How I want Egosoft to manage games (split from X4 wishlist thread. AP)

[dholmstr]

While I understand OP (and many others) point of view, I still must disagree abit. X-games are the vision of Egosoft, neither me or you have didling crap to say about it. It's like I would go and say to to Picasso "I don't understand your painting, make some more blue over there".
We (all the players) may argue about the game and its content as much as we like, and not going into personal issues. I know some of you here might take it abit tooo personal but try not to. Some may come out abit more harch than they actually want.

I'm glad that Egosoft lets us bring input and actually listen to us, but I have no illusions that they need to do any of the stuff that comes up here. Few companies, that make a luxury (not necessery for life) product of thier vision, let complete stranger have a say. Even to-be-buying customers.
Others software companies do it differently, so be it. But I don't think Egosoft can be compared to a company doing a software on demand for a reallife pourpose. The banking system don't need to fly spaceships etc .

[RAVEN.myst]

While I understand OP (and many others) point of view, I still must disagree abit. X-games are the vision of Egosoft, neither me or you have didling crap to say about it. It's like I would go and say to to Picasso "I don't understand your painting, make some more blue over there".
We (all the players) may argue about the game and its content as much as we like, and not going into personal issues. I know some of you here might take it abit tooo personal but try not to. Some may come out abit more harch than they actually want.

I'm glad that Egosoft lets us bring input and actually listen to us, but I have no illusions that they need to do any of the stuff that comes up here. Few companies, that make a luxury (not necessery for life) product of thier vision, let complete stranger have a say. Even to-be-buying customers.
Others software companies do it differently, so be it. But I don't think Egosoft can be compared to a company doing a software on demand for a reallife pourpose. The banking system don't need to fly spaceships etc .

I totally agree (as I've already made clear, so I shan't belabour the point.) I would like to add that, being a bit of a gaming old-timer, almost all of my most memorable and formative gaming experiences revolved around games that had zero or next to zero outside input, given that this was when the Internet was still relatively young, and the bulk of the population wasn't as connected (hell, the main source of patches etc. were "cover discs" that shipped with gaming magazines, which themselves were the primary source of gaming news and reviews.) I'm talking about last millennium, and classics such as the original Warcraft: Humans vs Orcs (or was it the other way around?), Dune II, Command & Conquer (yes, I played lots of RTS in those days - still do, just not quite as much), DOOM, Heretic, the first Diablo... and many others. In those days, public beta testing was a novelty that was only to start becoming more widespread around the time of C&C Sole Survivor, and even then it would be quite some time before it became what we could consider "common practice". Blizzard, quite notably, were renowned (before the Activision merger, which was relatively speaking quite recent) for being very secretive and sticking to their guns regarding their creative vision - and their track record speaks for itself. (On the flip side, WoW has probably contributed considerably to public desire for involvement by promoting connectivity in gaming as much as it has - but that's pure speculation on my part.)

Of course, admittedly in those days, given that gaming hadn't yet matured as a mainstream entertainment medium (being pretty much exclusively the province of nerds/geeks, and those terms were still negative), there were fewer competing products, so it can be argued that it was easier for the better ones to stand out, and gaming populations were more "concentrated", there being fewer choices of what to play...

[Ormac]

I'm talking about last millennium, and classics such as the original Warcraft: Humans vs Orcs (or was it the other way around?), Dune II, Command & Conquer (yes, I played lots of RTS in those days - still do, just not quite as much), DOOM, Heretic, the first Diablo... and many others.

I think it was Warcraft Humans Vs Orcs (given Humans were default choice) I was a rusted on Diablo Fan so didn't go down the Warcraft, Starcraft lane)

Glad Egosoft didn't subtitle their X Series Argon Vs ...

Other Classics of that time were the orginial Sim City [not this Melleniums name sake] I particularly loved the sequel Sim City 2000. Sid Meier's Civilization series . Practically anything from Microprose while he lead. Railroad Tycoon for example.

I'm also thankful that Egosoft allows us to share and experience their vision of the X-Universe Few Other Companys seem to do do that these days.

As to our involvement in the process prior to a final product for commercial sale I'm not sure what way I want Egosoft to proceed.

-- Ormac

[Slashman]

Personally, I have zero trust in day-1 reviews (especially given my preferences in game types), as they can't help being superficial, and thus easy for the developer to manipulate by focusing on flash over substance (which, to me, leads to hollow games that fail to keep me interested.) I prefer to see opinions after the novelty has worn off (and, to be fair, also any initial shocks that people may at first overreact to, given the general public's very jerky knees...)

I was mostly talking about player reviews. Not pre-release, early press reviews. Although the majority of the ones I saw were right about Rebirth so...

If both common Steam reviews and professional reviews are overwhelmingly negative, including some of the more trustworthy gaming sites, then it's a pretty safe bet that steering clear is a good idea.

I'm not getting on the 'diamond in the rough' roller-coaster. If I have to wait for a year and a half of patching to get a stable and finished game, then that's worth a 75% off sale price to me.

[RAVEN.myst]

I was mostly talking about player reviews.

No offense - those are even worse, in my opinion Without professional accountability (which a journalist is *supposed* to be bound by - of course, that's not always the reality of it...) you get a lot more knee-jerk, superficial snap judgements.

If both common Steam reviews and professional reviews are overwhelmingly negative, including some of the more trustworthy gaming sites, then it's a pretty safe bet that steering clear is a good idea.

Yup, true enough, usually. In fact, sad as it may be, when initial responses are predominantly negative, it's usually the case, but when the initial popular response is positive, I find it's more likely to be inaccurate over time - people tend to get initially dazzled, but it's whether a game can survive the honeymoon period that really means something (imo). I'm not into buying a game, getting 2 weeks of intense fun out of it, but only to then put in on a shelf (virtual, in these days of digital distribution) to gather dust - that's not a good buy, in my books.

I'm not getting on the 'diamond in the rough' roller-coaster. If I have to wait for a year and a half of patching to get a stable and finished game, then that's worth a 75% off sale price to me.

Hahahah - I'm 100% with you on that! It's also why so many of the games on my (now metaphorical - I'm in the process of moving. Countries, if all goes well! ) shelf are of the budget re-release sort (by no means the majority, but a substantial portion.) And I'd rather wait for an evolved and finished game (or operating system, for that matter!) before I commit to an installation. I didn't do this in the case of a particular game that sees more than its fair share of hate thrown at it, so it will remain nameless, and so I ended up playing it for a few days, giving up, coming back once 2.0 was released, playing for a week or so, putting it down, and so forth - played a little longer every time (which was a good sign, at least ) Generally, though, I have the patience/discipline to wait for any relevant dust to settle. (I was only able to adopt this attitude after I had quit reviewing professionally, of course - early adoption is not optional in that business!)

[bambikaka]

Well Egosoft could behave like Steve Jobs.

Keep everything totally secret and then produce something world changing.

Like a new version of the iPod that makes telephone calls and then rebadge it as, oh I don't know... lets call it something really original like the iPhone.

But Egosoft have a series of games. They now have a rough diamond that needs polishing.

They say they are listening to what we want, so really it is just a matter of waiting.......

well, thats true, they could do it, if actually they could pull something like steve jobs. trust me, nobody would come here "demanding" things, yeah, now im intentionally using the demanding word, if they could make the game good on their own. but with xr they clearly shown they have lost the vision of how to make a space sim... so simple functions were missing like radar cmon, really? a RADAR? MISSING FROM A SPACE SIM? or a readable map... i mean readable, not a bloody blue mess. and i didnt mention the AI yet which is so bad really an illiterate person could do it better. i dont mean the coding part but the logic part.

they were saying they are listening before xr too, we were waiting patiently, so patiently that ive even forgot to log in here for like 5-6 years, and see what happened? ofcourse we could just sit tight again and wait and dont give any of our ideas either on ai or other aspects and just dont buy the game when its released, but on top of that would hurt us, yeah it would, it would hurt ego the most. is that what you want? to make ego listen is not primarily for us, its for the sake of x4...

[CBJ]

You just can't manage to post anything without insulting people, can you? Ironic, considering that the moment anyone says anything like that to you, you cry foul. Anyway, you had your final warning some time ago, so bye bye.