My last Illfonic game: is this game half-a-scam?

#81

I wish you were right… but you know. At some point you got to stop hoping and start to recognize the patterns. I think I trusted Illfonic until Patch 1.04, after that the doubt was starting. I mean… “it happens”, games get released and are buggy as hell at release. Something went wrong, an old build got uploaded, various reasons.

Illfonic even pushed a quick hotfix right after the release that showed they actively worked on fixes. They even spoke to the community, everyone was happy and supportive.

It turned when every patch ‘almost’ brought more bugs to the game than it fixed. And the sad reality is… this is a company that is required to pay their employees. Meaning that if we - the playerbase - want the developers to keep fixing this game? We have to keep paying for DLC… get friends to get the game as well.

But I can’t recommend this game to friends. They love my stories about this game, but they don’t want to play a “broken” product. For a game like this, the Predator gameplay has to be flawless. Evolve didn’t even try to create fancy levels that looked natural, it was designed so the monsters always felt like it was fair. Like the game wasn’t holding them back. For everyone that remembers, the hunters in Evolve had the most broken mechanics, but it was like 1% broken, you learned to live with it (jetpack climbing for example).

In this game… leaping for the Predator is basically Russian roulette. More so when engaging a good team. Hitscan weapons make snipers overpowered as hell. In any game.

Remember Halo & Halo 2 on PC? Remember the playerbase that got good with “no-scope” snipers? It flipped the entire balance in favor of any sniper. Because Halo also has hitscan (human) weapons. The bullet hits when you shoot, there is no travel time or bullet drop. Hunt Showdown literally balances weapons with bullet speed (vellocity) meaning there is a noticable difference between pistols, rifles and snipers, simply because of their bullet velocity. It balances everything, it makes distant targets much harder to hit.

It will balance snipers for Predator as well… but it will be an extra handicap for Playstation players.

From what I’ve gathered this game was originally designed to be a Playstation only game, but PC players got lucky.

Right now… PC makes the Fireteam overpowered… not only because of their ability to aim, but also because you can literally “click heads” with your weapons. No weapon sway, no bullet travel.

There is too much that feels like an afterthought. And it shows.

If it takes 6 more months to fix this game, then I wonder what happened during development. What happened to their productivity and ability to rework some core programming so future fixes won’t break underlying mechanics.

How is it that major gameplay mechanics are affected when changing completely different systems? I know the answer, but if I say it out loud “I’ll be the asshole”. I said it a few times already.

2 Likes
#82

Say it. DEW IT!

#83

Do you guys think they have maybe been demoralised from the bad fan reception? It has to have some affect on them? The crossplay invites they maybe overestimated their ability to have it working from launch? I get peoples frustration, I really like the game concept and enjoyed the beta but when they stated publicly that the beta was only a fraction of the game, to me that could have meant it would be more fleshed out on release so I preordered, but after so many issues and bugs I finally admitted defeat and requested a refund on psn and Sony rejected the request. I was more disappointed with the games launch than not getting the refund but I’m hoping it can be turned around. People are 100% justified to be pissed

1 Like
#84

I am sure they are. And if the team is demoralized they will have employees creating more problems than they fix. But that is something the company has to figure out themselves.

Generally the issues lie with leadership and quality hiring. People underestimate how skilled you have to be to be a proper programmer and I personally know a few who bluffed their way towards the top. Mind you, they can make games just fine… but they will make more mistakes because they simply lack the experience.

Imagine a game like Oxygen Not Included from Klei Entertainment:

In that game you have to design “engineer” a colony for your dupes (survivors). Now you get to midgame and you have to do two things: improve your oxygen generation and deal with the industrial heat that is creeping throughout your base. Now, if you played that game you will know how many small “patches” will sorta help, but you will slowly notice that these patches aren’t enough. It’s like plugging a broken dam with corks. At some point… the flaws will make the entire thing collapse.

Now if you played Oxygen Not Included, you will know it’s better to design your “machines” with the end-goal in mind. You make this completely oversized monstrocity so you don’t don’t have to worry about it anymore. You make sure the design will be “future proof”.

Then comes building it, the idea is set, but you are noticing small hickups in the system (literally the bugs of your own design) and you start fixing them.

Now imagine a “machine” that wasn’t designed right, it barely works as intended and it has been “patched” but it costs so much work to avoid breaking other parts of the machine…

You kinda conclude that you are spending 10x more time on working around the fixes and patches, because the core design wasn’t right for what you tried to create.

Now imagine that creating a game, building one follows a similar proces. And literally all game-programmers I’ve met (not masters of their field, mind you) have the habit of thinking ground up. They start at step 1 and end when they feel they are done.

Designers work the other way around, they think with the end in mind and hope to god that the programmers/producers create a foundation to get there.

So what happens if the programmers “just start building” but they don’t know what complications they will face, because the designers haven’t thought of it yet. What happens if your core gamedesign doesn’t have a strict quality check, starting in your prototype phase?

What will happen if you change the core design of your game - or want to - but the foundation barely supports it?

What you get is a “treehut build by teenagers”. Functional, but prone to mistakes, flaws.

Now imagine that you release a fully fledged title, “build by teenagers” - lack of experience - and they are fully confident that it works.

Until the customer finds out that what they paid for… isn’t what they sold.

What if - regarding my McDonalds example - the burger on the screen, doesn’t look like the burger you pay for?

Imagine a Hamburger restaurant that throws random people out of their restaurant every 10 minutes? What if that same restaurant also doesn’t deliver the quality they talked about. What if the prices this restaurant asks, don’t reflect the products they deliver?

Well that restaurant will go bankrupt because their leadership is literally too foolish to even be in that position.

This is how companies die. I worked at two companies that went through this proces. And that same leadership acts like they know… but the systematic mistakes and ignorance? If nobody does something about it… it is a sinking ship.

I’m old enough now to realize that you need to intervene. Literally start communicating internally about the issues you are facing.

What Illfonic needs, is their own “fucking” Gordon Ramsey that wakes them up. Something is going on and if it doesn’t change. Illfonic will be a name of the past.

Reputation matters a lot in this business.

Ask EA
Ask Ubisoft
Ask 2K
Ask Bethesda

#85

Thought this was relevant:

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And the counter argument from my side, resulting in the same-same, but different meme:

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3 Likes
#86

This is as true as it gets unfortunately.

#87

Queue times are high when there’s less players… That’s how it works when you are waiting to have 5 ppl that want to do the same thing.

More players = Lower queue times
There is no set number of lobbies. The servers simply match 5 players together and creates a lobby for them. Long wait times are either a poor server set up or lack of players.

Maths is a wonderful thing.

#88

When the dutch dropped the que times got longer, when predator challegne came up que times got longer. This game is not dying just look at the forums or the reddit

#89

Weren’t you supposed to be dropping the game like a patch ago?

Not really no. Illfonic’s reputation is being the outsourced dudes that got kicked off star citizen and you still bought their game. I atleast went in with extremely low expectations and left with a roadmap. Meanwhile EA could release NBA games for 500 more years while we’re on the topic. No Man’s Sky currently alive and well still dropping content even after being the greatest PR disaster should’ve tanked them completely by your logic? People don’t care, they see the game not the company and probably rightfully so because talent comes and goes. Forums are and always will be a vocal minority, and this is an age of social media anyways & that’s what qualifies as communication these days.

& Ah yes the comic straw man. Because everyone knows early access games never hit 1.0 therefor games as a service = scams

#90

No. They didn’t. You’re talking shit. As per usual.

#91

Nah if you’d been paying attention (and considering you dropped like 30 replies to my post from 10 days ago where I was talking about getting the refund, I thought you would have been), I said the next patch (what they labeled 1.13 even though @courier admitted it was a typo by the devs), would be D-Day for me as far as illfonic goes.
That dropped just under a week ago and I have since sent my response to Epic to accept the refund (3 days ago), I am now waiting on said refund.

I’m amazed you can’t even remember the threads you troll on, although if you troll on every thread I guess it’s easy to loose track of the bullshit you are spewing.

1 Like
#92

read the data…

Here we go with the reading thing again LOL.

And if you look at the forums and the activity, it’s seriously dying.
Most of the players that actually give a shit and were trying to help the devs with in game videos and tests have given up.

2 Likes
#93

You vastly overestimate the amount of shits I give but that’s cute. I forgot you run around checking people’s profiles like this is facebook.
You’ll be off the forums by 1.13 rather than staying to scream dead game, surely?

#94

Your not wrong with the Bethesda part 😂😂