v1.0 release should get pushed back, not polish features
Morph_Guy
Join Date: 2016-04-21 Member: 216034Members
Join Date: 2016-04-21 Member: 216034Members
Like I said in the title, I think v1.0 should get pushed back to allow for more polish time.
Earlier this week I was looking at trello and noticed that some cards for polish features had been pushed to the backlog recently and some had comments on them that said that they might end up pushing those features to post v1.0. These include things like animations for climbing ladders or terrain polish, as well as other animations and FX fixes (check the backlog on the development trello to see more examples). Personally, I don't like this at all.
While animations like this aren't necessary they still add a lot to the game and make it feel a lot more like a finished product in my opinion. Aside from those features there are also lots of other, even more important things I can't see getting implemented well under the late October deadline. Things like voice acting for Lifepod and Degasi downloads, Images for all of the life forms and tech in the PDA encyclopedia, and fixes for hitboxes that make them actually good. I'd hate to see some of those pushed back as well.
This is why I think they should push v1.0 release back to at least late November, giving them time to add all of those animations, sounds, and graphical updates that help make the game feel finished.
Earlier this week I was looking at trello and noticed that some cards for polish features had been pushed to the backlog recently and some had comments on them that said that they might end up pushing those features to post v1.0. These include things like animations for climbing ladders or terrain polish, as well as other animations and FX fixes (check the backlog on the development trello to see more examples). Personally, I don't like this at all.
While animations like this aren't necessary they still add a lot to the game and make it feel a lot more like a finished product in my opinion. Aside from those features there are also lots of other, even more important things I can't see getting implemented well under the late October deadline. Things like voice acting for Lifepod and Degasi downloads, Images for all of the life forms and tech in the PDA encyclopedia, and fixes for hitboxes that make them actually good. I'd hate to see some of those pushed back as well.
This is why I think they should push v1.0 release back to at least late November, giving them time to add all of those animations, sounds, and graphical updates that help make the game feel finished.
Comments
We all want subnautica to get out of early access as a beautiful survival game we have ever seen but the devs might not have enough recources to complete it so they release it in October and then from the revenue they get they add them in updates after 1.0 but that's what I think is happening otherwise I'm with you on this
I would imagine that it's a revenu thing, what with having to actually PAY their employees and all.
< chuckle >
The games in pretty good shape considering where it was even just two months ago.
Yeah, it's in a fairly good shape overall, so anything leftover can be fixed after the launch and then they can look towards things like new content/mechanics/etc later on.
I haven't gotten to play the Cuddlefish Update just yet, but when I was streaming for my friend a few nights before that update the save I was playing was riddled with errors xD (Stable release, not experimental)
This happened when I tried exiting back to the Main Menu after it sat there saying "Saving..." for four minutes. I uh, never did get out of that situation there and had to force-quit
Oh and you can see my oxygen low there....? For some reason oxygen refused to replenish in my cyclops, seamoth, prawn, even powered bases. It only replenished when I went to the surface. Even reloading the game didn't fix it.
Not to mention numerous cases of cells failing to load, almost died just trying to enter the QEP since the floor didn't spawn in and I fell down and broke my legs on the ground below and oh my goodness the terrain popin! I wasn't able to see the Floater Island / mountain island until I was practically touching it (PC and Xbox) Was a lot of things going on xD
Some of those were probably addressed in the latest update, so I'll give a new game a shot and see how that goes. ^^
All I'm saying is that if they have the option to push it back they should push it back.
I've been shot out of the ocean and 200m in the air by my cyclops bay doors, been stuck in the ladder animation more times than I can count, been stuck in the docking animation, had a wreck spawn on top of my seamoth trapping it permanently, clipped through the Aurora hull and been trapped until suffocation, half constructed things only to be unable to finish or deconstruct them, had a leviathan clip inside a wreck and pull me out through the wall, had upgrade modules randomly cease functioning (this bug seems to have been squashed lately), have the seamoth distance stuck at '8m' constantly, had a stalker drop 26 stalker teeth in a neat little mountain, silent running using energy even when engines are switched off, cyclops being damaged but impossible to repair (seems squashed), ghost leviathan swimming into and out of Lost River cave walls, phantom lava patches in lava zone, graphical glitches where i can see Aurora/my base/lifepod from any distance even through other terrain, have fish swimming around inside my base constantly.
These are only the bugs I have personally experienced, which implies the actual number of bugs is mind-boggling.
Similar threads popped up for Natural Selection 2's 2012 Halloween release and at the time it was in a worse state comparatively. Just booted up Subnautica and from my perspective it runs buttery smooth when blasting at top speed throughout the surface world with the Seamoth. So if you're running this thing on anything around toaster performance (Xbone)... Those performance issues bit are kinda your own fault to some extent
However, I do have a huge contrast for comparison, the last time I booted up the game was... January/February June... And I can tell you, this game runs MUCH better
He's right. Many a potentially great game ended up being incinerated by reviews when it was shipped before it was ready. Hitting arbitrary release targets is what dooms games, not helps them. A game should ship - or, in the modern universe, release - when it's ready, not before. If there's still work to do, it needs to be done, period. The short-term gain of just getting the project out the door is very, very seriously offset by the long term losses both to the game released and a developer's reputation. Just look at Interplay; thanks to a lot of well-deserved bad press (and some pretty stupid legal decisions), they went from a top-tier production house in the '90s and '00s, to essentially a games recycler today. And this was the developer that created Fallout. But too many "release on time, not on completion" titles helped sink them. (Anybody who played release-day version Fallout 2 knows exactly what that looked like.)
I doubt @Morph_Guy was pushing for "perfect," @Voxel - just "ready." (Of course, he might've been; I can't speak for him.) You're right; perfection is a nearly-impossible target to hit, mainly because it keeps moving around. (As the wise Mr. Crisp once said, it's "like killing a bear with a chopstick - you can do it, but it's super tough.")
As for motivation and money, you tend to get sharply decreasing amounts of both when reviews start popping up along the lines of "this is the release version?!" or "it wasn't finished and they rushed it out the door" - and we all know that both the Steam and Xbox community are full of people who just loooooove writing reviews like that. Right now, the game's protected by its "Early Access Shield." Ladder teleportation? Early access. Sub control issues? Early access. Lighting inconsistencies? Early access. But when you release, you drop your shields and are exposed to the full fury of...The Complaints Corps. And "early access" is no longer a valid explanation; the only one left is "we didn't do it," and that doesn't fly well.
Having run through my share of large programming projects, believe me, I get what the developers are probably feeling right now. Project fatigue. This never-ending monsoon of to-do list items, complaints, bugs that won't die, bugs that will die but spawn other bugs on death, nags, and all kinds of pressure that just needs to go away right now before I lose what's left of my mind. I've been there and I'm completely empathetic. But just jamming your boot into your program's back and shoving it screaming out the door is generally inadvisable for any developer that cares about reputation and quality.
Net-net, it comes down to two things to make sure this game ends up being released in a state that all of us - developers and community - want it to be:
1. If it needs more development time, then the time needs to be taken. Not something any programming team that's spent years on a project wants to hear, granted, but it's the truth. Those years invested can be undone by not taking the extra couple weeks or months to make sure everything's ready to go; bad reviews sink ships. And, if they're bad enough, the dock, too. If finishing items that are important to the proper experience of the game will take work past the deadline, then the deadline needs to move. Yes, even things like the teleporting ladder transition - in a game that has such attention to detail, items like that stand out much more than they would in a lower-quality game where they'd be expected.
2. The community needs to knock off the nonsense. Reading how these boards get, I'd be anxious to be done with the project and move on, too. We collectively need to stop with the nagging about things we know and have known are off the table. More vehicles, multiplayer, weapons, more creatures, area X is too (fill in random subjective complaint here), and the parade of "suggestions" that would involve completely rewriting core game elements - and then the inevitable flame wars that follow. Part of what drives a game development team is community energy, and when that community starts going sour, it saps your will to keep doing anything that would keep you heavily invested in that community...which means developing the game. There comes a point where the attitudes get to you and you just want the project over with so you can just say "sorry; game's finished, we won't be adding (blank) to it or making substantive changes." The multi-page arguments that have become commonplace are generally just ego wars that don't help the development process. If you really need to fight, do it in private. Productive debate is one thing; the endless "You're wrong because" "No, you're wrong because" gainsaying is another.
(Point of clarification: this thread is an example of healthy debate and provides the developers with a window into the community's collective head. If at some point two people start in on each others' throats because they both think the other is an idiot, then the conversation has gone to The Bad Place.)
So, really (wake up, TL;DR crew), it's on all of us. If the game needs more dev time, then it should get it; the effort invested thus far and the community that has rallied around it deserve the effort it would take. And we as the community need to get back to acting like a community; we don't always need to agree, but we don't need to fight and sling mud like a dysfunctional family at Thanksgiving.
I actually can't comment on the bug-state of the game, all I did was a stresstest run to see how it would cope by pushing the thing to the limit and it seems to hold up quite well, especially considering all the "performance issues" threads on here. I was quite surprised to see that contrast in performance since June-ish
Bug wise, well are there a lot left? More than they should logically be able to handle in 30-40 days, to be able to deliver an acceptable "release product"? Surely the epic fail that were the No Man's Sky or Duke Nukem Forever release, isn't going to be repeated here?
Like @scifiwriterguy said, I don't want the game to be "perfect". There are plenty of features I think are fine to be saved for post v1.0 updates, like fauna riding. It's the features that have been getting put on the trello backlog recently like ladder animations and vehicle exit animations that I don't like getting moved to post v1.0.
Yet, I don't think it would be missing ladder transitions, but rather more severe problems like graphical and clipping problems. Maybe also some things like missing PDA graphics and voice recordings or still weird tech balancing. Though I think the time should be enough for November on most issues, considering the latest improvements and the fact that the devs can spend more and more time on fixing now.
Many people praise it as an excellent game, and in some aspects it is... but it's so barebones. The story is flawed and confusing and the gameplay itself is painfully simple. Not that Subnautica is lacking in content, but I personally don't think that it'll be ready for a full release by december.
I don't know...if bought a game that was v1.0 and every time I climbed a ladder it frozen and I had to Ctrl+Alt+Del, losing all my progress (can be up to 10 hours progress if you're in Hardcore since you can't save) I wouldn't be writing a positive review.
I'm afraid that is what's going to happen at release
They at least to remedy the game-breaking bugs.
If the game isn't finished, it isn't ready for release. It's really that simple.
I'm willing to wait another 12 months if it means the game is 12 months-worth of better after it. When the Precursor bases arrived it was obvious that the game was far, far from finished and personally, from that point, I'd say it needed another 18 months at least.
You know I love you but I have to disagree with a few things here. I feel you're putting far too much onus on this forum community when in reality we should have absolutely no bearing on the developer's motivation or lack thereof. Their motivation should come not from our verbal support but from the millions of dollars we have collectively given them in the hope (not guarantee, hope) that we end up with a decent game to play. They may only be legally obligated to deliver a bare minimum quality product, but morally they are certainly obligated to deliver the best product they are capable of producing. Their motivation should be all the support we've given financially, nothing more, nothing less. The support they receive here on the forums is an added bonus along with the feedback they require to make the game "better." And criticism (no matter how strong) on the same forums is part of the process.
If the community "starts going sour", as you put it, and that "saps your will... (to be) heavily invested and develop the game" (I'm paraphrasing) then that reeks of both immaturity and unprofessionalism, not to mention an inability to take criticism. If the community "goes sour" it's usually a very strong indicator that the developers haven't been listening to that community in the first place. The responsibility is theirs, and theirs alone. However, I'd like to think the developers in this particular case are far more professional than that.
Also, forums should be places for both healthy debate and yes, sometimes arguments. And never forget that one person's idea of what constitutes "toxic" is not the same as the next person's;
I just spent the last 2 weeks "jailed" (what ever that means) because I made clear my opinions on console gaming and the damage the console culture has done to gaming as a whole. It was made very clear that my opinions were not welcome, I was censored and punished. But this is a privately owned website and they have the absolute right to censor whatever they like and ban anything they like. I respect that, even though I happen to disagree and find it immoral.
My point in bringing this up is that to others, including the forum mods, my opinions were toxic (not to mention potentially damaging to potentially console customers) so they made the decision to censor those opinions.
But to me, the decision to censor those opinions was far more toxic, and creates a climate of fear where people are afraid to speak up lest they be punished. That's the world we live in IRL, and it's awful to see it leak into the online world too.
Anyway, that's a bit off topic, and I always respect your opinions @scifiwriterguy, I hope you know that. I just think forums are a place specifically designed for conflict and sharing opposing ideas. That's the entire point in their existence. It'd be boring and entirely pointless if we all agreed all the time.
I meant the missing animation with having just teleportation. Not the bugs with climbing ladders. Those should be fixed before release. Especially if there's only 1 save together with autosave. Any bug will be written into the only savegame with such an approach.
I wish graphics cards had expandable memory. Of course, then we wouldn't have to run out and buy a new one every other generation or so... xP
So much this
That HD5870 is a beast still, but sometimes it has issues because of the 1Gb. Doom 4 for example runs crap because it uses over 1.5Gb on 1080p or even 900p. Which is strange in any case, cause the graphics on low/medium are blurry as shit
1080p and 900p should be able to run on that measly 1Gb IMHO
Because you're using TAA probably. Vaseline screen.
Either turn off the anti-aliasing completely then use SweetFX +ReShade to handle AA (FXAA or SMAA) and other post-process effects, (which would help performance also) or alternatively, keep using the blurry in-game TAA and the Lumasharpen settings in SweetFX to counter the vaseline.
I'm playing Dishonored 2 at the moment and have the same issue. TXAA looks beautiful, but only once the blur is removed with Lumasharpen tweaking.
I can't wait until game developers realise that their anti-aliasing always sucks, and their post-process effects just make games run like crap. Enough of this unoptimised garbage already.
It's about time they stopped with post-processing altogether, and start telling people to go and get Sweetfx/ReShade so they can use as little or as much post=processing as their own rig can handle, instead of forcing us into it.
Honestly, the minimum specs of so many modern games are jacked up by this sort of thing it's unreal.
@EnglishInfidel While I disagree to a certain extent, I do think you do have some good points, and I think you made an excellent, high-quality post.
Main difference being, while it's true the devs are driven by the money paid for their service, there's also an element of community that can drive people to excel above and beyond. As for the effect a toxic community has, you'll find most of your best and brightest idea and support people will begin avoiding the community, because they aren't interested in, to put it bluntly, pissing matches (when two or more people with opposing views have expressed their reasoning quite clearly, but won't shut up and move on, but instead resort to trench warfare).
Last thing, another concern of mine is definitely optimization and making the game run smoother. I am fairly confident that the developers can get it running very smoothly in time, for the most part. The release date is coming up so SOON, and I am just crossing my fingers for everything to be done in time. I really want Subnautica to be a massive success and for millions to be able to experience and love this game, just as we all do!
For the record though, since the disabled seamoth pressure module was finally fixed, I have hopes that all the other serious long-term bugs may get squashed as well.
The only thing I would really like to see that might be considered a new feature is fixing the scanner room fixed list. That is really more like a bug fix then a new feature, though if it doesn't happen before 1.0, maybe it could be done in an expansion.
But of course I have no idea of what the Dev's commitments might be. Who knows if they've got a big fat loan repayment for all this due.
(BTW - post #100 for me!)
Well, if they gave us a noclip command it would be alright cause then you could just go through and move everything.
What are your thoughts on this?
Quiet_Blowfish is right, this game has the potential to be one of those "Classics" that everyone will remember. I think the Dev's should take their time and finish it up right and get it out just before Christmas if possible. I don't want to wait, but I'd really like a game that I'll play again and again in the years to come.
I think that they should delay it probably by one more month, and try to get as much as they can done in that month,m then they should be in a good standpoint. Just my thoughts, idk tho.