@archmagos-alexi said in Not jumping on the hype train. (Concerned):
We had the Testing Team for such things, but the Tau were sprung on us at such short notice and pushed through before we really had a chance to check things properly. Hopefully this time around we are given the time to thoroughly test things and have them working "Just As Planned" prior to release, but as it is we have to wait and see.
Ah, that explains it. Hopefully with every race already available at launch, it'll be less of a concern this time around anyways.
@canned_f3tus said in Not jumping on the hype train. (Concerned):
@romeo Yeah but these games are so successful because they have an established fanbase. Also the content they provide is top notch. Totalwar has a crap ton of replay value BFGA doesnt. You play the campaign maybe once twice and than you move on to comp stomping ships in elite (which i can imagine gets repetitive and boring) or mess around in multiplayer game dealing with rediculous imbalances, cheezes, stale metas that are really strict for some races for X Y and Z reasons and a rapidly declining playerbase.
With tindaloses limited resources they kinda need to figure out what the focus of the game is. Because they wont be able to please everyone. They can go all out with the original formula and make a bangin single player/ coop experience with tons of campaign DLC in the works cause it would work fairly well. They wont have to worry about imbalances and flawed game mechanics because the singleplayer guys most likely wont care because it wont affect their gaming experience as much. But if they want to make a good multiplayer as well on top of that it is going to require some reworks and more time and i dont know if tindalos can do both.
Do bear in mind, Stellaris was a brand new IP, and Galactic Civilization hadn't had a release in so long that it no longer had the name behind it. Plus Ashes of the Singularity was also a mammoth success, and that had no name behind it. Even then, even if we want to say all five were only successful because of their names, it's worth remembering: They still built those names through singleplayer-dominant releases. The point still stands.
Agreed, and that's my big concern too. If they pull it off - awesome, I'll be thrilled for both Tindalos and the multiplayer crowd. But Games Workshop themselves haven't pulled it off after decades of effort, and they're absolutely colossal compared to Tindalos. I think the "safer play" is to focus on the singleplayer stuff first, lock that down, and then work on the multiplayer ongoing after release. Because it's never going to be perfectly balanced - it can't be - but if they're working with the community they can at least try to get close (See: Starcraft).
@voodoomike said in Not jumping on the hype train. (Concerned):
@bosie said in Not jumping on the hype train. (Concerned):
You can't quote a single games' MP vs SP figures, especially when the games allows mods in MP games.
Some games have achievements for playing your first multiplayer match. When a game is distributed exclusively via Steam, that allows for a reasonably accurate determination of the number of game owners who do or do not participate in multiplayer. BFG:A, however, does not have such an achievement so the figures he's quoting are nothing but supposition.
@romeo said in Not jumping on the hype train. (Concerned):
All I can do is look at the data I've got from a fairly similar strategy game, and compare it to the multiplayer community of this game weighed against its average user amounts.
Not a reliable method.. nor are the numbers from Steamspy reliable. On another game I compared the number of people who had played multiplayer that day (from actual play records obtained from the game's own servers) with the steamspy activity numbers, and it showed that more people had played in multiplayer that day than steamspy showed having played the game at all on that day, which is clearly impossible. It was the last time I wasted any time on Steamspy for anything but general trend data.
The figures I'm quoting, for about the 223934745985th time, are from the developers of Ashes of the Singularity. Not supposition in the slightest there. Here's their post about it, if you're curious (https://forums.ashesofthesingularity.com/478991/page/1/#replies). It's the fourth bullet point.
As for Steamspy not being reliable, you're going to have to provide proof of that, because their data comes from the Steam SDK itself. For it to be unreliable, Steam itself would have to be unreliable. Literally every time I've had to compare it to what developers have posted, it has always been accurate.
Frankly though, I'm not even sure what possible argument there is to be made. The multiplayer was always small in the game. There were numerous threads about how dead things were in the old forums. Look up BFG:A on 1D4Chan and it's described as a great game with a non-existent multiplayer crowd. Hell, Google "Battlefleet Gothic Amarda Multi" and the first suggestion will be "Battlefleet Gothic Amarda Multiplayer Dead". People can dance around and try to skirt the issue all they like, but the simple fact of the matter is multiplayer typically a small part of any RTS, and BFG:A was very clearly not an exception to that.