When will FC consider the game as finished?

[boj.per]

hi all

first of all, i really like the game and try to support it as much as i can. but after having seen space hulk ascension, i feel a bit disappointed. compared to JAF, SHA has

- better textures
- massively better ui
- more mechanics (guys can move backwards e.g.)
- better lighting
- better sound fx
- better animations

overall just better production value. only the performance issues are present in both games. i know JAF is a budget title, and there has been a SH game by FC before, so they are more experienced considering the franchise, but JAF really pales in comparison. SAH proves that FC is really a bunch of talented developers (except in performance optimization maybe ;-). JAF is not only "rough around the edges" compared to an AAA title, but even compared to a title by the same company.

so i wanted to ask when FC will consider the game finished? after the fixing of the present bugs (stealth being the most important one), after adding a few nice-to-have-features (storefronts, weapon modifications), or do they plan to polish the game thoroughly (better UI, free camera movement, more animations, rooftops...)?

would be nice to know what the devs' goal is and what is to be expected in the medium/long run. again, i really like the game, played many hours and will continue to do so, just a tad disappointed atm.

[Dorok]

Im' sorry to clue you that but we implicitly already got the answer, shops, bug fixes, stealth, a new batch of weapons, nothing else. That was depending of sells and amount of players interested and JAF is a sad big failure on that, and the low number of Kickstater pledgers is another bad clue on number of players potentially interested.

Not that there's no reason of this, I can see them, but dam the game is fun with some stuff that's been fixed and improved, and even without all stuff fixed (list above).

In my opinion JAF is an indie gem, alas in context of JA2 and fans of JA2, it's a crap for many of those fans and they setup the fame of the game. Well that's life, it happens, enjoy be one of the rare players able to appreciate the rough gem it is. :-)

After, eventually modders will transfigure the game. Honestly I have little hope because they don't have any entry points in the AI. Perhaps try anyway port a full JA2 in JAF, I doubt it will be possible, because of ownership problems and engine adaptations problems.

Majesty 2 was released in 2009, 5 years later still no Majesty at the horizon, it sells a lot better than JAF but got the same total destruction by many fans of the IP.

Im' curious to see when the owner of JA IP will have the boldness to try again after JAF, as they don't have the shoulder of any AAA game and no way the IP have shown to have the number of players interested at the amount required for an AAA game. For me the IP owner is in a locked path, no issue.

[Devine]

Originally posted by boj.per:

hi all

first of all, i really like the game and try to support it as much as i can. but after having seen space hulk ascension, i feel a bit disappointed. compared to JAF, SHA has

- better textures
- massively better ui
- more mechanics (guys can move backwards e.g.)
- better lighting
- better sound fx
- better animations

overall just better production value. only the performance issues are present in both games. i know JAF is a budget title, and there has been a SH game by FC before, so they are more experienced considering the franchise, but JAF really pales in comparison. SAH proves that FC is really a bunch of talented developers (except in performance optimization maybe ;-). JAF is not only "rough around the edges" compared to an AAA title, but even compared to a title by the same company.

so i wanted to ask when FC will consider the game finished? after the fixing of the present bugs (stealth being the most important one), after adding a few nice-to-have-features (storefronts, weapon modifications), or do they plan to polish the game thoroughly (better UI, free camera movement, more animations, rooftops...)?

would be nice to know what the devs' goal is and what is to be expected in the medium/long run. again, i really like the game, played many hours and will continue to do so, just a tad disappointed atm.

Short answer - we'll have to wait and see.

Long answer:

I don't think the comparison with SHA is fair. I don't think anybody but FC (and Games Workshop) knows how big the budget exactly was and they probably aren't allowed to say even if they wanted to, but I would be very surprised if it wasn't quite a bit larger than JAF's. Just because it was developed by the same company doesn't mean they have the same resources for both games.
Remember that the kickstarter's goal was to stay independent from bitComposer, so they had to (almost) completely depend on the money gathered there.

Space Hulk is licenced by Games Workshop and from what I understand they at least somewhat financed the project, although I don't know the details of course. Also don't forget that they had the money they got from the original Space Hulk game and although I don't know how much money they made from that, it was probably quite a bit more than from the JAF sales. Even if JAF gets the same amount of players (if you believe the reviews it won't) - due to the kickstarter, a lot of people that would have bought the game already bought it in kickstarter and are probably not gonna get a second copy, so you have to keep that in mind when you think about the sales. Of course their money did go into the project, but that was only enough for the minimum we got now (or will have in a couple of weeks), so you can't count it towards further development.


I highly doubt you will get an exact answer from FC about what else they are planning to do, because no matter what they say, you can be sure it will be used against them, so they are cautious about that. From what I can tell, they are dedicated to make it the best game they can, but I doubt the sales were very good, so they might just not have the budget to do much more than what they have promissed already.

Sadly I agree with Dorok when he says that nobody will have a hightened interest (or budget) in making a AAA (or AA) JA3. FC would certainly love to do it, but they don't have the budget for it and I don't see the thanks they got for their work giving anybody an incentive to try something similar, even with a budget considerably larger.
The current license holder of course is bitComposer and I don't see them willing or able to create the JA3 everybody wants. I also doubt anybody else is highly interested in buying the IP from them. From what I know, it was never a real moneymaker in the first place and after the kickstarter only achieving the minimum and a lot of JA2 fans p***ing all over the product that could be created from that, I don't see anybody seeing that change in the future.

All that is of course only the way I see things, so I could be very wrong about everything, but I doubt it.

The good news is that FC seems very interested in working together with modders. Adding something like rooftops might stay out of their reach, but I think there are going to be a lot of mods out there once FC manages to re-enable the workshop, update the map editor etc. and from what I heard, I am confident that they will continue to work on moddability and they really can't afford not to imho.


About the things you specifically mentioned:
- better textures
- better sound fx
- better animations
Those are very expensive (because time-consuming) I believe, so I think FC would rather spend the available money on different things. They shouldn't be too hard to mod (apart from taking a lot of time), though, so I think it's very possible that they might make it into the game eventually. At least if you like the JA2 sound fx, they should be pretty easy to mod into JAF once they manage to fix the problems they had with having those parts available for modding (I believe memory leakage, either way I know that they are working on it). I am pretty sure even I could do that with almost no modding experience whatsoever, that's how moddable the game is (going to be in some aspects).

- better lighting
might be in the same category, but I have no idea.

- massively better ui
probably out of the hands of modders - I guess FC will improve on that in the future, but again I don't know

- more mechanics (guys can move backwards e.g.)
I think that is where FC will spend most of what they can afford, because that is what everybody wants in the game (from what I gather).

[Dorok]

Like OP and not with SHA but already knowing SH, for sure I had a little regret not have that, in JAF, at least once I started enjoy a lot the game (first steps in it was more bad, the first area is plain bad, and the tutorial is great but you could skip it at first, moreover it took me some time to understand better some mechanisms and really appreciate the game depth).

On a positive note, game aging is a major element, the more you are trying to be very realistic the more you'll look bad in some years. JAF approach is cartoon and light style, and this won't age.

Moreover it already supports a resolution that will hardly rise. I'm using a 30" monitor and over is just unusable. And on 30" JAF is looking fine and this won't age.

In fact it's even a game that will age well, I mean it will improve with age during some years. The reason is the dev met a problem of performance. They couldn't increase too much number of enemies and met a problem when trying have enemies, and militia at same time, it's a lot a problem of power. On my computer the game runs like a charm, except when I enter in an area with 2 enemy squads, then enemy turn start be really too long. This will be better and better along the years, and mods if there is any will be able to push that further and further.

So that simplified look isn't just a bad choice it's also a choice that will age better. SHA will look like lacking of details on some years, not JAF.

EDIT: The sarcasm version of my post is, JAH looks great but with years it will look bad. JAF look bad but with years it won't look more bad, yeah! :-P

[Keyboard Cowboy]

Originally posted by Dorok:

Like OP and not with SHA but already knowing SH, for sure I had a little regret not have that, in JAF, at least once I started enjoy a lot the game (first steps in it was more bad, the first area is plain bad, and the tutorial is great but you could skip it at first, moreover it took me some time to understand better some mechanisms and really appreciate the game depth).

On a positive note, game aging is a major element, the more you are trying to be very realistic the more you'll look bad in some years. JAF approach is cartoon and light style, and this won't age.

Moreover it already supports a resolution that will hardly rise. I'm using a 30" monitor and over is just unusable. And on 30" JAF is looking fine and this won't age.

In fact it's even a game that will age well, I mean it will improve with age during some years. The reason is the dev met a problem of performance. They couldn't increase too much number of enemies and met a problem when trying have enemies, and militia at same time, it's a lot a problem of power. On my computer the game runs like a charm, except when I enter in an area with 2 enemy squads, then enemy turn start be really too long. This will be better and better along the years, and mods if there is any will be able to push that further and further.

So that simplified look isn't just a bad choice it's also a choice that will age better. SHA will look like lacking of details on some years, not JAF.

EDIT: The sarcasm version of my post is, JAH looks great but with years it will look bad. JAF look bad but with years it won't look more bad, yeah! :-P

English motherpizda, do you speak it?!?

[Goose Whimsey, PhD]

Budget title?! Isn't it the same price as Space Hulk: Ascension?

[boj.per]

Originally posted by Goose Whimsey, PhD:

Budget title?! Isn't it the same price as Space Hulk: Ascension?

which is half the price of a full priced title.
and it was made with a 300K kickstarter budget.

[Ⓦⓗⓘⓩⓚⓘⓓ]

Originally posted by boj.per:

Originally posted by Goose Whimsey, PhD:

Budget title?! Isn't it the same price as Space Hulk: Ascension?

which is half the price of a full priced title.
and it was made with a 300K kickstarter budget.

they might as well just shutdown their biz if all they want are risk free capital to run their biz which will never happen, FC is one of many indie companies out there and in a perfect world obviously everyone wants free capital to design their vision, in the old days where it all started how many small indie companies actually succeeded and move on to being the large AAA companies of today.

ffs just stop with this poor excuse, just admit they dont hv talents and its just a money grap, if they really believe in their product they would have thought of ways to raise funds and finish this not release a half ass product lmao what text based merchant menu hey are we moving backwards in game development?????

.....

[Captain Australia]

@ Bonjah +1

[boj.per]

Originally posted by Bonjah:

Originally posted by boj.per:

which is half the price of a full priced title.
and it was made with a 300K kickstarter budget.

they might as well just shutdown their biz if all they want are risk free capital to run their biz which will never happen, FC is one of many indie companies out there and in a perfect world obviously everyone wants free capital to design their vision, in the old days where it all started how many small indie companies actually succeeded and move on to being the large AAA companies of today.

ffs just stop with this poor excuse, just admit they dont hv talents and its just a money grap, if they really believe in their product they would have thought of ways to raise funds and finish this not release a half ass product lmao what text based merchant menu hey are we moving backwards in game development?????

.....

that's just hating and not constructive in any way. if they had no talent, the game would be much much worse. the missing/broken parts are clearly - at least from my point of view - not there because a lack of talent, but because a lack of funds. that's why i compared it to SHA. same company, same talent, more cash --> much better overall product.

please keep in mind that non-constructive criticism is as worthless as critiqueless praising. i'd like the game to improve and not the developers to go bankrupt or whatever. the outcome of JAF is, again, first and foremost the consequence of bad circumstances. don't hate the player, hate the game.

[Tendoncutter]

Originally posted by Keyboard Cowboy:

English motherpizda, do you speak it?!?

Solid constructive criticsim. You played 40+ hours, didn't like the game and surely have better things to do.
Why even stick around and post mindless chatter?

Originally posted by Bonjah:

they might as well just shutdown their biz if all they want are risk free capital to run their biz which will never happen, FC is one of many indie companies out there and in a perfect world obviously everyone wants free capital to design their vision, in the old days where it all started how many small indie companies actually succeeded and move on to being the large AAA companies of today.

ffs just stop with this poor excuse, just admit they dont hv talents and its just a money grap, if they really believe in their product they would have thought of ways to raise funds and finish this not release a half ass product lmao what text based merchant menu hey are we moving backwards in game development?????

.....

You really should stop your BS projections and start taking some damn responsibility for your personal actions, Bonjah. You bought something, the framework and the outline was on the tin, and you didn't agree with the outcome. Give up this juvenile attempt to justify your poor purchase to yourself.
"If they didn't think they could make the best game ever, then maybe they shouldn't have even thought about it, or existed, or have asked for tons more in KS, or gone out and got more funding(Do you honestly believe they didn't attempt to get more?)" "They only did it as a cash grab(what cash??) to get MY money!!" All BS projection...
YOU saw the game, YOU read the diclaimer, YOU made the purchase well knowing the scope of the project(and potentially what it would take to appease youand the rest of the community), YOU followed KS. YOU YOU YOU. There is noone to blame for this purchase but yourself. Grow the flip, up.

[SoulsandBlood]

I may be naive but it was it has been my understanding that a game is "finished" when it is officially released. Of course there are always bug fixes and balance patches for games that have dev support, but for a company to be able to get away with saying a game is not finished after its official commercial release is nonsense.

[Devine]

Apart from the promissed features, Full Control put everything into the game they could for the budget. We could argue whether it was wise to release the game before adding those (I would say it wasn't, but I doubt people would have been satisfied even after adding those, so who knows), but I guess they didn't have much choice. Don't forget that they added the map editor without the kickstarter reaching the goal for it, so we got (apart from some other things) a very important other feature instead, that can essentially give us 10 more games if people are willing to make them. My guess is that they had to release because they just didn't have any more money to continue without additional sales. That doesn't mean that they won't continue to add more features if they can, but nobody can say what kind of and how many that will be.

People that expect all the features that JA2 had highly overestimate the budget. The budget that was planned for the original JA3 (that never came to pass, I guess like 13 or so years ago, but I don't know the exact timeline) was about 3 million. This game had less than 400k, so obviously they can't deliver on those kind of expectations. The kickstarter clearly states that 350k are not nearly enough money to add all those features.
We'll have to wait and see what they will be able to do and what can and will be done by modders. After the map editor is working again and the other modding problems are solved, there should be a lot of possibilities in that department and I am sure they will try to improve on moddability (they imho don't really have a choice considering the negative attitude towards the game), so there should be even more possibilities along the lines. People just have to be willing to give it a chance.

[Ⓦⓗⓘⓩⓚⓘⓓ]

Originally posted by Tendoncutter:

Originally posted by Keyboard Cowboy:

English motherpizda, do you speak it?!?

Solid constructive criticsim. You played 40+ hours, didn't like the game and surely have better things to do.
Why even stick around and post mindless chatter?

Originally posted by Bonjah:

they might as well just shutdown their biz if all they want are risk free capital to run their biz which will never happen, FC is one of many indie companies out there and in a perfect world obviously everyone wants free capital to design their vision, in the old days where it all started how many small indie companies actually succeeded and move on to being the large AAA companies of today.

ffs just stop with this poor excuse, just admit they dont hv talents and its just a money grap, if they really believe in their product they would have thought of ways to raise funds and finish this not release a half ass product lmao what text based merchant menu hey are we moving backwards in game development?????

.....

You really should stop your BS projections and start taking some damn responsibility for your personal actions, Bonjah. You bought something, the framework and the outline was on the tin, and you didn't agree with the outcome. Give up this juvenile attempt to justify your poor purchase to yourself.
"If they didn't think they could make the best game ever, then maybe they shouldn't have even thought about it, or existed, or have asked for tons more in KS, or gone out and got more funding(Do you honestly believe they didn't attempt to get more?)" "They only did it as a cash grab(what cash??) to get MY money!!" All BS projection...
YOU saw the game, YOU read the diclaimer, YOU made the purchase well knowing the scope of the project(and potentially what it would take to appease youand the rest of the community), YOU followed KS. YOU YOU YOU. There is noone to blame for this purchase but yourself. Grow the flip, up.

lmao did FC ever listen to our feedback and this BS about running out of budget was only given when they decided to release this unfinished product and now trying to buy the sympathy vote claim they tried their best with the budget they had, u got to be joking right which company relies on the KS budget to finish a product most of them would had raised capital via other means, just stop explain for a has been game developer the excuse might fool kids but not responsible adults work and pay their dues, just a concept which is hard for some to follow...

[Devine]

Yes, they listened to tons of feedback. If you bothered to really read the JAF forums you could easily see that. Of course they didn't (and couldn't) include everything people want, but they changes a ton of things because of feedback they got. They could have done a better job with that in some spots, but I doubt you would have an easy time coming up with a lot of developers that listen more to feedback, even if they have a lot more money and people at their disposal.

Where should they have gotten additional money from? The kickstarter barely made the minimum (!) goal and a real JA3 would have needed a multitude of that (again - budget for the originally planned JA3 about 3 million, probably over 10 years ago), so how would you expect them to raise all that money?
It was a kickstarter project and a lot of people didn't support the game and now they wonder how they didn't get JA3 from it? (not talking about anyone specific, I know there are a lot of people out there that did support, just not nearly enough for a JA3 budget)

[=🆆ΛУ🆆⋊г∂=]

Originally posted by Keyboard Cowboy:

English motherpizda, do you speak it?!?

legit SLJ quote : )