I cannot lie, I am receiving a guilty schadenfreude-like pleasure from watching the forum burn down and the sheer utter chaos going on in this Steam Early Access thread. It's terribly ironic that the community is tearing itself apart, battle lines formed from forum members with objective and alternative belief have been drawn ready to shout down each other instead of limiting themselves to calm rational and sensible debate, and the game has only just come under intense scrutiny and negativity about being released on a different platform and how it's not ready to be sold openly in the last few days. The irony is this is equally as damaging as the prospect of negative reviews on Steam, any new founder can see the plethora of threads revolving around this topic, what people believe in Eternal Crusade and the several listed problems such as Optimization, lack of content, or whatever and ask for a refund and these threads do well to mirror what the steam-reviews and comment section will be like with the radically differing impressions and perspectives of what Eternal Crusade is and can be. There are members here who are worried about how toxic, harsh and negative the reviews and reception for Eternal Crusade can be whilst expressing their concern in simply put: a toxic, harsh and negative way.
I really think too much is being made of this. *Samuel Jackson's voice* "Lets slow this down... lets slow this waaaay down". So, EA will help the devs with some cash, people WILL buy into it, we all know they will. So, a little extra cash for the devs early on to help them in their dev... ing? Then there will be the people who will rant, and scream, and blast this awesome game, all over the internet. Good for them... let them rage. Yes, it may send some people away, and others may scream for refunds. Let them! Who cares? When this game launches, FULLY launches, people will play it, have no fear. You will have squads and you will have clans and yes you will always have enemies to shoot. So let the devs do whatever they can to make their funds so they can help make this game for us. Koh out
imagine if the steam forum become a safe place for discuss about the game and the official forum is the place full of "THE DOOM IS NEAR" topic.
I guess we just have to wait and see, since devs are going to do it their way no matter what we think. But I think you underestimate how harmful negative reception can be for a game in the long run.
Understand this, if you release the game as Early Access as is, you will suffer a player gap/shortage in a year before the community starts building up again. Basically like what happened to Planetside 2. It exploded for the first 8-10 months then it suddenly dropped due to player being tired of poor performance issues and gameplay imbalances. It's very very slowly recovering after changing to new management but it's never going to hit the amount of players it did when it first released. Holy crap i'm seeing no positive comments! Someone show me people who are hyped for EC!
Nope the steam forum is going to be hell just like every comment section about the game so far and these forum is going to be everyone saying I told you so. We still don't have keybindings in I know they say they are working on it but honestly if the game is going on steam saying something like its coming is not going to fly. Also about getting the sdk http://www.steampowered.com/steamworks/publishingservices.php , from reading all of that dont they already have the SDK? Cause about half the things I see from the SDK page is already in place.
Obviously it's just a speculation, but it doesn't make any sense for Valve to only give devs full access to Steamworks when their game is on Steam. And plenty of games were released with full Steamworks support from the start.
My fellow EC and Warhammer 40k enthusiasts--there is a guy/gal somewhere with a slide rule spouting stuff like, "Market statistics show we can expect X amount of initial revenue from the EA venture, which will fund our efforts in X, Y and Z. After that, the expected backlash and potential negative reviews, consistent with current market demographics, will cause profits to be reduced for...yadda yadda yadda... and we expect to be at or exceed our fiscal goals based on the plan developed... yadda yadda yadda..." We don't get to hear this stuff, but it is ALWAYS going on in the background and literally influences every single aspect of development and publishing. So, long story short, it doesn't matter what you or I think about this. You and I have a very small sphere of influence, and if we care about making EC great, we should support it through celebrating the positives while giving constructive feedback and suggestions commensurate to our position as testers and supporters to help the devs fix the lacking parts.
