Recent Mixed Reviews

[Double Quarter Pounder w/ cheese]

What's up with the reviews lately? It was overwhelmingly positive prior to its release. The game already felt complete as it was even before the endgame crisis got introduced, dunno why so many people think the game is incomplete.

Edit: Keep the discussions relevant to the topic, you're free to express your opinions, but do not derail it for your own personal agenda.

[charleyherrera63]

Originally posted by Sarissofoi:

Its just me or banhammer was released?

As far as I know only one person was banned from the thread.

[[82DK] Iregi]

Originally posted by charleyherrera63:

Originally posted by Sarissofoi:

Its just me or banhammer was released?

As far as I know only one person was banned from the thread.

And he kinda deserved it even though he was obviously intoxicated as ♥♥♥♥.

[Double Quarter Pounder w/ cheese]

Originally posted by charleyherrera63:

Originally posted by Sarissofoi:

Its just me or banhammer was released?

As far as I know only one person was banned from the thread.

That's the only ban that's needed here, was getting tired of his a/ss plaguing my thread meant for discussion

[gazomierz]

Originally posted by charleyherrera63:

but character building, I dont think so.

Sure it isn't on lvl of what rpgs offer. But if we compare it to other games of the genre? Stats system is nothing to write home about. It's still better than most as it actually plays big role and you can customize stats of your mercs by lvlups, not all squad tac games do that. But still, nothing exceptional. Perk system is just great tho. There is huge variety in builds player can utilize. And I like open nature of it very much, you're free to mix and match and experiment. It's one of the best I've seen in such games.

[Overhype Studios]

Hi guys,

first of all sorry for the long silence but we really needed a break after the latest developments. I will personally try my best to answer any questions you have and have an open discussion.

On topic:
Everyone who bought the game has the right to give a positive or negative review for whatever reason he or she sees fit. Some might play it for 3 hours and give it a thumbs up, others might play it over 200 hours and give it a thumbs down. We as developers are not in a position to judge or influence this decision. We offer a game that we made and put a lot of work into, after that people have to decide whether they think they should recommend it to others or not.

There have been an increasing amount of recent cases in which reviews have been used to influence developers towards certain decisions - be it for good or bad reasons. As developers we have to live with this and accept it. When we are making a choice we have to be aware that people might like it or not like it and we have to be ready to take the consequences. That is how the whole review system works: To voice an opinion - about the game, the developers and their choices and business practices. We obviously made a choice that a lot of people did not like but for us it was the hardest choice we ever made. We spent a lot of time thinking about this (this is not just said, this is actually true) and changed our minds more than once on it. In the end you all know what came out of it and we accept it with all its consequences.

I hope i can give some confidence back to you by entering the discussion again and assure you that we are not gone but instead are working hard on something we hope you will like as much as BB. It will take some more time until we can give more details on it but we are making good progress on it.

[Sarissofoi]

Any chance that we will see source code or decompiler tools avialable?
Anything that allow access and modification of scirpts and text files?

[Overhype Studios]

We thought a lot about that but ultimately we do not want the game to be open source by opening up all the files. If we did that we are basically handing out the code to everyone to copy or use it in any way they like. With all the work we put into the game we feel very uncomfortable with just opening up everything.

Modding in general would of course be possible, there is hardly anything that can not be achieved if you put enough ressources into it. However, adding at least half a decent way to mod the game would cost us a lot of time and work and also we would have to take care of the support questions around modding the game. The more minimalistic the implementation of modding the more requests we would get about it again binding up a lot of our resources.

Modding was not planned when we started the project years ago and adding it later turned out to be quite the challenge - at least if you want to have it in a proper way that keeps the game working. With our new project we are planning for it right from the start and there will be Workshop Support for Steam so we have a working, well implemented solution for it.

[Sarissofoi]

So you will let the game die?
Gotcha.

[Esxhaton]

Originally posted by Sarissofoi:

So you will let the game die?
Gotcha.

Exactly, the same as other games, like super Mario, final fantasy tactics, and many others. They are dead ;)

[Stormlock]

Originally posted by |BO|Esxhaton:

Originally posted by Sarissofoi:

So you will let the game die?
Gotcha.

Exactly, the same as other games, like super Mario, final fantasy tactics, and many others. They are dead ;)

You just listed some of the most extensively modded/hacked games in existence. Hiding the resources of those games certainly did nothing to increase their popularity compared to the efforts of the people that improved them long after their release.

[Esxhaton]

Originally posted by Stormlock:

Originally posted by |BO|Esxhaton:

Exactly, the same as other games, like super Mario, final fantasy tactics, and many others. They are dead ;)

You just listed some of the most extensively modded/hacked games in existence. Hiding the resources of those games certainly did nothing to increase their popularity compared to the efforts of the people that improved them long after their release.

My point was to take as example a few "finished" games, I could have picked more recent ones, but I thought these would have been more obvious.

[Overhype Studios]

Modding is something we really like in games and lots of games have started just as mods of other games be it Counter Strike or Dota. We always said we like mods and that BB would be a good game to mod and that didn't change. However, modding was not on our "must have" list at the beginning of development and a game that does not support modding is not an unfinished game by definition. We always considered it to be a nice extra. It is something that adds to a game, not something that is essential - there are lots of games on the market that don't have any mods and are still worth playing.

We are completely aware that adding mod support would benefit the game, there is no doubt about that. What we as developer have to decide is how much ressources we can put into something like modding or translations or basically any other feature. As i explained above adding mod support after a game is finished that was never planned to support mods is a lot of work. The other option would be to make the game open source by just opening all the files but we do not feel comfortable doing that at the moment. We have definitely learned from all the years of developing Battle Brothers and that is why adding the possibility for mod support is one of the first things we are doing for our next game.

[13obo]

Thank you for taking the time to reply to this thread- I never doubted that you haven't deserted us or are afraid to stand up to your decision, which was plain bollocks.

As someone who lives by the dogma of Barney from "How I met your mother", which is:

New is ALWAYS better,

I fully support your decision to start a new game from scratch with similar gameplay to Battle Brothers. My favourite genre is turn-based tactical strategy games with RPG elements, and I'm confident, given your past record, that your next modern take on a game will be something similar and of par quality.

We live in a world where many people consider themselves an "expert" now that they have the ability to publically express their opinion via social media, youtube, forums, etc. (see posts here suggesting that the developers did not consider all sides of their decision). However, I am certain that having spent 5 years on this, you took the decision to start something new only after thorough, deliberate consideration.

It is a perfectly reasonable decision for you to start a new project rather than continue the current one and we, the fans that are not afraid to delve in a new game instead of sticking to the "gold classics", agree with that. It makes financial sense, is fun to start something new, is more efficient (effort/result ratio is much higher than trying to rewrite code), etc.

You delivered a wonderful and complete game (in my books) that gave me hundreds of hours of game time, and I'm looking forward to your developer blogs for the new one!

Best of luck!

[screeg]

Probably a good idea to pin your explanations in a new thread. I think the ♥♥♥♥-storm has died down a bit at least.

Regarding those in this thread and elsewhere you have declared I will never *sniff* buy another Overhype game again! Please. Games of this type and quality are few and very, very far between. If Overhype makes another game, you will have to take a look, and if you like it you will buy it and play it. No one is going to stand by their blood oath and let a tactical gem slip by.

[Overhype Studios]

Thanks for the understanding, i can not spoil too many info on the new project yet but it will have a lot in common with BB. This is the genre we really like and we also feel that there is a lack of decent turn based tactics/strategy games. On top of that, we will also profit from a lot of things we learned from Battle Brothers.

I did not want to start a new thread about it as i personally didnt want to make it an official announcement but rather i wanted to enter the ongoing discussion. Maybe i can do that a bit later....