced the project. Just like No Man Sky... where you have a studio that goes from making a 2D sidescroller to one of the most ambitious games ever spoken about... doesn't work that way. No disrespect to Behavior, but seriously, look at their Wikipedia page. Its the prime example of a company that solely exists to employ its employee's and will take any and all jobs they are offered to make money. (Nothing to be ashamed of, i might add) I mean on their portfolio we have things like Porting Mercenaries 2: World in Flames to the PS2... in the year 2008. A little reminder.. the PS3 released in 2006. And i am sure Pacific Rim: The Mobile Game is amazing... but it doesn't exactly carry with it the necessary expertise to do 3rd person lobby shooter on PC. Yes, based on what i am seeing in this thread and on the Steam Forums, i think many people still don't understand that. You do not go to a car salesman and buy half a prototype car that only exists on paper... or is only half done and you don't even know if they ever finish it. And yes, i think it needs to be said so people actually understand what we are dealing with here. Don't get me wrong, they seem like nice people, and i am sure i'd buy them a drink if we'd ever meet in RL. I have no hard feelings towards them... but having illusions about some big rewards or them throwing money away by giving away new swag for free... i just don't see that. The biggest game i see in their history is pretty much Fallout shelter, the rest is almost exclusively ports. I can't imagine that the big money is in doing ports, and ports of movie tie in shovelware at that. I also doubt that they have the 'savings' to actually hire people to create free stuff as sort of loyality reward. Its not exactly Blizzard or Valve that pretty much make money for nothing at this point. What we can hope for is that maybe some of their people put in some unpaid overtime to.... how did they put it? Bdazzle the Venerable Weapons.
No they just need glasses to stop TK. They know witch end spit bolts but can't discern enemy from friends.
I think what strikes me even more then this is that it feels like the artistic vision of Eternal Crusade is literally dead. Like, those things are literally a change of paint of existing stuff... Then you have Mastercrafted items in the game that are not even full recolors, just a smidgen of different color on the barrel or hilt of the weapon making a difference between these two tiers of weapons... Dont get me started on "uniques", which in allot of cases are just the skin of a basic weapon recolored in some other color or adding an effect... Everyone has their own example im sure, worst to me personally is the Plague Knife, which is just a recolored bronze knife with an aura. So many imaginative ways to represent a rotten AIDS dagger and its just a recolor of some item... Im sorry but someone needs to crank up on actual creativity here, ive seen DoW1/DoW2 mods that were leagues more inspiring, and those guys make those in the spare time...
Very good post and i agree with you wholeheartedly. For me it is not about the money, i guess most people who spend 20 years gaming have bought more then one bad game or spend 100s of dollars on subscriptions/cosmetics from games long shelved. I am simply dissappointed that they have choosen this path without much need for it. You might argue that it is a tough world out there and we all live in the age of hypercapitalism. But I still see companies not pretending to be my friend but alteast treating me like a valued customer. Noone forces bE to be all scummy about 10k rtc for a helm recolour and quiet honestly their missnderstanding of "MICROtransactions" and "quality to cash relation" should be obvious to anyone who visited their store. Ironically there are companies- even big ones- out there who really try to treat their playerbase well and respectfull, knowing full well that the title after the current one also needs a buyer or that satisfied customers tend to spend more. But i think that neither bE nor HelloGames think that longterm customercare is worth it. Like you underlined quiet well with their portfolio. As you put it, i understand full well that they have their bills to pay and i have no grudge about them personally and would gladly buy them a beer or a pizza and have a good laugh about it. However they will not see me spending any cash on additional RTC, the game will get my review on steam when things with f2p have calmed down and i've reached my time to move on and it will be fair and without any nerdrage. I will in the future most likely refrain from buying their products without sales or very long consideration. We will see if their high stakes gamble with f2p paid off for them in a few months when playernumbers stabilize and maybe next year when the fresh cash is starting to burn down (unless they manage to establish a healthy economy by then).
There are good exceptions on the market like CD Project Red, the guys that made Withcher series. Their financial results were sky rocketing for some time now, even thou they were giving dlc's away for free and did two expansions that could have been standalone games, with the price of ... actual dlc's Check out their financial report for prove that being fair to the customer pays out in the long term. Especially given the fact that after they capitalized on the success of Witcher series, (Witcher 3 for the most part), their next game is highly anticipated and will probably hit top sales. yup, thats what CD Project RED does True that. I can't understand that out of one of the most fertile IP licenses in sci-fi made up universe, that you could possibly imagine, they have taken so little effort to actually bring to us the first and most important reason all the founders bought into this cash grab machine. Its the flavor of Warhammer 40k., not any other feature of the game that brought us here and made us pay the insane amount of money (comparing towards what we got in return). They have failed so hard on the visual level that I don't even know where to begin with, but what is most shocking is the continuous process of them performing the same PLACEHOLDER kind of approach to the visual side of the game again and again, like nothing happened. Its like they say to our face: "Hey we know its kind of rough to give you recolored items for the price of the boxed set of actual miniatures, but hey you at least get to see us every week during the twitch!"
