Worth picking up at this time?

[Fenris]

Last day of the winter sale, so sell me here. I like 4x games and space games. played galactic civ 2 and 3, Stellaris, endless space, civ 1 through 6, and so on. How does predestination compare, and is it worth buying at this time?

[Troy]

It's not as good as any of those games, but it has some interesting ideas.

[losferwords]

No. I'm not sure this is ever going to be a finished product. The state it is currently in may be the final state of the.... software.

[eric.r.lesch]

The developer of Predestination released an update with a ton of bug fixes and a brief status update a few days ago. I have no idea why you are asserting that the game is abandonware. Since there is only one developer working on the game, it is true that the game is taking a while to develop, But it is encouraging to see regular updates and transparency in the development process.

[Daniel.Kiwi]

The game works, From what I've read the dev is doing balancing, final models/artwork & that.

I played it yesterday (First time since early alpha), & I like it, lil rough around the edges.

its better than the Master Of Orion remake.
similar to Gal Civ 2.


With some UI work (I miss the right click to exit of Endless Space) the game will be great

[athelasloraiel]

nice to know.

[Nyphur]

Hey guys,

I just wanted to stop in here and let you know the current state of development, that it's certainly not abandoned and we've been releasing consistent updates throughout development. As I mentioned in the latest set of patch notes, I took some time off from development recently as my father passed away unexpectedly. I'm the only programmer on the project full time so not much can happen without me, but I'm now back to development and you can expect to see more updates very soon.

The latest status is that we've just left the alpha stage and officially entered beta with the V1.0 update. What that means is that every major feature we wanted to get in for the main release is now complete and we've entered a period of heavy iteration based on feedback. There was a lot of development we couldn't do properly until all the features were in their final forms, such as balancing, some content development, and some UI work, and we can now start aggressively checking that stuff off our lists. So what's to come before release?

• Balance Pass: As I've discussed in another thread (and will discuss at length in the enxt dev update article), we can now do a full balance pass on everything from racial traits and difficulty settings to the economy and planet growth. Now that the gameplay is in its final form, we'll be a lot more confident in our balance changes sticking, and we'll be able to solicit focused feedback from players on balance.
  
• User Interface Overhaul: Now that the gameplay is finalised, we can shift gears and improve the user interface. This is something that we absolutely need your specific feedback on as we're often too close to the development of the game to see the problems in the interface -- we designed the interface, so of course we find it intuitive. We'll be focusing more heavily on usability and quality of life tweaks to the UI and improving the graphics where we can, but we're definitely going to need your feedback to help direct our efforts.
  
• Iterations: Each aspect of the game is going to get a once-over look before the final release, now that the core gameplay is finished. We've already released the first beta iteration as part of the V1.0.0.1 patch, which included a major iterative update to planet generation and resource gameplay. Each iteration will similarly improve the quality of gameplay in a specific area, solve problems that have been pointed out by fans, fix long-standing bugs, and generally attempt to polish that specific gameplay. Examples of upcoming patches include an iteration on diplomacy, a major iteration on the 3D ship designer, and another iteration on Fleet Combat.
  
• Storyline Missions: We have 1 storyline mission currently available, but there's a whole series of them waiting to be implemented. We have 6 story missions for the first story arc, which will introduce each of the races and their backstories and then lead into the story of the Revenant war. Then we have 6 more dealing with each of the races after being sent back in time and their conflicting motivations etc. We'd like to get all of these finished for the final release, but may release them episodically after launch just to have regular content drops.
  
• Challenge Maps: We've released the first challenge map, but there are more to come. These are ways for us to experiment with interesting twists on Predestination's core gameplay or tell little self-contained stories. The whole system is also moddable, so we will be looking at
  
• Missing Artwork: Now that we've overhauled the game's memory management and asset management code, we're ready to start adding more of the missing artwork such as the ship components for the remaining races.
  
• Kickstarter Backer Content: Predestination was originally funded on Kickstarter, and our backers have pledged for a variety of creative rewards. Many of those (such as star names and ship weapons / modules) are already in the game, but there are other still to implement. Many of these have had to wait until the game was feature-complete, so we'll start working our way through these as quickly as we can.
  
• Bugfixes: We've solved a huge number of bugs and crashes when we switched from XNA 3.1 to Monogame and did a major overhaul on the game engine, but there are always bugs and some new crashes have cropped up since the engine overhaul. We'll be trying to balance new content additions with bug-fixing as we approach final release.
  
• Other Features: Steam Achievements, Trading Cards (if possible), full modding support, etc. These are all things we want to get in place for the main release.
  
  The coming patches and updates will improve the game significantly before launch, and we're going to rely on feedback to make that happen. If you're considering buying Predestination and aren't 100% certain that you want to support beta development and help give feedback that will shape the final release, there's no rush to buy it just yet.
  
  There's absolutely nothing wrong with waiting for the main release or launch reviews before deciding, and if you wishlist the game then you'll be able to follow the development updates and get notified when we launch. We obviously appreciate all the people who have bought in so far and helped support development to get us this far, but we've always said that we'd rather lose a sale than have an unhappy customer.
  
  Cheers,
  -- Brendan, Lead Developer

[athelasloraiel]

Wowww