Frustration from customers

[Drake]

One thing I have noticed is that it seems the majority of the threads both here and on Steam are people frustrated with the game in it's current state. Some people exaggerate, some laugh it off, and some hold out hopeful but peruse the comments and you will see the tone is of fans of the franchise simply upset and rightfully so. This game has a lot of promise but it feels like key elements were rushed out the door, things cut from the game either temporarily or permanently, and the ai is a jumbled mess. The game has an overall Steam page rating (as of this post) of 67% overall 51% recent and a Metacritic score of 60%, those are failing grades. I really hope the dev team keep up the momentum in patching this title and follows says the example of the NMS debacle. Releasing the game in this state was wrong and passively expecting your community to beta test the title to get it out of a beta like status is wrong. Maybe to mend fences you can make your first expansion discounted or free. NMS has added and incredible amount of content all for free and have turned that title around earning respect from many in the community, that was a hell of an achievement considering the fiasco of it's launch status.

As a fan of the game I am disappointed, as an optimist I am hopeful the dev team will turn this around. I posted this after my 2nd crash tonight and coming to the forums to simply see the overall frustrated vibe. My .02 and I still will keep on playing because it is a great beta that I hope one day will be a great game.

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

I think there are two main but distinct issues in play:-

1. Customer expectations about level of content - these on the most part are unjustified and unreasonable
2. The software quality of X4 - this is a failing of the X4 team as a whole at Egosoft

The more Egosoft try to appease those complaining about level of content the more likely the software quality will suffer.

I think you can blame the wider adoption of Agile methodologies for the degradation in software quality since to do Agile properly it can be quite a resource heavy process even with the tools. In some cases, Agile is the best and right way to do things but that is anything but universally true. There seems to be a tendency in at least some cases to rush things and make shortcuts just to make the metrics look good, and in other cases Agile seems to be merely used as an excuse to not do certain things that should be done regardless of the approach adopted. In the context of developing games like X4, I personally think using the Agile approach is ill-advised in the main.

My personal review of X4 is stuck on "not recommend" for now, there is likely to be a minor update for 1.60 but until Egosoft have released a sufficiently good release from a software quality perspective that is unlikely to change. V2.0 is a move in the right direction in some ways but a backwards step in others.

[adeine]

This game has a lot of promise but it feels like key elements were rushed out the door, things cut from the game either temporarily or permanently, and the ai is a jumbled mess. The game has an overall Steam page rating (as of this post) of 67% overall 51% recent and a Metacritic score of 60%, those are failing grades. I really hope the dev team keep up the momentum in patching this title and follows says the example of the NMS debacle. Releasing the game in this state was wrong and passively expecting your community to beta test the title to get it out of a beta like status is wrong. Maybe to mend fences you can make your first expansion discounted or free. NMS has added and incredible amount of content all for free and have turned that title around earning respect from many in the community, that was a hell of an achievement considering the fiasco of it's launch status.

As a fan of the game I am disappointed, as an optimist I am hopeful the dev team will turn this around. I posted this after my 2nd crash tonight and coming to the forums to simply see the overall frustrated vibe. My .02 and I still will keep on playing because it is a great beta that I hope one day will be a great game.

What happened here is unfortunately a bit of a tradition where Egosoft are concerned (although admittedly previous titles were more feature complete upon launch if just as broken). Understandable to some degree as it's a very small team trying to make a very ambitious game (sound familiar?) and it's very evident the game was rushed out for financial reasons in whatever state they had at the time.

X games have always been niche, and it's unfortunate that X4's chance at reaching a bit of a wider audience did not happen under better circumstances. Scores are invariably going to get worse before they get better, but for what it's worth Egosoft also have a tradition of turning things around with time and polish. 2.0 is already a huge improvement over launch just a couple months ago, so there is reason to expect this time will be no different. The main worry is that Egosoft might shy away from some of the more radical changes and rebalancing needed which would almost certainly break continuity with existing saves. There's also a catch 22 in that if they rebalance things around DLC content, people stuck with the base game will have a poor experience, but if you keep balancing as-is the DLC is just window dressing and does not address the current shortcomings.

Honestly not sure what the best way forward is in terms of financial viability and public reception. NMS's model of continuing to sell the game at higher base prices while adding missing content and fixes for free for existing users has worked quite well for Hello Games, so certainly worth thinking about. They could feasibly restructure development so the 'first two expansions' bundled with the Collector's Edition are pushed back for new stories/actual expansions (think TC/AP) and include the missing content in the base package to fuel sales and goodwill. Whether the numbers add up is hard to say from an outside perspective, however.

[Nikola515]

At least game is pre beta and not pre alpha like XR( egosoft has improved a little) X4 is pretty much in development at this point so I don't think it will be out of beta until 3.0. This is last time they sold me unfinished game as finished product and they lost all of my respect and any fate I had in them. Next time I'll wait a year and probably wait for sales...I played X4 for only two weeks until I give up. Game is just too shallow and there is not much to do like in older titles. I hope they bring more missions and balance the game as it is way too easy at this point. It feels like it was made for mentally challenged ( or perhaps I'm used to playing challenging games). I personally think X3 was their last masterpiece and we will never see game like this again

I think players in general are getting sick of unfinished games and being betrayed by developers. Best examples would be Desteny,Metall Gear Survive,Fallout 76, Mass Effect Andromeda and now Anthem. People are just getting sick of those practices and they are bashing on every game. Egosoft is well known for their buggy and unfinished starts but there is early access now and there is no excuse why they couldn't do this. Also they dont have publisher so people can't say that they wore forced (they make all decisions). Wrong is wrong no matter who does it.

[adeine]

At least game is pre beta and not pre alpha like XR( egosoft has improved a little)

Nah, X:R was X4's pre alpha.

[Nikola515]

At least game is pre beta and not pre alpha like XR( egosoft has improved a little)

Nah, X:R was X4's pre alpha.

[Socratatus]

I was going to do a thread like this, but I thought, "what`s the point? They have my money now. they won`t care. We just have to wait 6 months, a year, maybe 2 like NMS did".

I`ve actually been laying NWN1... A very simple game. It has the odd bug, is a bit simple, but you know what? It works and works well. No frustration of wasted time due to bugginess.

I`m never buying a game on release again. What is the point of having to wait 6 months to a year or more for something to be fixed that we were all tricked into thinking would work reasonably well on release? I even had to do a new restart now, then i decided to shelve it instead. Complete waste of time. I have work to do.

Also if i released work in this state I`d never make a penny and rightly too. Only games companies get away with this. What`s even worse is how they`re starting to ignore us, where before they were quite responsive, now that the `crucial` release period is over.

I do blame myself, I was weak for one period. How many times have we been warned? how many examples of this have we seen? numerous.

I won`t make that mistake again. In fact i haven`t bought a single new release game since then just old cheap ones ( that work far better than X4) and I`m having far more no-frustration fun with them.

Rant... over.

[Player]

It was suggested that the game was released on the model of Early Access, but the developer has refuted it. I believe that not adopting this model and launching the game in the current state (even after 2.0) was a mistake. It seems like nothing has been learned since the XR's fiasco.

[Falcrack]

I`m never buying a game on release again. What is the point of having to wait 6 months to a year or more for something to be fixed that we were all tricked into thinking would work reasonably well on release? I even had to do a new restart now, then i decided to shelve it instead. Complete waste of time. I have work to do.

I expected bugs at release. So, I was not shocked or dismayed when I encountered them. I certainly didn't feel "tricked".

[Nikola515]

Actually some features like player shipyard were supposed to be in the game from the start. It was delayed do to UI or something like that. From the start tutorials wore buggy to the end where whole economy that is X4's main feature was bugged.. Those things should have never passed alpa let alone beta in the first place.

I'm not unreasonable and I understand that even with 1000 beta testers there is so much team of 30 can do but that is not the point. Unfinished game is still unfinished and people shouldn't get triggered just because someone point this out. They had other options but they chose not to use them and now there is backlash like there was with XR. I'm sure game will be ok in a year or two but this is second time they pulled this and damage is done...

[Hornet108]

I think you can blame the wider adoption of Agile methodologies for the degradation in software quality since to do Agile properly it can be quite a resource heavy process even with the tools. In some cases, Agile is the best and right way to do things but that is anything but universally true. There seems to be a tendency in at least some cases to rush things and make shortcuts just to make the metrics look good, and in other cases Agile seems to be merely used as an excuse to not do certain things that should be done regardless of the approach adopted. In the context of developing games like X4, I personally think using the Agile approach is ill-advised in the main.

Holy hell m8, chip on your shoulder much? You can absolutely not blame agile for this. Do you even know they work agile? If not, what a massive assumption! I hope you don't make those sorts of assumptions when you are developing, particularly if you're using waterfall and you have to wait for your next testing phase to find out that your assumptions are wrong and you have built the wrong thing!

[Alan Phipps]

Hmmm, I well remember this quote from vukica too:

"What I have observed is that egosoft is using some form of agile aproach to software development. Google it...
That is a good a thing, even though it may not seem so. Even bad "agile" is better than no "agile"."

So putting aside whether Egosoft actually use Agile methodolgy or not, the debate about its efficacy here would still be contentious amongst those who claim to be 'in the know'. As a sub-topic for discussion here, it's probably just another techie rabbit hole to fall into. <shrugs>

[Hornet108]

Interesting thread! I have no idea who that person is (do they work for egosoft? there's no egosoft tag) but I find this statement from further on down that thread really nails it tho:

I cannot disagree more with the "even bad agile is better than no agile" statement. The main idea of agile development is to deliver stable increments at all times. Never ship something broken.

But you're right, I really don't need to go down this rabbit hole. Just gets my back up when people blame poor results on methodologies (which according to vukica, apparently, they might be doing badly anyway?), the truth is no matter what methodology you're using, good devs will produce good code, the difference will be if its the right code or how quickly it is delivered. The code here just straight up doesn't seem to work, and I don't think its fair to blanket blame agile for "the degradation in software quality" either here or in general. You absolutely can write a solid product in agile and thousands of organizations do it every day.

All software development requires solid testing and acceptance procedures (with a strong emphasis on automation), no matter which methodology you're using, so I would be asking how these bugs got past testing and QA long before I would be looking at which methodology the team is using - the problems are far more basic than that. I also suspect the reason it released in such a state was financial, and egosoft needed the sales to survive. They had to know releasing in a broken state and then rushing to patch afterward would hurt sales, it would sell far more copies if everything worked perfectly, but I am just guessing.

Anyway, Rog's first comment was intentionally provocative and I suspect he was looking to elicit such a response as mine, so I have taken his troll bait. I will bow out at this point.

[sh1pman]

I’m afraid Egosoft didn’t have much choice. I think it was like “Either we’re pushing X4 out in whatever state it is now, or this will be the end of Egosoft”. Can’t really blame them for choosing to survive and finish the game in the following months. Still, the fact that I understand it doesn’t make me feel better about the game itself, there’s a lot to do (and fix) yet. I agree that they should’ve released it in Early Access, for PR reasons at least. People would’ve been a lot more receptive. Just think about how many more copies of the game they’d sell if they had a 90% positive score on Steam (and I think 90% was doable after just one more year in dev/Early Access). More streamers would get involved, etc. I really hope they learned the lesson this time and will do it right for the next X game.

[pref]

I’m afraid Egosoft didn’t have much choice.

No one forced them to release shipyards before fixing basic commands. Some of the issues and lack of features that are really disruptive to gameplay are there since 1.0.
Modders are way more reliable in cases..

[Belgarath]

No one forced them to release shipyards before fixing basic commands. Some of the issues and lack of features that are really disruptive to gameplay are there since 1.0.
Modders are way more reliable in cases..

I agree. I could totally do without player-owned shipyards and be happy that the worst issues were being addressed. That isn't happening, though. Egosoft is taking the road to new features being added before fixing the things that are broken and it's really hurting them. 47 curators on Steam reviewed the game and only two did not recommend it. I didn't check the dates on the reviews, but I imagine they were at or near initial release. For the past month, user reviews on Steam are only at 55% positive. That's not good. When people see that, they either just skip it or check the forums to see what shows there and they see all the issues the game currently has. If Egosoft continues down this road, it could very well be the end of the X series and Egosoft. I would hate to see that happen since I've been with them for so long and have more hours in the X series of games than any other franchise.

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

I think you can blame the wider adoption of Agile methodologies for the degradation in software quality since to do Agile properly it can be quite a resource heavy process even with the tools. In some cases, Agile is the best and right way to do things but that is anything but universally true. There seems to be a tendency in at least some cases to rush things and make shortcuts just to make the metrics look good, and in other cases Agile seems to be merely used as an excuse to not do certain things that should be done regardless of the approach adopted. In the context of developing games like X4, I personally think using the Agile approach is ill-advised in the main.

Holy hell m8, chip on your shoulder much? You can absolutely not blame agile for this. Do you even know they work agile? If not, what a massive assumption! I hope you don't make those sorts of assumptions when you are developing, particularly if you're using waterfall and you have to wait for your next testing phase to find out that your assumptions are wrong and you have built the wrong thing!

In practice, no-one with any common sense develops software using a pure waterfall model, testing should be happening at some level through out development.

As for me having a chip on my shoulder, not really but I have worked with various implementations of Agile principles and have seen how easily and often it is not done well nor for the right reasons. The problem with Agile is not Agile in itself but how it is implemented and the reasons for doing so. There are cases where Agile is appropriate but Agile in itself is not suitable in ALL cases - there are time and resource implications associated with Agile that introduce inefficiencies in the development process and such inefficiencies are not always justified.

Whether Egosoft actually use an Agile approach or not is a bit moot but given that on at least some occassions a game crash to desktop opens a web browser session to a site that is clearly running a tool that is primarily targeted at Agile it is a fair bet. However, a common error IME made by organisations/teams that operate on Agile principles is that the wider impact testing of changes tends to gets glossed over because testing is often too focused on a particular feature. This particular issue is not unique to Agile but often the impact is amplified rather than reduced IME.

The real fundamental problem in play is Egosoft have significantly dropped their standards of testing - what development methodology they actually use at the end of the day is moot, that is up to them to work out. What is clear is that they do need to increase their release standards for X4.

[Socratatus]

I`m sick of hearing about Shipyards. The Devs got mobbed by the loudest minority screaming "SHIPYARDS!" almost completely ignoring the rest of the game for the majority who were just puttering along exploring the universe. Now they`ll hold up the Devs even more on how much a gun can fire in quasi-milisecond blow-everything-apart mode.

This is why the rest of the game remainx, and is, even more, broken.

[Chris0132]

Given that the shipyard tab was in the station builder from release I would suspect the shipyards were planned for a while.

[Nikola515]

I`m sick of hearing about Shipyards. The Devs got mobbed by the loudest minority screaming "SHIPYARDS!" almost completely ignoring the rest of the game for the majority who were just puttering along exploring the universe. Now they`ll hold up the Devs even more on how much a gun can fire in quasi-milisecond blow-everything-apart mode.

This is why the rest of the game remainx, and is, even more, broken.

Actually decision to have shipyard in X4 had nothing to do with lout minority but it had everything to do with how popular this feature was... It was implemented in X3 as HQ and moders took it to another level (X3 LU especially). Whole mod was based on building economy and building your huge fleets to save galaxy from super Xenon that was taking over sector by sector....Think of X4 on X3 engine but with more freedom to do what you want (more commands and less restrictions)....My favorite part is going to Xenon sector and jumping my fleet of 100 capital ships in my location and wasting everything in my path.... Than in XR we dint have shipyards but moders again added them in to the game and it was one of most popular mods and almost everyone had them (Black Rain's Shipyard Mod ). Based on this it is logical that Egosoft would add this in to their game as they have done this in past. For example Universal Trader started as a mod and now is almost part of every game...