In Defense of This Game

[Arte]

So, I have a ton of hours on this game, this is because I'm a pretty early adopter of it. I sometimes check the store for the game to see if any similar games are linked on it: I like this kind of game after all. I was surprised to find that the reviews exploded to overwhelming negative. Reading through the reviews I saw they were recent, that they were related to the new update and about needing to go to a Chinese website and give your credentials there.

I have played this game once or twice after the update, I also saw the Chinese website for mods and never bothered with it but my reason may be kind of different. My main reason was that I've scoured tons of other Chinese websites incidentally -long before this- with relation to this game and the mods were similar. Further I had no interest in those mods and worried that they would break my game saves, since they were meant for a Chinese game.

This brings me to my defense; despite the localization this is a Chinese game, the developers are a small team and as a small time developer I can say that information is a limited resource. I can absolutely understand the reluctance and even aggressive sentiment towards using Chinese sources. China is after-all notorious for nationalizing, and being subversively belligerent towards foreigners. This means your number, and your Steam info and so on will not have Valve and the well, principles of freedom and the assumptions therein protecting you...

Here's the thing, I don't think the developers could have seen this reaction coming because up until now these mods had all been distributed through these Chinese sites to begin with, all they did was make it one site that was translate to English.

That's the benefit of the doubt right there. The caveat is that those other Chinese sites don't ask for this information, or rather if they do they do it through a third party, which is avoidable if you know what to click.

Game Dev is hard work, indi-Game Dev is ultra hard work, and solo-Game Dev is Desolate mode. As a solo game Dev it's easy for me to see and appreciate the mistake they made here. I understand what could have caused it and it sucks so many people rated it down, it's still a good game.

Anyway, that's my defense.

[Valeriya]

There is nothing to forgive when trying to force by asking for the private personal data of users through sites that belong to other third-party companies with the risk of ending up in who knows what hands. We know well how China works that its citizens are all tracked, but this is absolutely not acceptable in democratic countries and violates many regulations.
What is the reason for asking for private user data?
Whether you like the game or the mods is a speech that doesn't make any sense with the end and this sh.it should be eliminated from Steam forever!

[Arte]

Originally posted by 𝓑𝓵𝓾𝓮𝓫𝓲𝓻𝓭:

...

As I said, I appreciate that reaction, my thing is these guys could very likely have never considered that. They again are a small team and a Chinese one at that. They want their game to continue to be popular and may have taken the easy way instead of the right way.

It's also possible there is some forbidden fruit stuff going on here where the CCP 3rd party may have just offered a sweetheart deal and they took it. But part of my defense comes from their response which was that Valve takes time to integrate Workshop into their game. Further that they were developing the UI for that.

UX is very important and UI is tough to develop, again I solo dev and most times my UI looks bland. I'm too busy focusing on character controllers and other systems to worry about UI because that alone is a behemoth.

It's just sad to me to see this game get hit this hard off of what most likely was the result of ignorance.

[moonfeast]

they have 29 people working on mobile version, and less than 10 working on this pc version, i can hardly call this a small team, obviously they have some kind of deal with the third party website, and one of the clause that made people so angry is that once mods are uploaded it no longer belongs to the modders, so the website and devs can do anything with the mod (most likely to incorporate the mod into their mobile version as well and claim it as theirs).
If you think the above is not enough to see how scummy the devs are then you probably wont understand why so many players and modders are angry.
Also , Many chinese games on steam have steam workshop function, again no excuse for using a third party site

[prusswan]

Modding is optional, the only people who would have issue are people trying to sell private or elicit mods, when the developer take clear actions to stop them. I didn't see any real modders complaining, just a whole lot of people spamming because they want to get free refunds (even after getting 100+ hrs playtime), or maybe they are trying to drive traffic to competing games. A few of the accounts have been dormant until this incident, they don't even post in other games, so pretty much they have been organized to stage a Russian protest.

[Vainz]

you ever wonder why western company always get away with sh1t over them again and again ? well people like op is the answer, with mindset I LIKE THIS GAME SO I CAN EAT SH1T IF THE GAME GAVE IT TO ME.

[bunny de fluff]

One of the fundamental difference is that, westerners don't usually buy a game just because it was made by their fellow countrymen. Chinese would do that, they would buy a game because it was a China made product so to speak. By betraying the trust of these gamers, the devs was also betraying their love towards their country, to an extend. They were not asking the devs to make the world's best game ever, nothing like that. They were asking for what was promised. The devs chose to become the lowest of the low, the shameless scum of gaming industry. This is still a good game, to a lot of people including you op, but you have to understand that this is something related to the principle of Chinese people. Chinese do not like to be lied to ,or to be used and then discarded, actually no one does, but in this specific case, especially by own Chinese people. The devs are bad devs in general, but more importantly they are untrustworthy Chinese traitors, the nationality factor is important here. I saw a lot of people bought the game because it made in China, this was reflected in their reviews, telling the devs to not be so arrogant because his game actually sucks. They tried to put the scamming liar back in his place. But guess what, workshop is happening at the end of this month!

[qinlongfei]

The dev knows, or at least should know exactly what they are doing. Because Chinese community have been consistently given them feedbacks on steam forum. And they been consistently ignoring this community in favor of their own self managed echo chamber... allegedly. I didn't go on their own sites to confirm this.

But as I highlighted in a previous topic, this workshop isn't the only debacle with this game. The game has been having a series of debacles all the way back since the first 'major' (debatable, since they mostly just add more grinds to the game) update. I posted, once again, in another topic detailing all the ones I personally witnessed on this forum, as a lurker.

Here's re-post of my original post:

"

Do take note, that none of the debacles I listed here (probably not in chronological order... since I don't visit this forum a lot) can actually count as some kind of scam. They are mostly just dev team not doing a good job at updating their games, and communicate with the community. So the frustration has been slowly building up within this community till this time, where they flat out did something shady.

Anyways, when this game was first published it got glowing reception from Chinese community, since it does have a good foundation to build a game. And there isn't a lot of Chinese XianXia games that's actually based on the more ancient mythology of real Chinese culture (most of them are based on web novels).

People first get annoyed at Zhang San's attempt at 'balancing' a single player, non-competitive game. Which is a nicer way of saying he mass nerf'ed a lot of meta-builds people have been playing, making these nonviable for high level plays. But the first debacle within the community (I'm aware of) is what's know as the 'Wind Sword' build.

Basically, it's a completely broken build where wind dodge move makes you completely invincible, have 0 second cool down, and you can still use your attack moves while invincible. Unlike the other nerf'ed meta build, this is obviously broken to the point of cheating. But this was the build the dev team reinstated into the game, compared to the other meta build that actually requires some skill to pull off.

The next few debacles that got community more than annoyed was the first two major content update. The first one opened up two more stages of cultivation, and the second opened up the feature of the magical artifacts. People were hoping for them being something different than the base game, which is just a hamster wheel of grinding for more stats, and turns out they aren't and they were released full of bugs, which caused a lot of players to complain about them in the forum.

I think at this point was the English localisation debacle happened, where a number of players got angry at the dev team prioritised English localisation so they can sell the game to more people over completing their game and keep the early adopters happy.

At this point, Ghost Valley Eight Wasteland (the game's original Chinese title, by the way) has pretty much missed most, if not all their original roadmap milestone. Especially the last two stages of cultivation Metamorphosis and Ascension (The actual English translation might be different... since I didn't bother to check what's the official English translation) stages which still isn't in the game now, and is pretty much one year behind their original milestone at this point.

The reason dev team gave for postponing the update is how they want the extra time to polish their major update. Which is fair enough... if the postponed updates were actually polished (which they aren't). All the major updates pushed out by dev team are still buggy and unbalanced, after they changed their monthly major update to pretty much 'whenever I feel like it' update.

The major update that really made people's opinion towards the game itself fall off the cliff was the Sect/Heaven's Chosen major update. The update is once again, buggy and unbalanced (pretty much as all their major update by this point), but Heaven's Chosen are what made most people flipping their tables. Basically, they are randomly generated NPCs with a stronger modifier that makes them stronger than most other NPCs. Probably to emulate the elites of different cultivation sects from the novels (since most RNG'ed NPCs don't advance their cultivation stage with best items, they would eventually get outclassed by the players).

Not a bad idea in concept, but people hated how they are implemented. Somebody, who probably got curbstomped by Heaven's Chosen too many times went through the NPC's character event log to see how they are strong, and discovered they randomly have events that permanently boost their ATK rating for no reason. Something the players can't do they themselves. Which ends up frustrating all the legit players who have been putting in the actual hours grinding at the hamster wheel, causing them to complain about how Zhang San gave up 'balancing' this game for legit players all together (despite his team nerfing most earlier meta build and quoting the reason as game balancing) and just balanced it for people who cheat with a trainer.

And Honorable mention, which technically isn't something bad the dev team did. Sometime around major update 2 or 3 (I forgot which one exactly), a topic was created where an alleged female player didn't like how most male characters are covered up in clothes, while most female characters are either scantly dressed, or have disproportionately huge chests and accused the dev team of misogyny.

Needless to say, she got relentlessly mocked by the community since this game really isn't that bad in this regard compared to a lot of free to pay Chinese browser/phone games. At this point she pretty much had a complete meltdown, and edited her original post to contain a lot of downright misandry remarks about how male gender is inferior to female gender. So for a good while, most discussion within the forum is derailed from talking about the actual game to having a flame war between genders.

Obviously, this isn't the fault of the dev team. But through out the whole debacle the dev team was completely silent (as always) on the forum, which clearly shown they didn't cared one bit about actually managing a steam community to keep it healthy, and they only went on steam to sell more copies of their game. Which is fine, but it certainly doesn't cultivate them good will.

Which, of course, lead to the current workshop debacle where Zhang Sang actually did shady things and failed to fulfil their workshop update milestone promise. While it would still be shaddy, if he didn't drop the ball on every major update so far it probably wouldn't have blow up as big as it is now.

So yeah, that's all the debacles I have so far personally witnessed myself.

"

[qinlongfei]

I love to troll No Man's Sky fandom by calling their game 'One Man's Lie', but in a way, this game is the true 'one man's lie'. Consider it pretty much had the polar opposite story arc as No Man's Sky release. Overwhelmingly well received by the community at the start, but its reputation slowly and progressively went down the gutter with consistent (bad) updates.

[Arte]

Honestly No Man's Sky wasn't bad at launch in the context of Elite Dangerous and other similar games.

No Man's Sky problem was that they didn't caveat the release with "Early Access" or basically noting that the game is a long term project. Similar with what ED did and Star Citizen. In reality No Man Sky on release had no more or no less than ED did on release.

It's debatable now if NMS vs ED which provided a more interesting space game experience. I'd say NMS is better and always has been better within any time period when directly compared to ED of that time period. But ED tries to be a simulator first game second I think.

Regardless this game has it's problems, I have my own issues with some of the back end coding they've done which is why I've haven't played this in a while, I used to like messing with fates but they changed how that works so it's difficult to edit them now.

The Modding of fates is nice now and I was hoping it would get me back into it, but it's kind of lacking some of the interesting combinations I was making for myself before.

If you feel it's the devs that screwed a good game fine. But I still think this was a good game and I'd like to see others explore this genre more in the west.

[Nsan]

Originally posted by Arte:

No Man's Sky problem was that they didn't caveat the release with "Early Access" or basically noting that the game is a long term project.

No ... the dev just lied about features that should have been in the game from start like multiplayer.

[Sayla Massochist]

Originally posted by Nsan:

Originally posted by Arte:

No Man's Sky problem was that they didn't caveat the release with "Early Access" or basically noting that the game is a long term project.

No ... the dev just lied about features that should have been in the game from start like multiplayer.

This is the last game that needs multiplayer of any sort.

[Arte]

Originally posted by Nsan:

Originally posted by Arte:

No Man's Sky problem was that they didn't caveat the release with "Early Access" or basically noting that the game is a long term project.

No ... the dev just lied about features that should have been in the game from start like multiplayer.

That is besides the point I was making, you are making a valid but entirely unrelated point.

There I was drawing direct comparisons between similar games.

[qinlongfei]

@Arte

If you think this game is good and genuinely had fun with it, that's great. Just because a game is objectively bad doesn't mean one can't have fun. Or if a game is objectively good, doesn't mean a player can have fun.

An example I give for myself personally is always Fallout New Vegas VS Fallout 4. Fallout 4 is barely a finished game (I liked to joke that Skyrim is an unfinished game, Fallout 4 was a barely developed game), but it's easily my favorite Fallout title to play.

On the other hand, Fallout New Vegas, a much more finished game is my least favorite new style Fallout... and the old Black Isle titles comes after New Vegas. These two are the genuinely some of the most forgettable experience I had playing video games.