I 'Completed' Nebulous Fleet Command - Assorted Thoughts on the very beginning (aka the end)
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- čas přidán 5. 09. 2024
- I decided to play a game that isn't in early access. I made an absolutely horrendous judgement when I selected this random title from my library. However, it turns out to a really good contentless game, which I found enjoyable for the extremely short time I played it. Let's take a look, and dream of a full game using these unusual mechanics which I found so refreshing.
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Hi Devin, lead developer of N:FC here. Thank you for the video, and I'm sorry you were disappointed by the game.
Neb is still in early access and will be for a while, but I *do* consider the skirmish gameplay mostly complete. Neb really shines as a multiplayer game, where people spend hours tuning their fleet comps and missile designs and then testing them against other players who have done the same, and that's what I designed it to be. High-level play is extremely complex and challenging. We have a small but loyal and extremely active multiplayer community. Some of our players who have over 1000 hours of play time still make tweaks to their favorite fleets after every game and try new tactics because there are always lessons to be learned, and that is where 99.9% of the content is.
I totally understand your frustration with not having a singleplayer theme-park style experience to guide you through the game, especially since that is pretty standard in strategy games, but it's just not really the game Neb is meant to be. I also understand your complaints about not having an overarching objective. It can be hard to get invested when there's no reason to be fighting in the first place. Our next major update will be introducing a large strategic layer, which you can find more info about here: czcams.com/video/371mP5886Mc/video.html. In the meantime Neb is just a tactical sandbox, and if you're into that you'll have hundreds of hours of fun and if you're not then it seems like there's zero content in the game.
Anyway, thanks for checking out the game, and I hope you'll give it another try once Conquest is available.
P.S. I'll pass on what you said about the tutorial VO to my wife, who is the voice actor. The tutorial script is heavily inspired, like the rest of the game, by my time as an officer in the Navy and I basically imagined I was training a new Ensign in CIC when I wrote it. I'm glad that's how it felt to you, too.
No problem, I was blindly looking for something that wasn't here, so it's not so much disappointment, more just making a fuss about not having the finished product ready for the exact moment I stumbled into the game. So if you could invent a time machine while you're at it, that's an easy problem to solve eh?
I will swing back around sometime further down the line and take a more serious look. Thanks for your work!
"Nexus: jupiter incident" is a great example of the campaign in similar setting (sure u know), but it would be barely possible to compose it solo. Better example can be "Starsector" kind of having preset of missions in manner of different combat challenges to solve, where you can taste combat aspect of the game easily.
@eridanusindustries9427 just in case you aren't familiar with OffyD, he likes your game, even though it might not sound like it from the review. It's more obvious after comparing with his reviews of games he dislikes. Cheers and good luck working on your game.
@@OffyDGG I will note that the conquest mode of Nebulous has been cancelled? Changed? Put off for later? Because it didn't really fit the scope of Nebulous their going to do something smaller but first their releasing carriers and some other stuff just letting you know that it might take longer for single player stuff the beta of it is still available but isn't being updated or fixed
I highly reccomend you check out the "Exception To The Rule" campaign on the game's workshop, it's very high quality and is certainly more the type of content you were hoping for.
That said, nebulous has a very healthy multiplayer community (which has been the main focus of the game/developers for now), and the early access description (You've got to click "read more" on the store page to see it all) makes this clear.
As far as other "complete" games like this, Nexus - The Jupiter Incident is one of the big inspirations for the game and has a campaign, but lacks all the sandbox/skirmish and editor features Nebulous has
Looked up Nexus, and I already own it, another part of the infinite forgotten backlog! Good tip though, I will keep that in mind.
Have you tried out the modded single-player campaign "Exception To The Rule"? It's a bit short but very enjoyable.
Your review kind of irked me. I don't think you gave it enough of a chance. Neb is deceptively simple looking because of the UI. But the gameplay is not only complex, but very enjoyable. I was disappointed with no campaign, but everything else is stellar enough to far outweigh that bit. New players show up in game lobbies and go straight to spectating but we always coax them into playing... Because you won't learn it right or have fun unless you get in and mix it up. Spend a few hours tinkering/testing a build and when you see your strategy bear fruit it is very rewarding. I can't recommend Neb enough. I hope you can try it again and give it a real whirl. It really is worth it.
I mean it's not a review, played it for like an hour and then decided to wait to see what it will become later. I don't have time to get into a multiplayer game, especially not a slow paced one, so I was looking for something else from the game. The UI and general design seem promising to give me what I want eventually though.
This is the kind of game that really gets me thinking about multiplayer design: if you look at the most popular multiplayer games, they all have ways to make you feel like you're winning even when you're not, like somebody who makes a lot of money in Counterstrike despite their team losing, or a battle royal game where you might at least get to the end even if you don't kill anyone, or most commonly, RPG mechanics that do an okay-ish job of at least getting people to pretend to be trying.
With something like Nebulous Fleet Command though, it seems weird to mainly focus on the multiplayer, because there's no 'consolation' to be had, really: if someone feels like they've lost in the first 5 minutes, why play out the next 30? They have an incentive to keep quitting games until they don't feel on the back-foot, and without something like a big publisher's leverage to threaten long-term punishment for quitting (which itself leads to toxicity,) there's no real way to punish that bad behavior without hurting the badly-needed player numbers.
It feels like the game should really be rushing to at least teach player not to give up before kicking them into multiplayer, showing, "here's how you can turn some common situations in your favor," or, "this is what you or your opponent might be giving up if they want to do this thing," but I don't think I've seen an RTS do that since Age of Empire 2's Art of War...
It is actually exceedingly rare to see a player quit early because, barring situations where someone gets their fleet mudered by a cruise strike they didn't prepare for, you usually realize the game was lost...20 minutes ago. Its not a bad feeling, its just how nebulous plays and you take that acknowledgement and then figure out what went wrong for next time. Generally you have fun playing and the fights get scrappy as all get towards the end. I've had battles that seemed super lost and then we came back with some good ambush play and end up taking the thing 1000 - 972. But overall your never feeling like the game is lost 5 minutes in unless you make a major misplay.
I will agree that neb's in built tutorials aren't the best. The community has a swathe of resources for teaching folks, but its not super accessible due to being largely on youtube, steam guides, or the discord. However, devs have said they will be adding warfare library which will both cover more situations then the tutorial, and explain some of the less obvious mechanics.
@@Tuna224th It has an average player count of 80 from the past few months, so as a multiplayer game, it's basically going to be dead if something massive doesn't change.
And that's the problem: games don't have long to convince players there's fun to be had, not just frustration, and there isn't much point in asking people to pay for a game on the off-chance they might have fun playing with 80 other people.
@@bubbasbigblast8563 The player counts a bit low but its not unworkable, there's enough unique users at any given date that its not like your playing with the same people every time. Honestly the lower player count leads to fun situations where when you are playing with someone you recognize, there's an additional aspect to the infowar section of the game. When I run into another player who goes by smolcake I know to expect a corvette heavy playstyle, and they in turn know to expect lots of mines and rockets out of me. I once designed a missile expressly for the purpose of fighting a single player and countering their specific build, that's not something you can do in any other game I know.
Whats really important is that you do get games, its not dead lobbies, and there's a constant influx of new players. Lots and lots of folks are just waiting for conquest, which is fine, and I expect the player count to surge when that drops in a few months.
I think that's a good point about the issue of teaching a multiplayer game. It really depends on how willing the player is to lose, if they want to learn it via playing. Some kind of meta-tutorial that teaches how real games tend to go would be perfect. I think in the meantime people can say 'just look at guides on youtube' or something to get around that, which is probably the answer to have any hope of getting into the game in competitive multiplayer.
As for the quitting thing, I guess in reality it's harder to guess if you're going to win or not early on. As the other guy said, more likely you realise you were in a 'soft-loss' state for a long time but too late to do anything about it. I think that's just going to have to be something the game embraces, along with the inevitable reduction in interest from a time-sensitive audience.
Personally I would probably get driven away by this, because the thought of sitting there spending 15 minutes watching yourself gradually lose for the sake of getting to the end of the game might not be fun. Need situations where things don't really go in anyone's favour early on, so there is still hope and opportunities to look for. But that little niche situation is probably where the real fun lies!
@@bubbasbigblast8563 this is not CS, you dont need a infinite pool of people playing every moment of time.
80 players playing is atleast 60 of them in multiplayer. there is never an issue getting a game going with 8-10 people even if im from scandinavia.
MP is addictive, the game has a okay learning curve but the complexities (not in controls, but in tactics) makes every game unique and rewarding. Sure there is time where you loose early, but that is made up for by magnitude when you have a 40 minute slug match with equaly good players, where small choices can make for big impacts in the game. And where the biggest gun dos not always win.
Children of a Dead Earth might be worth checking out, it is the most , i'd even say only spaceship game that actually makes a real effort at realism and comes very close. (Or at least as close as we can get with foresight, so i'm curious what you, being from the future, think of it.) All other games i know tend to go off the rails really quickly because they either get something really wrong or make intentional changes for the sake of gameplay. Like, in this game the entire stealth/ECM/information warfare idea just doesn't work in a perfectly transparent environment like vacuum (of space). Or Terra Invicta which you also made a video about a while ago, which on one hand implements real orbital mechanics on the strategic map, but then all battles start with fleets stationary to another.
That's a good shout, I think I might even have bought the game already as someone else recommended it a while back and I liked the idea of it. A favourite game of mine in the last year was Delta V, a space game that the dev said was inspired to some extent by Children of a Dead Earth. So yes, I do need to check that out. Thanks!
@@OffyDGG Interesting, i didn't know that about Delta V, but i can see it. They are both games that lean heavily into realism and the high level of detail and tinkering that it allows, with no regard to normal game conventions. Although they are not similar in terms of gameplay.
Did you try the multiplayer? So much meat on those bones, best strategy games right now
Howdy, long time player of neb here, wanted to drop a comment after watching
First thing that jumped out to me, description says its not in EA, steam page does, you say in the video, I get what you were trying to say but it comes off as not knowing. Neb is very much an EA title in active development, which may explain some of the quirks and whatnot it has.
The whole seeing the map thing can kinda be explained that these random rocks have been pre-charted to a degree, a ships radar cant see a whole island but you'd still have it on a map, meanwhile enemy ships? Only once you see them yourself. Its not really explained in game but the rocks we are fighting over are actually points of interest that exist for the eventual conquest gamemode, so they are notible enough for those purposes. You can see some of them on the stratmap for the devlogs
Nebulous is driven quite heavily by the players design due to the shipbuilding. The content is taking the tools it gives you, and then tuning your fleets over hundreds of games to be the perfect fleet of doom that brings fear to the enemy. Your constantly designing new ideas, new fleets, to beat the things that you see other players bring, and thats really the content. Thats not for everyone, but it does mean I can be over here with just shy of 1500 hours and still enjoying the game greatly. The tools themselves are way more complex then they look at a glance, for instance, radar. You bring it up a bit a the start but when your ships sensors see a thing, its not some arbitrary distance. All the stats on the radar go into a horrifyingly complex calculation thats placed against the radar return using the actual geometry of the ship its trying to see, compares it to the noise floor (which is changed by jammers) and only then can you generate a track, with the accuracy being determined by the strenth of the return. The main dev is active U.S Navy and was (is? not actually sure if he still is) an electronic warfare officer, hes gotten about as close to just simulating real life radars as he can without having someone knock on his door for leaking classified info (or burning our brains out).
The tutorial VA is actually the devs wife so your comments about it was kinda funny
Regarding the concerns over combat degradation (thrusters etc), even a component at 0% still does something even if its really, really bad. A ship that has been absolutely blown to bits can still manage a speed of around 7 m/s when its top speed is normally 30, thats painfully slow in combat but it does mean your not just stuck in place for seven minutes at a time. A gun or missile system at 0% will stop functioning, but unless your drive module itself or the CIC is shot out, you always have some amount of control. CIC and drive restorations take perhaps 1-1.5 minutes to bring back online, and because your usually controlling an average of 3 ships (I personally control 6-9 as preference) you always have something to do even as one ship brings itself back into function, its not really a problem for playing the game and definitely adds to the simulation aspects. With conquest damage is going to be more persistent but can be repaired at major stations, but thruster damage wont prevent a ship from moving on stratmap so your always able to go and repair provided you have the fuel for it, and you can be refueled by other ships.
Jamming and EWar (Electronic Warfare) are both major components of multiplayer games, some players use it more then others but active stealth -- the practice of using jamming to hide your location rather then trying to slip under the radar -- is a pretty common practice. As mentioned above it gets factored into a whole lot of stuff so its pretty fun to fight. You can counter-jam, use illuminators and burn through sweeps to try and fight it, manage distance, all that stuff plays into the jamming and its neat. I dont see why you wouldn't let yourself like it lets be honest its realllly cool lol
None of the point defense stuff is probability based its all simulated. Missiles have armor ratings even that factor in the amount of damage they take when hit by a point defense weapon, for example torpedos are armoed up enough that flak based weapons, despite having their nice AOE attacks, wont do full damage as the fragments cant get to the nice internals. Thats not the case for size 2 missiles (tempest frame) who take full damage. With something like the 20mm CWIS, the defender for ANS in the tutorial, it is actually casting multiple stepped raycasts to see if it hits a missile. Missiles can use terminal manuvers like corkscrews to try and throw this off, and it works really well. Its not a % to dodge the missile has to actually avoid the line of tracers and it looks brilliant in a real game
Conquest is going to be designed with singleplayer in mind, so that will be much more the singleplayer speed, until then neb is a heavily multiplayer focused and driven game for better or worse
Nebulous is a verrrry slow paced game and myself and many other players do love it for that. It is nerve wracking to have to think minutes in advance, but you do get the nicety that the enemy is doing the same. APM for nebulous is often single diget unless your running a high ship count fleet which makes it nice and approachable by folks who aren't from the RTS genre, its no starcraft where the APM difference alone makes you hopelessly outmatched, the best players in the game have the same constraints as you. For people more used to those faster styles I do imagine it can be overly slow, but it gives you the time you need to make those choices and sort through the mountan of information the game can throw at you in a real match. Your doing 2x Oak v 2x Oak which is a real game but its such a mirror match that many of the tactical limitations are removed, not to mention that you know what the enemy has which isn't the case in multiplayer at least. If the game is really too slow for you outright, in singleplayer at least you can press F2 and do time-scale (number), that lets you accelerate global time by whatever you want.
If you feel like dropping by neb again I do recommend the community discord, folks can answer questions and help you understand whats going on. Multiplayers always there to give a try to as well.
Apologies for the essay I just really like this game haha
Oh I was just reminded! There is a single player campaign mod called 'Exception to the Rule' which is really good and highly recommended. Slipped my mind somehow.
Thanks for your comment. My concerns were more hypothetical, so less about how it plays now, and more about what it would be like to have battles of these style as part of a wider campaign. The risk is that if you have a certain 'flow' of campaign gameplay, stopping that flow for a long diversion in the form of a battle could become disruptive. Perhaps some kind of autoresolve feature will be added for skipping the more trivial cases, to help with this.
The most important you mentioned for me is right there at the end - pressing F2 to change timescale. that needs to be brought out into the main UI imo as I definitely would have used that constantly if I had known about it.
I am sure I will be back some years in the future to rant some more, so I will have to try and remember some tips for then!
Nice writeup @tunna224th - I may have to get off the fence and pick this up.
If you wonder how a realistic space campaign for this game would look like - you've already seen the tutorial for it. I'm not talking about this game, I'm talking about Terra Invicta. The campaign has a ton of realism and engineering considerations and as a result you do realistic things like waiting for your ships to get to their destination. You're waiting a lot, the game has massive pacing issues. At the same time it is amazingly refreshing and incredibly fun.
Ah the dark spectre of the ultimate game looms again!
@@OffyDGG Whenever I start to get dewy-eyed about the ultimate game, I feel like a strong game engine and framework for modding has to be an ingredient. "Ultimate" is so arbitrary and personal, that you need to just give the most passionate players the tools to realize whatever weird and wild concepts they can think of -- in-game or in mods. This helps to build a community around the game, that can outlast many seasons of rehashed AAA dross like Call of Duty: Electric Boogaloo 2 or FIFA 20xx. In my limited experience, some of the most enduring games that came out of the post global financial crisis period were conceived when their founders indirectly opted out of the rat race, took a few years to put a game into early access, and now 10+ years after that are still growing.
No sequels, few to no DLCs, definitely no microtransactions, big mod offerings. I already listed the few that dominate my limited gaming repertoire, elsewhere in comments: Project Zomboid, BeamNG, Rimworld, Space Engineers. Maybe Arma 3 fits here as well. Heck, even GTA V kind of counts, because of all the content and gameplay people can make or find in it (sometimes by forcefully prying the modding capabilities loose from Rock*'s grasping fingers).
I'm sure there are more that I haven't played. Minecraft seems popular. :D
In this paradigm, a game dev then becomes the groundskeeper for the content ecosystem, building and maintaining the game engine and infrastructure. They build and model systems, just as much as or more so than creating actual content for player consumption. A physics engine, a pawn or entity personality abstraction simulation, an inventory management system, a building blocks sandbox. I'll mildly critique Space Engineers and Arma 3 a bit for leaning too heavily into the sandbox and mechanics with inadequate content or content framework to prime the community content creation pump in some ways (though their workshops are still VERY active despite this).
I saw another video that talked about how Halo briefly lost its fanbase to some one-shot FPS game that combined Halo gameplay with Portal. This was due to timing during a "long" dry spell, 6 years after the then-most recent Halo game release. As with many AAA conventions, I had a moment of indie-grounded culture shock, b/c most of the games I've played most recently have been steadily selling for 11+ years with no sequels, sometimes no DLCs.
There is also the campaign for this game in the world and it looks like it'll have better pacing than Terra Invicta. And it'll be pretty realistic.
Your critique of Nebulous in its current state is similar to how I've seen people critique Space Engineers. Cool toolkit, now what do we do with it? There's no narrative other than what you choose to make (as the pro-Nebulous comments below have pointed out about the MP games or the very cool Exception to the Rule campaign mod).
Space Engineers has the advantage of letting players do solo games where they can engage in the core survival game loops of mining and building. Nebulous, not so much singleplayer, skirmish or otherwise yet.
As Nebulous is now, I kind of compare it to Wargame/WARNO or Arma 3. The players and MP can definitely make it something amazing. But the devs could stand to expand the basic framework or toolkit with more options. From my limited perspective of watching a fair few Nebulous rounds, it's similar to Wargame in that there's only one style of map play (well, not technically true for Wargame, and maybe not for Nebulous): Capture 5 areas of the map and rack up victory points. There aren't any variations like:
Capture point dependencies where capturing a first point unlocks access to a second point, etc (like Project Reality/Squad). Creates an attacker/defender dynamic instead of the same meeting engagement every time (which is what all MP Wargame/WARNO games devolve into, no matter the specific point award structure).
Procedural or randomized sets of capture zones. High value targets IRL aren't always uniformly distributed over an area, so why are Nebulous capture points roughly symmetrical and equidistant? This is one area where Wargame/WARNO makes some effort to individualize their capture zones with different kinds of terrain. In space, perhaps one capture zone could be 5x the distance from other zones, but with completely clear line of sight and no navigational hazards; players would have to strongly consider bringing an element with the longest range fires available, and/or the fastest ships available. Or some zones could be partially fenced in by different navigational hazards: area denial EMP defenses that slow or intermittently black out ship subsystems passing through but don't hinder weapons fire passing through (unless guided missiles), smaller asteroid/debris fields that don't fully obstruct LOS, weapons fire, or navigation but pose a damage risk or chance of absorbing shots passing through.
Mobile victory points or physical ship/station objectives for attack or defense (i.e. strike or raid for offense, escort or fighting withdrawal for defense). This seems like it would be very much in OSP's wheelhouse for Nebulous factions -- with their lighter more ad hoc fleet, they'd want to fight delaying actions, hit and run, etc rather than try to go toe to toe with ANS every time. This does occur emergently within some Nebulous rounds, where OSP try for end runs on victory points. It'd be nice if the game mode framework could additionally support or encourage this as an option.
Trigger points to unlock reinforcements or repairs/supplies/ammo.
Maybe some old sci-fi tropes like steal the prototype, extract the covert operative, infil/exfil into enemy-controlled space, or play the OPFOR and search for the infiltration force (One side has more numerous force that is not quite enough to simultaneously fully cover 6 high value targets; other side has smaller, faster force and can choose which targets to hit in what order, opting to bail on the last ones if the safer partial victory outweighs the risks of going for a full victory), etc. The Arma 3 milsim community have replicated a lot of these game mode variations, and in a sci-fi spaceship setting some of them could easily transfer.
We have such similar taste in games, especially wishlisted games, these videos almost feel tailor made for my tastes😅
I got this game after reading some of the Legend of the Galactic Heroes manga (understandably), and played it for a little. Unfortunately it took too much brain power at the time so I stopped fairly early, and haven't gone back since. Now it sits in my library and tempts me, telling me sweet little lies about my latent military talent, and I continue to fight it with the knowledge that to unleash that talent I must first learn how to play the game...
LOGH mentioned! Liberty stands for freedom~
Thanks for the video Devin, as usual I found your commentary enjoyable to listen to and broadly agree with your comments and criticisms. I've not played that much of Nebulous Fleet Command but I have enjoyed watching some multiplayer match videos from people that have played a lot more. I would probably push back on your assessment of 'not a game,' because while there's a lot of planned content that isn't present yet, I do think that the mechanics are deep enough at present that there's real fun to be had in learning how to master those mechanical elements of the game, even without a campaign or anything like that. I guess it reminds me of people who enjoy getting really good at Street Fighter 6 or chess, in that if the mechanical elements hit just right for a person, they might just end up playing 1k hours of what arguably amounts to very little structured content aside from repeated slightly changed versions of those same mechanical considerations. Which I guess speaks to the unfortunate gap between what Nebulous is and what it is planned to be, because as a very niche multiplayer digital wargame I think it's really cool, but it's unfortunate that it isn't really more than that at present. I think the wargame comparison is the best way of thinking about this game at present for me, because much like a tabletop wargame it feels like Nebulous is almost a set of mechanics that have been designed, but the "game" is something that arises out of engaging with those mechanics in a way that hasn't been designed (much like how reading a Warhammer 40K rulebook isn't really playing 40K "the game," if that makes sense). I guess the core point all this text is that weird and clunky milsim space naval warfare activates a specific set of neurons for me, and I hope the developers are using my early access money to add more to the game.
Also I was going to end with a joke about how assuming a game is finished just because it releases as 1.0 isn't safe, but then you ended the video with a very similar comment, so instead I will just mention the joke I wanted to tell instead of telling an actual joke (which is less funny but also less work).
That sounds good to me, it is only that I basically came in looking for some kind of single player experience, so I didn't explore the aspect you are talking about at all. And I only played for like 1.5 hours. So whatever the 'game' I was looking for was, it's wasn't there, but certainly it has racked up a whole load of hours played among multiplayer users by the looks of things, so something good is happening there.
You haven't played this game until you've ambushed a player led task force with a triple beam bb and managed to design a missile boat that can pierce real heavy pd screens. Those two things are how the game clicks into place.
Reminds me of the homeworld series but with more detailed individual ship info/control
Homeworld + War thunder or smth.
I never really thought about early access as a concept. It is perhaps a neccessary evolution of the typical indie game path. Whereas before, you did a kickstarter and hoped to get enough funding by enough people being interested in the project. Now, you have a 30% finished product that you get funding from because people already interested are buying and allow you to finish it. It isn't a perfect system. Just like Kickstarter, it can be easily abused. but I think this is net positive to developpers at the detriment of the comsumer. We all know about crunching in the video game industry and I think we should support indie devs, working at their own pace instead of being rushed to put out half-finished products. The irony of my previous sentence is not lost on me. It is funny how we used to praise indie games for being complete products unlike the DLC-ridden AAA games, and now most indie games also come out half-finished.
I think a solution that would be sastify people like you and the indie developpers, would be to have game demos again. We stopped making game demos and it all went downhill. So have a demo for your early access game alongside the option to buy it. The player gets an idea of the game by playing it and the devs don't need that much work because the EA game would already be the size of a game demo. The player can then buy the game if they feel the promised content beyond that demo is gonna be worth it
Demos seems like a really good solution. I saw the dev of Delta-V Rings of Saturn talking about this. He basically made a demo that contained almost the entire game, and just said 'buy it if you like it'. Any chance of players getting disappointed or having buying remorse must be eliminated by this.
It is also fun to be able to window-shop games by playing small amounts for free, so demos feels like a great advantage from the consumer point of view.
I guess devs may not think the same way all the time, since using your marketing to 'trick' people into buying the game, and relying on a certain amount not refunding, is basically free money that doesn't take much dev time or effort to generate. No Man's Sky being the classic example! If that game had released a demo, I am sure it would have been a disaster for the company.
Tangential to OP's point, I am semi-OK with games deliberately residing in perpetual development -- if they do it right. Great power, great responsibility, and all that. It IS necessary to some degree, b/c few entities have a spare few $100Ks lying around ready to take a chance on some unproven new indie dev team. So you have to iterate with the resources available at any point. Movies often go through a life cycle of small skits and shorts, short film or episodes, and ultimately a big movie deal if things work out. Same for all the comics that had to build up to graphic novels, TV shows, and movies. Or bestseller books that started as a short story, then were re-written and expanded later. Big publisher money is risk-averse, and wants to see tangible evidence of a community or fanbase already primed to pay money for a bigger version of the pilot or test version. Or an indie dev team can give the big money the finger, and choose to directly engage with smaller revenue streams in exchange for retaining full creative and business control over their work, which can end up giving them a much bigger percentage of smaller net profits.
Project Zomboid, BeamNG, Space Engineers, and Rimworld are games I've played since within the first 1-2 years of their early access launch. PZ and Beam both take a very pure approach to development where "we'll keep improving and expanding the game as long as people keep buying it." No DLCs, no AAA microtransactions, etc. All of these example games (esp PZ and Beam!) have come very far since they first launched EA and CONTINUED to do so at a similar pace after 1.0 release (where that even applies), such that the 1.0 milestone was almost inconsequential in the grand scheme of constant growth.
Qualifying this position, I recognize that no matter what a game's current stage of development is called, it has to be sufficiently fun with some minimum core game loops functional. PZ was fun for me years ago already. Beam became much more fun more recently. I have a few hundred hours in each (and 3000 hours in Rimworld, with more than half of that time pre-1.0 release).
OTOH I paid my bare minimum entry fee of $45 into Star Citizen 11 years ago, and still have yet to log more than 2 hours in the game (most of which were spent trying to load it). Not sufficient for me. But sufficiency is an individual judgment call, and I realize there are plenty of people who do consider SC already sufficient for their own fun, esp recently in the past year or so.
All of this relates to other business and societal movements towards life and work as constant, iterative processes instead of monolithic milestones with huge plateaus of nothingness in between. More adaptable in some ways (a major benefit I've seen play out in multiple indie games with healthy communities), while a bit formless, endless, potentially aimless, and lacking in decisive, attention-grabbing Release Day spectacles that help to motivate devs and players toward a common goal. Just a different way to do things.
No Campaign, and on the road map is SP gone.
The dev said they are working on single player currently, although on idea how long it is going to take.
29:27 This isn't how it plays out, usually. Why? Well, the symmetricity of ships will just not be there. What you've done is created the least interactive scenario possible here.
Also: the ships, unless explicitly told otherwise will try to rotate to a favourable thrust orientation by means of the fastest rotation axis. Just cuz you CAN tell their crew to hold a heading doesn't mean that they won't do what they see as best (following simple rules but still) if NOT told to do otherwise. They'll also repair their ship without your input analogously to above. They're not stupid, but they do follow orders.
Yes I just threw on the pure default options for that skirmish, which happens to be not especially interesting it seems, unlucky!
Hey, its come to my attention that there is a Mechanicus 2 in the work. it still fairly early in developement but will feature playable Necrons! May you consider taking a look at it when it eventually comes around the corner? For the sake of seeing if your rant has been answered?
Sure, only thing better than a three hour rant is a three hour rant with a sequel! I shall be interested to see what changes they make.
41:54 Let me guess, it rhymes with Splomeworld Bree.
Love your videos
Bro I can spend 3 hrs making ships and missiles. You started wrong son.
Space submarines with battleship guns!
Waiting for Devin to play a game to use SunTzu tactics instead of Chess.
5 hour video of me repeatedly entering matchmaking, then quitting because balanced engagements don't guarantee victory, coming soon.
Wait... is this the kings and generals voice actor???? 😮
I think this will never really be a game you want. You seem to want a kind of larger scale breadth of things to do in this game whereas all the game development seems to be going into drilling into the core of the earth and back out the other end again. I don't really think that this level of depth is that interesting in a campaign context, it's something that really only reaches its peak when you play against other people since if there were a campaign it would either A) only use the systems superficially or B) be so incomprehensible to the average player that you'll bounce off of it anyway. I'm hoping personally the campaign such as it is, is the former since roping players in and having some of them trickle into multiplayer is better than having them just smash their faces into a wall that is this game's systems.
Most of the people I see playing this game and enjoying it are people who want to tinker with things to see if they work or how to get better at the game as a whole. Personally, I've spent about 110 hours in the missile design screen and testing range to about 30 hours in actual multiplayer matches, and the payoff of your volley of S3hHEKPs hitting home and coring out an Ocello is simply orgasmic. Doing that against the AI is just a dull, hollow thing since I can know what the AI loadout will be, where it will go, how it will react. But predicting where a real human player is with a loadout that I cannot know ahead of time, and nailing their ship without it even knowing I exist? That is the peak of what this game can offer.
If spending 140 hours just to get that high of seeing your hard effort and learning coalesce into that one perfect moment isn't something that you want, then I don't really think this game will ever do it for you. Even if they made a massive campaign with the pieces that they have, the game falls flat without those kinds of rushes and if all you'll ever experience with this game is firing long range gun fire at cruisers, then no single player experience is going to fix this game.
Glad the dev is working on a very in depth single player campaign. Very hype for the future of this game.
And for me, the custom ship making and multiplayer is already a good gameplay for me.
This whole video seems more like a complaint that the game focused on multiplayer and didnt have a single player campaign. (Yet).
You stated its a “tech demo with no game” and “not a real game sold in a game store” when its a very good game its just a multiplayer game. Thats like complaining Counter strike is bad cuz theres no campaign just Multiplayer.
Not to mention you stated you did not even look at the store page to see what the game is about and complain it didnt live up to expectations it didnt set.
That's exactly what this is, yes. Not what I was hoping for, but maybe one day it will be.
@@OffyDGG a shame.
@@damaskusseraph6046 agreed, but the devs are working on new content, so there will be something to offer players like me eventually
@@OffyDGG bad news. Conquest is canceled fir now. Check newest dev video for why
Reminds me too much of eve online tbh.