Who Murdered Medieval Engineers ? - Information - History - Development
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- čas přidán 11. 01. 2022
- What happened to Medieval Engineers ?
A question that often pop's up is what happened to Medieval Engineers so why don't we dive in and have a look.
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My favourite memory of ME was joining a guy on his quest to build a castle. We started from square one and more and more people came. The castle got bigger and some people made their own homes. I made a tavern in town aswell. Server was never populated enough, but this was still a lot of fun.
I remember those good times. People coming together. Making tunnels. Making farms. Making their own little homes at the mountain-sides. Un-necessary bridges that looked good. And stairs leading down in channels to more doors, that lead into the mountain. Wacky constructions that sometimes destroyed houses. Little routes inside the walls. Good times.
its shit like that wich makes golden moments...
after all ,how many minecraft things is rather lack luster ? be its 'vanila' form.. or modpacks a lot of people call 'small' ..yet due to how much freedom people have when sharing a realm and such...
the poor mp coding always been a crippling factor for this studios games..they are perfect concepts...but just ffs!...finish the poolish of at least ONE before pitching dlc or a new project... bha :/
Was this guys name Attila?
@@fudomyoo9762 Oh? Another Hungarian? This is not the same guy who wanted hugs and got put in a cage right?
@@fudomyoo9762 Not sure. The guy I mean is called Vallenshield now.
Whilst I understand abandoning the project from a business standpoint, the problem with doing it like this is that it sours all your customers for future projects and experiments you do, such as a Roman Engineers if that happens. I think they'll find far fewer people willing to take a risk on another early access from a studio that might well up-sticks if it doesn't turn out as successful as they want it to be.
Also makes people really not trust buying early access games too, knowing there is a high chance it will be abandoned.
@@KarasouTengu Yeah, every time this happens with any game or studio, it has a knock-on effect that hurts every other developer, especially the smaller and new ones that really need people to buy into early access for their game to get made. Everybody loses, really.
aye...if you want to try fund a project with early access... you HAVE to deliver a completed product or you risk not just hurting your studios name for a entire generation...but your personal names as devs...
as customers that actually have to cash to fork out will look out specificly for this kind of thing to decide if a studio or individual developers should be avoided or ONLY buy completed products from and never any services :/..... i actually got a bit sad when i heard that product looked like it was being ignored because i did want it...
i mean take me as example , i love my space engineers between the empyrion and space engineer i bought about the same time... space engineers is the true product i would be tempted to have a 'subscription' for to keep free multiplayer servers alive and the game kept uppdated if microsoft decided to try and trick everyone to rebuy ther AOE2 agen by making a 'new' Os -incompatible- with the old ones coding.....but the way ther studio handled the medival engineers means the vaule of ther 'word' dropped hard....
do i understand why they did as they did ? of course.... but if you not can complete a product you already started take cash for you either have to provide the modding community the chance to develop the missing parts on ther own and that add on coding also be THER intellectual property or....when you launch a new look alike project ,you HAVE to make the old abandoned one part of it so that those that 'invested' in you for that one...have ther moneys worth.
otherwise it just is far to much an ''EA' like behaviour to be comfortable...specially considering i cant get my space engineer drm free anywhere... :/
Who else remembers their asteroid mining space voxel game from even before SE?
Especially with Keen SWH/Marek's reputation. Abandoning another game really looks bad.
Medieval engineers always looked to be a tech demo in my eyes, and the fact they cancelled it after they thought it was a finished product basically confirms it, and the rumour of a roman engineers game, presumably similar to medieval engineers is very disappointing since they alienated most of the community that liked the game reducing it's player base even more.
And given they canceled ME for lacking players before it was finished in a market saturated with similar style games I bet Roman Engineers last a year before it's also canceled due to lack of community interest.
@@novaiscool1 But they will sure try to milk the reskinned ME, and than go back to "developing" SE.
@@Kareszkoma oh yeah I totally see them doing a skin that you get buy preordering Roman Engineers to boost sales initially, and then it will die quickly as they fail to make timely or sizable updates.
@@novaiscool1 Oh boy. That was just devious, and I didn't think of it. Probably they will do something like that.
Or maybe they give more of those great tiger skin welders that I kept finding in the parachute boxes.
I 100% bet roman engineers is going to launch as a DLC to medieval engineers.
Just like the space engineers dlc.
They will use DLC to milk it
Honestly I love Space Engineers to bits, but sometimes I'm surprised KeenSWH is still in business.
It just felt like they ran out of money at some point and that's why they canned medieval engineers and brought SE out of early access. The talk from Marek recently about rounding out SE and bringing it to a finished state seems to confirm that SE was rushed out of EA.
Maybe I have it all wrong, but that's my impression.
Medieval Engineers I thought was pretty cool, but needed a lot more features for me to really get into it. Hand carting everything around was more than a bit ridiculous to me. So the main update I was waiting on was the addition of livestock to do that sort of heavy lifting and transport.
ME always looked interesting but I never had the time to devote to it. SE by itself was already a great game, and the idea of having multiple planets was more interesting to me. The mod community being larger meant that SE had saw more new features from the beginning. ME was a cool idea, but it was always a secondary project. I do hope that we see Roman Engineers in 5-10 years as a substantial rebuild of ME.
To me, Medieval Engineers always felt like more of a template for that planet update space engineers was planning at the time
Medieval Engineers could have done separate continents with large oceans between each one. Kinda like what SE does with the solar system
Roman engineers is just a reskin of medieval engineers that's Roman themed
Space Engineers was a great game, but a buggy and a broken one, that they never finished. Keen House says that they merged to focus development on SE, but they barely done anything to SE, while mods have long had the fixes and much more content.
Or It could be a giant overhaul of ME that they were keeping under wraps and RE could be the new name
Thank you for covering this topic. One small point about that source code though: Keen did indeed refuse to share it, but some very talentful modders managed to reverse-engineer it themselves and introduce fixes to several issues the game had. With them fixed, the game physics engine has huge potential, to just give an example the community around the PlanetsNoLag server prepares for a modded ww2 season, including the usage of functional tanks, trains, ships, etc.
Where can I find this stuff? Sounds fun.
That's incredible. And modders being able to fix the engine without source code access doesn't paint a good picture of Keen's competency
@@alexanderhorstkotter2910 what do you expect from a company that goes "Oooo Shiney!!" And starts running to something new at the drop of a hat
Let's be BRUTALLY honest. Space Engineers was never meant to be as big or as complicated as it became. It was begun as a virtual lego set to put ships together and then smash them into each other. Nothing more. A small indie title with limited scope and severe limitations due to the engine. But it caught the attention of many who all piled on enthusiastically.
As fans suggested, hoped, requested and demanded new features to realise their personal vision of the game's future, development creep set in. The complexity increased rapidly. Jump drives and planets and stairs all became features of a game that was never meant to have them, delivered by an engine ill design to provide them. Money rolled in and Keen promised to make all their customer's dreams come true. Then the money began to dry up. So ugh was being promised, so little was being developed. People, myself among them, noted that despite tons of new stuff being added to the game, you couldn't do anything new. Where a survival ready shuttle.e was ready in 10 minutes before, now it took an hour. Just more complexity and fuss to get the same result.
The money began to dry up and Keen had been bringing in more and more people. They all needed paying. It was all going wrong.
Medieval Engineers came out as Keen was trying to get planets to work. It was a reskin of Space Engineers, helping to develop planet models. It also sucked in a ton of money from SE players. Much of the money went to paying the new hires at Keen.
SE was revitalised. More people returned and new players came with them. ME was a side project. A testbed for theories and research. When SE was released, ME was history.
Its a sadly common practice in indie development to double dip like this, scam people to pay twice so your first game can be finished.
It's dishonest and obvious and fuck Keen for thinking that they could get away with it.
Let's also not forget all their DLC. Which are just a few new blocks, reskins of old blocks, and textures to add to blocks pretty much. Which, if you want to get them all, cost more than the entire base game. When "to get the full experience" you have to pay more than twice what just the base game costs, you know it's no longer about the game but about making as much money as possible.
Medieval Engineers' end did make me a little sad, but the money I paid for it, I got my value. I spent plenty of time playing that game and had a lot of fun with it. It's not a purchase I regret. This is a chance you take investing in an early access game anyways. The warnings are clear as day on the Steam Page that a game may never reach the expectations that were set out to begin with and I accepted that when I bought it. The fact that it possibly funded one of my favorite games to ever exist, Space Engineers, I'm completely stoked about that and glad I somehow unknowingly supported them to continue production of Space Engineers.
@@Sanquinity I am more than happy to pay for the DLC after playing like 5000 hours in that game. They deserve my money more than those games that are like just a few hours of content. They should have called them 'Supporter Packs' instead, I bet it would have been viewed in a more positive light because those DLCs are effectively just that. They were made to continue progress in the development of the game, it's not about the reskinned textures that the modded community could have easily done. If those DLCs completely flopped and nobody bought them, the game would have been done for, there is no way they were making enough money from selling the base game by the release. We all got that game cheap as hell. I think I only paid like 20 bucks, but it was on sale much lower than that many times before release including the 6 dollar sale that breathed a ton more life into the game in the form of huge wave of new players with new ideas.
@@BillyOatmeal Agreed, people complain about the dlc even though not having it would probably mean the end of the game, I am glad its only decorative blocks cause you saw how the community rioted when they added a cockpit to one. and 3 euros every 3-4 months is very fucking cheap considering over companys would charge atleast double or triple the price.
They thought they could get away with it because they could, and did
Keen needs to be very careful here because by no means is space engineers in an invincible state. it may be a great game, but it needs vanilla improvement because mods are carrying the game. Hopefully warfare 2 will be a massive improvement but we will see. Much like the ME community, space engineers players are becoming increasingly disappointed with DLC's that are just reskins of items and mediocre free updates that don't really make a difference, it would be extremely unwise to start work on a new game when SE still needs more content updates. As for it being Romans as well, i don't think it will appeal much to many players, people play space engineers because its in space and allows people who love SCI-FI classics like Dune, star wars, star trek, star gate, Halo to all come together and merge their universes to battle it out for fun, that's what makes it so popular because science fiction has millions of fans. I just see a roman based game suffering the exact same fate as ME because there is nowhere near as many things to do in ancient Rome as there is in space. I just think they should haul everything they've got into SE for a while because there's so much potential and so many other space games to compete with this year and I do firmly believe with the right updates this year SE could smash the competition and come out on top.
The SE DLC is too little, too far between and feels cheeky. They put a "finished" label on their games but they're clearly lacking. They're coasting along sticking their hand out for more money. SE is a game that I think has potential. There's things I like about it more than some of the other space building games. But the way the company behind it conducts it's self and manages things means that it will probably forever be held back.
aye...maby if you made it a bit tie in with space engineers like....hmm...
you as the player got all the se stuff and mods if you want....but with the addition of some simplistic npc stuff that instead of just doing a dull 'ROMANS' is jsut left to be made up factions etc but only can do the 'bronce age' tech and building stuff...so you can get yourself npcs to repair say stone walls of your base as you play a bit 'from the skies overlord mixture of rpg/rts'' to the npc factions...but the space tech stuff you need to fix yourself (or more likely as i never heard anyone play se without something like nanobots mod on for the basic repair and maintance stuff ;) )
but i'd also say...considering the state they left medival engineers in...and how Se is being carryd by mods , ontop of how them reffusing to share the source code for medival engineers sets a president that only makes this move while space engineers still needs that final 'poolish' ....it only lowers the vaule of ther word so to speak :/
and i still wish space engineers as sold on say g.o.g so i could get a install for it that not demand soding third party software to run in the background or holds my property hostage to the web access :(
@@dakat5131 feels like someone needs to take them by the ear and...dont know ,give them a tour of say the factorio studios approach to ther product and customers :/ ...dont want Se to end up this product so many wants ,but the owner of keeps broken just to milk people for money in the Ubi like way of ''ohhh wehooooope the sales of x goess well so we can stay afloat and not 'have' to reduce the resources put into the only thing people ALREADY payed for'' :(
Heck man it's been this long and their multiplayer isn't even stable, running servers in SE is so annoying and stressful lol. Even just playing with friends after about a month your world becomes unplayable.. I even use a dedicated rig for servers and it couldn't keep it stable :/ pretty sad for how long it's been out ngl. I've never encountered server software that was so poorly optimized, even ARK survival works better and that game is a mess optimization wise.
@@dillypop1999 dident know it was that bad...that just makes ther handling of medival engineers and now the look like they try and re-hash the same thing while se still is lacking the basic optimisation you expect to call it a finished product....
the more one hear the more i start to wish the factorio studio could buy it of them and do it better...at least ther mp coding seems stable as heck.
I was disappointed when they dropped support for ME, especially as some of the cool features didn't make it into SE such as the building physics (less of an issue I suppose when you talk about the future), the rope system which was actually quite well done, and probably most of all the subgrid construction so you could make smaller buildings.
If Keen are doing RE, I'll probably not get it given their track record until its well advanced if they get that far. Given they dropped ME for SE, the results don't seem to be that great.
They nerfed the building in ME and then later pulled the plug. It was like they didn't want it competing with SE, and didn't want to bother putting some of the features in SE.
SE has been stagnant for a while. The planets thing was cool and now stuff finally mostly works (in Singleplayer, at least) but it needs more.
Before Keen had the chance to get new players out of curiosity, now they likely stay away because the bad reputation they collected. since they dropped ME, SE didnt evolved that much further in my opinion...
@@dakat5131 Barely in single player. I tried out SE with friends, and there have been bugs and problems constantly. Desynchronization, items randomly appearing, disappearing, installed blocks appearing seconds later, so on. Ships lagging in the air and crushing in the ground. It was pretty much unplayable with 2-3 players. This is where all the ME development went to? I really doubt it.
@@Kareszkoma been playing lots of space engineers with 2-6 players recently and haven't seen any of these issues?
Not saying they're not there, I believe you but I feel like they might not be completely common?
@@elecarno Yes and No. This is the problem of unoptimalization. It depends from person to person. Some VGA and CPU will run it well, some not so much.
Aka weirdly, on a friends laptop, the game runs pretty well. When my friend was hosting, there was a huge sim lag, but perfect FPS. When I was hosting, no sim lag at all, PC or Laptop, but FPS lag because of the people. This is why we loved hosting it from my laptop, as with that the FPS lag for my PC was gone, and no sim lag either. In other cases, we just dealt with the sim lag, or the fps lag.
In short, the game is not optimized, so everyone should get a super beefy computer and hope to just overshot every problem. If not, than sim lag for everyone.
Those who can't? Well they will just not play the game, refund, and the problem disappears either way. This is a very toxic modern PC game development mentality. Relying on the number of masses to make do.
In my opinion after all. I've seen many comments about these problems, discussions. However, I still find it weird, that my PC is pretty damn beefy, but a friends laptop, which is not so much, simply has more FPS, and sometimes small lag spikes. Is it because some part is newer or older? Is it because of multi core? I don't know.
The game was only abandoned from keen, not from the modders. There are still servers out there like the one I play on. Here we prepare for a ww1/ww2 setting with tanks trains and planes. There is so much going on in this community
Hello there :)
Theres only 145 people playing aint much going on and most servers only have at most 5 people on stop talking out your ass
@@MBKill3rCat hello there aswell greetings, hans
@@maxherrguth1117 Waaaaaaw
Honestly, Keen Software House is the company that soured me most on early access. IMHO It doesn't give me much hope for that Roman Engineers rumour.
I truly doubt Roman Engineers is going to do any better than ME unless they are really devoted to it, but a lot of people will skip it because of this. Their loss.
@@gilmer3718 Exactly, how many should buy into the "roman engineers" game with the canceling of a similar game before... It's like you know you gonna get dissapointed, i can't imagine there will be enough players to support it.
It's important not to speculate based on trademarks, it could even have been something as simple as securing a potential future trademark from competitors based on a rumour
I've been playing an AMAZING early access game called Vintage Story. It has more features than any Keen game and it has one dev and one artist! Constant major updates... And modders tools are built into the game. Loads and loads of high quality mods.
Bet Roman engineers is just a reskin of medieval engineers that will get hype for a while then die
I think the only differece from RE to ME is music and textures... thats it
For me the reason I never tried Medieval Engineers was due to Them having space engineers in early access and starting a new EA title while SE was still quite a buggy mess. If ME had been half the price it was during EA I'd probably have given it a try, but when they released SE from EA in the state it was in I knew they were not to be trusted with any title.
Yup, was fishy and turned out that way.
Yup same. Also with my hardware setup (770ti and 7600k i5 on my desktop and a mobile i5 and 1050gtx for my laptop) with each update I would have more and more performance issues despite what they claim is the "minimum" And dont forget that it didnt take long for Keen to adopt that scummy dlc policy that where they essentially see whats popular in the mods and then make their own version and make you pay for it - while taking down the mod version due to EULA
As someone who never really interacted with ME, that destruction physics kicks ass! Also it saddens me that they would just end it like that, even when it financially make sense.
You could even fell a tree to breach a castle wall. It made for super intense gameplay
@@sargkookie3118 Do you mean using a fallen tree as a ramp over the walls or do you mean trees can break stone walls?
I love space engineers but after what happened with this game I doubt I could buy another one of their games. Being sold an incomplete game that will never be finished sucks, especially when you end up loving the game lol.
Early on someone from Keen claimed ME was the testing ground for new features to be brought into SE. I wouldn't be surprised if that mentality is what kept the community small and ultimately led to the end of development.
Exactly. The community started to build around the promise of a full game, however they made only a framework for the game, they never actually filled it. You cant expect new players to show up, or old ones to stay, if there is no real development. When Valheim showed up, i was shocked, because it was exactly what ME should have been.
I was one of the ones that became utterly devastated when I heard they dropped the project.
This was an incredible game me and my older brother enjoyed for years hoping for new releases. They should really at least sell it off to another developer that will continue the project.
Once while watching a movie on Netflix I saw a kid playing ME in the background on his computer and was sure that it was a tease at an update.. but nothing ever happened..
ME had so much potential, but they never delivered and when they axed it I got real sad.
keem really should revive it tho or launch a damn sorce code so the spergs can develop more
like i would love a wild west engineers, gold mines, railroads, cities, meshing maps, guns, horses, wild beasts and tribes
I don't think they will because it likely uses a lot of SE source.
For a time they had some of the code available, for modders. (But you weren't allowed to actually do anything with the code).
So they had the community fix bugs for a bit and then stopped updating the repository.
We never really needed the source code... Several modders have simply decompiled it and made fixes for the game. ME's essentially been turned into a WW2-era game by us modders, we have trains, planes, ships, tanks, helicopters, everything.
I'm surprised keen hasn't been hacked for there source codes.
Industrial Engineers would be cool
I have to say, there was relatively little hope for the future of ME after the last meaningful update, at least if you were in the keen discord. The update was released in mid february 2019 (important to note that SE was fully released on the same month), and for about a month all seemed well, and the devs were working hard to fix the bugs of the new version. ME was still in the weekly update/hotfix mode, so when updates stopped comming and the devs stopped being as active with no apparent reason, it was noticed fast. After a month, the forum post you referenced appears, which is actually a farewell from the ME game director (Deepflame). In retrospect, it seems to me they knew this was likely the last update and wanted to leave it as finished as posible (worth mentioning deepflame even did some unofficial bugfixes after leaving keen).
After that there was relatively little hope for more meaningful ME content (at least personally) despite what the forum post says about future plans. That they waited a year, with basically no info, to then fix about 5 bugs and call it done was just insult to injury.
Now, its obvious ME just didnt have the numbers to justify continuing development in the eyes of keen (specially if they wanted to move to the "one update, one dlc" mode, as they did with SE). The last big update included a revamp of much of the game looks, so i feel it was a last attempt at getting some attention on the game. Still, telling us for a year "sure, we are working on it" to then show up with a couple bugfixes and saying the game is totally done was still disapointing.
Now if you want my opinion on why the game was never popular, its that it was too dead. Like SE it doesnt really have decent PVE content, and it never had the numbers (or stability) for decent PVP. And unlike SE it didnt have cool spaceships to fly and crash and blow up and fight with, just making useless but pretty castles. A good chunk of the remaining community is centered on modding the game into an almost ww2 tech level (tanks, planes, etc).
My favorite pastime in ME is making trains with the steam engine and rail mods. They're an absolute blast when you finally get one working.
Yea, ME really is a barebones "you can build cool but pointless stuff" game as it is. It definitely needed more PvE stuff to get any kind of popularity. The raider AI was an okay first step, but even that was and still is pretty underdeveloped. And, like I said, it was just a first step.
I have never played ME, but, this seemed to turned into more of a tech experiment than a actual game.
SE was tech experiment at that stage as well...
Given the backlash they've gotten over tanking ME and lackluster updates for SE, devoting resources to another "engineers" game would be a bad move.
Speaking as someone who has played SE for about 1k hours, Keen Software is hopeless. Marek Rosa will continue to let his ego drive his business decisions and the software will continue to suffer. Marek Rosa does not care about making good quality (or even functional) software, he just wants an excuse to nickel and dime everyone while drip feeding out lies and false hope. I hold out hope for the day that people will stop tolerating this type of business, but it doesn't look good.
It's so frustrating because the last 2 games, SE and ME, had potential. But at every turn he gets in the way of the teams making it truly good.
He acts super indecisive. He hires people to make those decisions for him, and then overrides them anyway. They can brag about getting a big new office and growing teams and then have development slow down anyway. On streams when asked questions, the presenters tended to look like they were trying really hard to not say anything negative in front of him.
(Of course I get not wanting to trash someone who's sitting right next to them, but they really couldn't answer any questions with him in the room)
Keen is basically a scam company. They abandoned Miner Wars, Miner Wars Arena, and Medieval Engineers. Space Engineers is the only game they ever had reach "full release", and it was still basically beta at the time (it's since turned into a fairly polished game). I think they realized Valve would ban them from Steam if they abandoned yet another game. Worst thing is they deliberately broke Medieval Engineers by removing compound blocks right before abandoning it.
Marek is rushing things. He though it would be fast business but little did he knew that games take time and resources to complete. He should have rather sell something else instead of giving us hopes and then letting us free fall into a abyss.
@@WardenWolf
Huh? Last year, I could swear Compound Blocks still worked fine.
It needed more to do than just survive and build. Valheim has done a good job filling that gap
Yea, while Valheim is also "survive and build" for the most part, at least they have enemies to fight, biomes and dungeons to explore, and bosses to work towards so you can kill them.
Keen probably just realized it might be harder to milk money out of plays via DLC in Medieval Engineers.
Honestly, I'm surprised Space Engineers is still being worked on. When I first heard about both Space and Medieval Engineers, I bought them with the impression that they'd be dead after a year or so. There was no way with Keen's business plan that they'd make enough money for long term development unless they have someone else with bigger money backing them. One of those too good to be true things and they never really had a long term plan in mind.
Then again, I am someone who just bought the game and didn't contribute to any backing of any sort. Someone who backed the game may have paid more or had different expectations and that is completely fair.
Keen Software House makes most of their money doing AI R&D, video games are a side thing for them.
Probably not a good idea to buy their next game or the like.
@@EnderGhost119 I guess that's fair enough.
I don't mind buying a game as long as I get my hours worth of money spent. And that the game is still playable even after support has stopped.
I wouldn't call what KSH has been doing for Space Engineers development, at this point. The last, what, 8 releases have just been their own take on content that has been in the game through the mod workshop for years, right? New decorations, different kinds of doors, armor plates, new weapons (both player and ship-based weapons, along with their own version of Weaponcore). This stuff has been around pretty much for the entire lifespan of the game, with the only difference being that Keen wasn't making money on it.
@@GoodwillWright But thats the problem. Their plan. Their idea. They made this games to fund AI project. And these games are no ordinary. They are unique for sure with tech not many games have. Until recently there were no games with tech as ME and SE have. That was one selling point but the biggest problem was Keen didnt know where to take this game to make them complete. These games have no future of being complete. The genre is screaming i wanna be MMO RPG but thats not what Keen sees. Keen is working on these or now its rather only that game to make sales. They dont have a real goal. Thats why what they need is someone to buy the source code (the games) and finish them.
Not just bug fixes and optimizations, but give these games some goals. Turning them into a MMORPG would do that. We have open world sandbox but only thing you can do is build for your self with some survival elements. But thats not a game. Its more like game engine. You must create your own "game" within this ""game"". What these games needs is a real purpose to doing all these things. They dont even have a full game loop. No quests. Nothing meaningful. Theres no reason for you to build. These games needs AI. And that the most funiest thing Keen fucked up. Keen is FUCKING making an general AI so im fucking have no idea why are they so stupid and didnt use SE and ME as a test and development platforms for this AI. Its a win win for both sides. These games needs AI. Keen is stupid and hope they read this. Because i dont know what excuse they have for not having real goals for these games. Bad thinking, bad management and bad marketing. They thought these are some survival games, but survival for what reason. You survive and survive again and thats the whole life cycle. And there is not even a reason to survive. What could have been an enjoyable game is just empty tedious abandon shell.
To follow up on the most recent devstream, the optimizations are at least something to look forward to. Better than most updates.
Probably something you don't get everyday but LSG was borderline my childhood. I remember watching your early space engineers vids in 2015 - 2016 and being completely enraptured by the game.
I still watch your vids from time to time and it's heartwarming to see the channel grow to almost half a million and still have the same content it had since the day of the channel gaining traction!
Bro you literally dropped this as I was looking for it. Dope vid, Thank you 🙏
Hopefully this one makes a comeback since SE is doing so well again.
Ohhhh, such a video HAD to come by. Nice, thank you very much!
Keen isn't even really doing much with SE to be honest. Mostly small DLC packs with a few blocks every blue moon. Wondering if there's more than one person even working at Keen.
There is, if you count the poor janitor that has to clean all their shit :/
Exactly, fans are getting sick of cash grabbing DLC's that under deliver and updates that don't add any free content. I think keen is convinced that SE is in a great state at the minute when in reality we are running out of patience and the game itself is still in need of major vanilla improvement due to lack of content
@@leob8036 They know people are sick of their shit, whenever that happens they promise a "complete combat overhaul" in the warfare dlcs. Guess what, from what we can tell, all the warfare dlcs are is a few new blocks.
@@leob8036 I didn't even see the door, but based on your description, there's already a mod for that called "submarine door" on the workshop. It's a submarine style door with a wheel that turns to open it, then turns to close, and it swings open. It also comes with 6 different varieties. It's one of my favorite mods.
Really gonna bitch about paying 3 bucks for these micro dlc?
I was always curious what happened, thank you for the much appreciated video.
I was thinking using about this game the other day. Glad you touched on this.
I think the real problem with these games is that nobody knows they exist in the first place. I found Space Engineers only by accident, when I saw a coworker watching a Space Engineers video during a break. And I didn't even know there was a Medieval Engineers game until today when I saw it mentioned in some Space Engineers video. Keen Software should invest a little more in marketing, I think, to get more players to play their games (if they can handle that, since it would also increase the amount of feedback they'd get).
I was there in the room on the Keen Open Office event when someone asked about ME and it was indeed a business-based decision :( Understandable, sure, but a major loss.
If this happened to ME, and they are focused on Space Engineers still... who says the Roman Engineers ain't gonna suffer the same fate as ME?
I would not get my hopes up.
Several years ago i saw a name for a game being trademarked, and 9 years later, there's still no updates on the progress of this game. Even though updates for the 'new' game has been put into the current game.
Don't get your hopes up is all i'm saying.
On the other side is that Keen house have made significant internal changes, I expect them to be also because of previous abandoned projects.
It does seem to me that they are working on more sustainable structure where every project will receive appropriate resources.
We have needed this video for a long time
i had great times with ME, usually preferring to play multiplayer and find a mountain as far from any road i can and create a solitary homestead, and very few games set such a mood like that so well. really great and had so much potential, i miss it greatly
I remember a server i joined and got in with a few different towns. I was supposed to be a traveling builder/architect of sorts. my last time playing was helping someone building a school for witchcraft. it was awesome here.
If Roman Engineers is an early access, DO NOT BUY IT. Keen Software have 3 games under their belt and they've abandoned two of them. Miner Wars was their first game and it met a similar fate to Medieval Engineers.
They've got a track record of 1 out of 3. It simply doesn't make sense to support their early access games, it's statistically illogical.
Less than that, since it's very debatable that SE is or ever will be finished.
They've abandoned THREE of them. Miner Wars, Miner Wars Arena, and Medieval Engineers. They have a track record of 1 out of 4.
Always buy early access games "as is". I only consider what is in the game when I buy it, everything they add after my purchase is just welcomed bonus. In the case of SE, the game was fun enough in the early access stage, even if they stopped at that point, I would still consider it a nice little indie game.
I love the game, still one of my personal favorites, it's very sad how it got abandoned, it for sure has so much potential
Indeed. I love Medieval Engineers. I bought space engineers 2nd. WIth the abandonment. I now refuse to give them any more money (DLCs). Very sad. My trust in this company is broken.
The removal of the NPC's really killed it for me. I would have loved to build up a village, farm and castle with npc's both helping lift the burden of gathering and give everything a reason to be built.
I remember getting this game as soon as it appeared on Steam, my aunt is an architect so i sent her a message talking about this upcoming medieval architecture and engineering game and then she bought it for me hehe
i loved playing this due to the building physics and being able to break up castle walls and other objects. the destruction possible was great fun and still play when i have time and still want to build historical castles to destroy lol.
Roman engineers is going to be a re-skin of Medieval Engineers so the devs can double dip and get a second dose of cash for this product. Maybe to continue development in their eyes, but its also scummy regardless.
That is, if they ever release it at all as a thing and arent just buying it to have it as an option
Sure that's more or less why SE happened, to make money off the Minerwars engine and textures.
Keen murdered ME because they were basically a scam company at the time. They abandoned Miner Wars, Miner Wars Arena, and ME. They came close to abandoning SE, but I think they realized Valve would ban them and they might face a class action lawsuit. If anyone has followed SE since the early days, you'll know they had some seriously questionable development practices and SE is the only game they've ever had reach full release; they literally abandoned every other game they ever sold early access for.
There's a few of us still active in ME, on the PlanetsNoLag server, we know the development is dead and the game's abandoned, and we carry the torch despite Keen Software House and Marek Rosa. We're currently about to start a WW2-themed season, using the Industrial Engineers modpack, available on Steam, with a whole host of mods developed by members of the PNL community, most notably Peaceman, specifically for this season.
Personally, I was just beginning a big project when ME's final 0.7 update came out. And, contrary to fixing bugs, it completely wrecked my ability to keep playing. I kept working, trying to find my way around the bugs, and even asked the developer of ME's water mod, peaceman, to make it compatible with Angel's larger planets, as I had realised the scope of the project was bigger than ME's original world, and wanted to grow bigger. However, the bugs introduced by 0.7 completely killed the project just as it was getting going. Rest in peace, Kingdom of Monningstar.
I also haven't played SE in just as long, the collapse of ME souring me on continuing to use SE as the preferred small-scale designer for a sci-fi universe I would abandon two months later, not having the interest in rebuilding in another program.
good vid arron and going off your question and it a wee bit out of the blue like my builds in SE but RE could mean a joint game of se and me
Now in April 2022 Medival Engineers started it's second live with the for Medival Engineers owners free Community Edition. It's the by Keen-supported effort for the modding community to continue development of Medieval Engineers. See the " Medieval Engineers - Community Edition - Announcement Livestream" posted on CZcams April 11, 2022.
Good looks, gonna check it out
I feel I haven’t seen a game be referred to as finished in a long time, we’ve reached a point where a game is expected to be updated seemingly forever and when it’s not it gets labeled as abandoned.
Pretty much software in general. And it's only getting worse
I love your review of the history. A couple things to note; a lot of the time was spent removing the SE code from ME and making sure that the game ran; this is why updates took so long and not a lot changed. The ME devs I worked with were extremely dedicated and I think they got a raw deal by not being allowed to finish ME properly. Beyond that I am not sure what my NDC would and would not allow me to say.
In terms of modders; the last I heard is they are still working tirelessly to make the game what it should have been. There is a rather large mechanised community that build trains, tanks, planes, boats and so on; their work is VERY impressive. This game had so much more potential in terms of what it could do compared to SE that I was surprised they(Marek) didn't try to expand on what the modders did.
There is another group of modders making their own game called Engineering Ages which is looking promising but it is a group volunteers. Right now they are focusing on Medieval.
Yeah... compared to SE, I saw more potential in ME than in SE too....
I think SE and ME were created too early for its time with how much of a limiting factor hardware was. A lot of the updates were devoted to repeated performance improvements and it sometime still had trouble running. ME is a glorified tech demo
Honestly, Roman Engineers pretty much was Medieval Engineers, as there were no cannons, telescopes, or other distinctly _Medieval_ technologies, which made the game stuck in the early iron age, which as Roman times. So I think this reskin and rebranding is the only viable way to revive Medieval Engineers at this point.
You know companys trademark a lot of names that might not have anything to do with future projects. Maybe for a fleeting moment they thought it could be a future project or just really wanted that name too.
I had forgotten about this game always wanted to look into it will have to download
I was thinking about this game literally yesterday and then saw this video. wow
man back when i played medieval engineers we had full on world wars with alliances and stuff. Those were the days
I was actually considering buying the game myself before the devs stopped updating it. If I had to pick my two most favorite themes for games is Medieval and Space so it felt like Keen was targeting me. Although now I'm unsure if the game is worth the time. I know it's only $10 on steam but I'm only linux so I don't want to go through the trouble of setting it up just to find that I never play the game.
I faintly remember many years ago in one of the teams stream's there was going to be a merge of the two games
Overly ambitious projects for a semi-pro dev team. They tried hard at least for a bit and really squeezed their old engine for all they could, I'll give them that.
My main issue is that they crippled the game before quitting... I always expected ME to be used to create Planetary Populations for SE... And I really wish they had ported the block system to SE...
Problem is these games are not their main focus. It was jst a sidequest to make money. And instead of focusing on one thing, they will rebrand it and sell as a "new" type of game. Like COD series does. Except COD is finished game where SE and ME is rather tech demo.
have you heard of mortal online 2? It releases pretty soon and is a sandbox medevil game. Has a super super deep crafting system and is really cool. Kinda seems like a game you would be interested in
To be fair I have a lot off people in my server ME vikings and is a pain to keep servers running as buggy as hell just wish they carried on with it has so much potential
This is the curse of Keen that we were warned about regarding their mining game they used as inspiration for SE (what was it called?)
They put out some great concepts, but they seem to consistently fail to deliver on them for the long-haul.
I’m bout to build the same game if they don’t come back and update theirs.
So much potential!
I bought SE 30th of November, 2013. Over 8 years ago. Last time I played it was 28th of July, 2018. I have "only" 427 hours in it. Here's why...
When I bought it in 2013, it still was in pre-release alpha, so I can say I was there from the beginning. It was my fourth Steam purchase at all. Back then, when Marek Rosa was new to this "OMG my game just blew up on Steam" thing, and he did his first Twitter Q&A, he was a really nice, decent bloke who answered all questions we raised. He promised many things, and at that time, it seemed to be true as updates after updates were released week by week, and he really did what we asked for. I remember when they announced that they moved to a new office, and not long after they sold the 100.000th copy of the game. And I was happy for them, becuase SE did really fill a gap when Minecraft was everywhere except space.
And when they announced ME, it was an instant buy for me. I thought that the guys who made SE, truly can make an awesome game in the medieval settings. But that clearly didn't happen.
And then, they put guns into SE, and that was it for me. I always played SE for the building part, I even bought it in a 4-pack for my friends to play together, build huge ass ships to cruise with them, I LOVED the "new" asteroid mechanics, but when my friends - who were socialised on BF and COD - realised that they can shoot the shit out of each other, we just sorta stopped to build huge ships and we turned into building small, quick, but much more efficient, hard-to-target, difficult-to-kill ships, and they just lost me there. I didn't want to build the 1000th fighter to obliterate my friends, I didn't want to shoot at everything, and I certainly didn't want to land on planets to do the same.
But what eventually drove me off was the first "update", where Keen implemented mods into the game, without mentioning those were mods. We knew, we raised the issue on Steam and Twitter, we told them that "guys, these "new" features are actually mods we're using for months because they weren't part of the game, you can't sell it as your own, at least make a sidenote that "This feature was made by xyz"", but not surprisingly nothing happened. That, when they literally stole other people's work and sold as their own, I said okay, that's enough.
A wasn't even playing when they released the first skinpack they called DLC, I just seen it and it just made me more sure that I'm not gonna give a penny to these guys ever again in the future.
Keen, but especially Marek, who was a really nice and really decent fella turned into an Edison, he stole half of his game from modders without admitting that he and his company had nothing to do with it, he sold skinpacks that were already available by modders only in better quality, he clearly abandoned half of his playerbase by turning SE into another FPS game, and then abandoned ME completely, he never ever made multiplayer playable, even single player dies after the first bigger space station, and yet, for some reason SE, and Keen is still strong on Steam...
Honestly, Keen is my go-to when a game developer lies, mistreats player community, "develops" useless features, or just doesn't do what players ask them to do.
One of the recent was Geometa with Stormworks, when they swore that "Weapons DLC" was the winner on Discord polls, even tho we still have proof that they reseted the polls at least 3 times when bugfixing was winning by magnitudes because instead of admitting that weapons what they wanted to do, it was easier to shift the blame to us. As we raised this stealing from modders issue to Keen years ago, we raised the issue to Geometa that once they implement weapons to the game, there will be nothing else important than that as it will attract thousands of 12yo russian kids to shoot the shit out of each other, and abandoning them will kill not just the DLC but Stormworks as well. They said no such thing will happen.
And, surprise-surprise, the only update Stormworks got since the Weapons DLC last October was only related to the DLC, the base game is still full of the same bugs (which affects Weapons DLC too BTW, but whatever...).
But at least I'm old enough to know that buying ANY EA game on Steam is a gamble where my odds are always gonna be shittier than in a fckin casino, so I just stopped doing it, even if a game has "Very Positive" rating. If they release it and the rating stays, I'll buy it....
The only time I personally ever buy a early access game is if I am already happy with the product. Where even if they never updated it again, I would still be good with it. Minecraft was like that for me, SE, while the ideas were great never was stable enough for it to be that sort of game for me. Buying a game in EA because of future promises is as logical as buying a game on preorder because of all the promises, it never works out.
ME is fun, with so much promise, I was truly devastated when they announced the game was being abandoned. I am an avid SE player though, and there are definitely things that ME could incorporate into SE, like being able to put intersecting blocks in the same space, think of the detal for us creative builders! The pulleys ropes and other simple machine mechanics could lead to some amazing machines in SE, and NPCs would be great! Even inmulti-player, having some NPCs to perform some of the more menial tasks leaving players free to focus on engineering things could be super handy,
Seems to me the solution should have been "Since we are abandoning promises we made about future updates, we have decided to make it free to play and open source for modders to continue working on it if they choose." This would of at least given the game a chance to have a continued community and kept the bad faith dev taste away a lot more. I really love Space Engineers but to hear this is what happened to one of their other projects is a bit disheartening.
I was the one who dropped the link to the European IPO filing of the Roman Engineers' trademark.
I think they are working on a new engine, and that Roman Engineers is going to be the first game using it.
I am playing this game right now and I like it don't know why keen stopped working on it
I think medieval engineers could've been as good as space aengineers with some rpg elements, like towns and castles with npcs giving you quests to build or destroy
quests might have been a step too far. But maybe at least npcs to populate your castle/town. Like npc shops, or a bartender, or farmers, or just general npcs to do manual labor for you. Imagine SE's motion sensor and timer blocks. But instead of a sensor/timer it's an npc doing X task on repeat or when you get close. Like opening a gate for you, or pulling a cart or a farming machine.
@@Sanquinity i think simple quests, like in SE wouldnt be so far. "Fetch 2000 stones for gold" " siege this bandit outpost" i didnt mean like "the world eater has awoken, you will stop it" quests... Also manual labor wouldve been cool, but i wouldve loved people for whom you could build, like there is no point of an empty castle
I unfortunately don’t have a computer but I’d love to see a return and I’d love to see it come to Xbox I’ve always wanted to play with the mechanics
The building capabilities of ME is something I wish SE could adopt. Primary for making bases since it would probably complicate ship building. But at he bare minimum I wished Keen could merge some blocks from ME and give them pressurization capabilities so they could be used in base building.
When the first early access for ME came out it looked like it had quite a bit of promise. It already looked like a solid base framework to build on. Problem is that they didn't really add that much to that base framework. New blocks/stuff to build, a food system, and VERY basic AI raiders. And that's about it... It feels like ME was just a "hey wouldn't it be cool if we did this?" project that, when they got bored of it, got abandoned. "Releasing" it in such an unfinished state felt like an insult too.
Game like this reminds me of Kenshi, Outward and other early access games labeled as full releases, but too janky to enjoy.
It's weird, some games will remain in "early access" long after their main ideas are pretty solidified. Others will have a sudden "1.0" release when the game isn't anywhere near completed.
Kenshi doesn't belong in that list, myself have enjoyed almost 500 hours in kenshi, know some people with over 1000. It's an extremely enjoyable game.
kenshi might be buggy but its much more of a game on its own than medieval engineers
I feel as a developer/publisher sometimes you have to make hard decisions to abandon certain projects. As you said in the video there's less than a hundred players on average active and those few sales are not going to cut it maintaining a dev team, it's just a hard truth in business.
A company's stock with me drops off significantly when they do something like this. Space Engineers got bloated and laggy when planets first came out and it took me nearly five whole minutes just to load in or save the game. I stopped playing then and haven't touched it since for more than one nostalgic afternoon. On that day, the load times had come down to only about two minutes but it was still not worth that much hassle for a game that had already lost its luster. Honestly, I went over to Empyreon from SE and only looked back at things like the detailed breakdowns of materials for the crafting as things that I missed. As for Medieval Engineers, I played it when it first went into EA and then again after it was 'done. The game changed so much it actually just reminded me of a totally different game. I know that it had a lot of unrealized potential but given what the company did when they diverted attention from SE to ME when SE really needed the help and then they abandoned ME for SE because the players shifted over... it doesn't surprise me at all.
i have a question will there be any more space engineers and plus your amazing
I feel like something most people forget is the fact Medieval Engineers began as a tech demo for planets, if I were being honest I'd say it could have gone much worse than it did seeing as it was more or less a standalone dlc adding structural integrity, multi-blocks, and some unique blocks. Still bad business practices, but it could have been worse
Think steam needs policies that if a company releases an EA title then bails on it, they can only release a finished product for their next title if one comes. Early access should further have a full refund policy for the time it is in early access in the event the developers abandon the project prior to a release state.
I played ME for quite some hours. Built a cart to store all resources I was gathering and dragged it along the roads over mountains and through valleys until I found the perfect place to set up camp. I built a small house and a wooden wall around my land. The occasional barbarian would come and hit my wall but I'd quickly kill it. The thing that I never liked about ME was the lack of reason for me to build siege engines and huge citadels. There was no army that would attack my castle so the only thing you're motivated to build is a house. If the game had better performance, more content and finally, enemy armies/castles wielding siege engines that would occasionally lay siege to your land then yes, the game would've been a blast.
I actually started playing this again recently. Mods have made it into an amazing game where you can play through from the stone age to Victorian and even early 20th century. I have been having so much fun with it. What lets it down are the physics bugs and random bugs which they didn't bother to patch and the removal of promising features like AI you can command. I understand it from a business standpoint but why didn't they release source code so modders could further improve it or at least leave it in an unbuggy state.
I also hope if they do make a Roman Engineers and its basically just an improved/reskinned version of medieval engineers that they give a free copy to those who bought medieval engineers. I know with the makers of a Microsoft flight sim game that got abandoned they gave a free copy of the game they made that replaced it to all who bought in to the abandoned project. Not sure Keen software has deep enough pockets though.
I remember Keen getting loads of shit flung at them for starting this years before Space Engineers was finished. They told us it was a separate team developing ME. However, I noticed a serious drop in updates for Space engineers as soon as they started ME.
I was waiting to see it's progress before I purchased it.
Had completely forgoten about that one, disappointing they abandoned it that way. It was a tech demo they charged 15-20$ for
I think it could be a cross-over reference, but nothing more... Considering the fact that ME has a dead space guy with a welder that is used as a light source, we could be seeing a planet eventually with medieval structures and dead medieval people
The best and only thing i've ever learned from playing medieval engineers is to first take a good gander at when the last update was on a game before buying it
Honestly, I'm still holding out hope for 'Time Engineers' or 'Time Travel Engineers' that was on a poll ages back.
That just sounds so very interesting, especially in a multiplayer environment. Even just singleplayer would be fascinating.
Still, 'Roman Engineers' has potential if it can lead to larger-scale building in a performance-sustaining way. Imagine huge cities actually made by people that _doesn't_ kill simspeed, performance, or your connection.
i remember when they first announced ME, and i immediately got a gut reaction that it wouldn't end well
Actually i know someone who was in close touch with some of the devs, there was still going to be a massive AI update but because recourses were assigned to SE we never got to see it.
Keen just axed it like that.
Clang in this game was epic. Nothing like ragdolling the character into orbit from cutting down a tree.
I've never jumped on the medieval engineers wagon. For me it was more like an experiment than anything else, I didn't have high hopes for a small studio developing two full games at the same time and to be honest, they made the right choice to continue space engineers development, it's what's earning them money right now. And although the game is released, I don't feel like it's a full game. We don't even have npcs yet... There's no real threat to exploring space or the planets
Thanks for this. It's interesting to know. Admittedly, I wouldn't be playing the game, anyway. For years, I bought _far_ more games than I would ever play - partly because they looked interesting, and partly because I wanted to support game development.
An internet friend bought me Space Engineers in 2014. I never played it, but I returned the gesture by buying both of us Medieval Engineers a year later. I never played _that,_ either. Heh, heh. I messed around with it briefly - _very_ briefly - but I had so many games already...
But I just love computer games, and I like to support game development in games that look interesting. I hate to admit how many times I've gotten a game I never played. :)
I'm disappointed that the game didn't continue on but I only paid 13 dollars and had a lot of fun with it. If they "reskin it" and continue building on it then I'll pay another 13 dollars no problem.
The only reason ME never got the attention SE did in my opinion is because they never added and refined core parts of the game needed to hold long term attention.
I wish we could get the whole community together and sit down and have a talk with Keen. Basically tell them if they want this game to last they need to stop with the dlc that ends up having more content than the actual update. I'm done spending money on SE and if they release another "update" that's just minor fixes and a $5-$10 dlc with a bunch of cosmetics, I'm out for good, I'll go play skywanderers or whatever name that game goes by nowadays
As much as I loved ME (what parts of it that worked) I feel that Keen did the right thing and cut there losses, as it was obviously not a profitable market and not as popular as they first expected it to be, and at the end of the day you have to pay your employee's somehow and a dead/dying game doesn't pay there wages. But at the same I felt there PR was a disaster, the communications they had with there customers was dismal at best, there wasn't any timeline of planned WIP of ideas or status of bug fixing, or even a basic guideline of where it seems it's direction was heading (as a finished fully released product) so as a result in the end I think Keen learned the hard way, of what happens when a small development team takes on to many projects and the projects & customers end up suffering under the stress of the situation.
This video has made me really sad I haven't played the game basically since I got it I played a couple hours and wanted to wait for the player base to grow a bit but now I know its not gonna happen
I'm certainly going to look at Roman Engineers, but unlike SE en ME, not joining early access this time, Iwait for once. I've owned both games right from when they hit steam, and if I'm honest, both games look like tech demo's. ME for the destructable buildings and weight distribution system and SE with the armor deformation, that and SE's programmable blocks (which I can't use, because I can't program) are the things that attracted me to these games, and it's mostly kept alive thanks to workshop content. And even though the updates where regular, what did we really get? The raycasting thing on the camera's was good. (if you could program) there are option to automate most things to a certain degree (which is the strength of these engineering type of building games) but it is still really limited in it's options to do so. My dream of starting in a new solar system in a pod and building up to a magnate, on a spacestation monitoring countless drones and automated mining, refining and transporting operations to and from my factories remotely, from the comfort of my seat in a spacestation in orbit of the local star, which several parts of this dream are possible, there are several techs still needed to tie it all together, for instance the ability to send instructions (in the form of a script, or a trigger for a script) remotely over the comms network without having to navigate the list of vessels to take control of
ME with its 100 player cap and all of the mods/builds makes this a very community driven RPG game. I would love for this game to be what it was meant to be.