IMPORTANT COMMUNITY UPDATE (ENHANCED EDITION)

[KlabaterCM]

Hi Pilots,

It’s Dawid here, Heliborne: Enhanced Edition Project Lead. I’m here to humbly address all the feedback you guys shared after the Enhanced Edition release. Before I go into further details, let me start with the most important message.

I and all the dev team here, we feel really sorry for making this free update not as good as You all expected. We underestimated some problems and that led us to the situation, in which a great day for the Heliborne franchise is not so great anymore - sincerely sorry for this! Yet we do not give up and we accept Your negative feedback and triple the efforts to deliver you the quality you were waiting for. Meanwhile, you asked us to restore the old version of the game, and your wish is immediately granted from now on.

For the time of Enhanced Edition patching (and there will be many patches coming soon, I promise) we fully restored the old version of the game. We will of course keep the Enhanced Edition on Steam as we need your further feedback to fix it, but we have also activated the old Heliborne on the main branch. To play Heliborne Enhanced Edition, please follow these steps:

• In the Steam client, right-click on Heliborne and select Properties
  
• Click on the BETAS tab, and from the drop-down list select "enhanced_edition" branch, then Close the window
  
• Install the game or for the best results re-install the game completely

So, just to confirm - all of you can now play the pre-Enhanced version of the game + you still get ALL THE DLCs released until now (this may take some extra time to unlock in beta Heliborne Original branch, though).

To be honest, restoring the old game was, of course, tough for us, as we really worked hard to improve the game we all love. This is what Enhanced Edition should be by definition, right? The ultimate edition of the game... That is quite obvious we didn’t fully deliver this task and we need to take a step back and re-think our design and gameplay choices. We could argue with some of your negative comments, but we can’t pretend as nothing happened. This is why we stay humble here and we promise, we will try to blend your vision with ours in upcoming days. We have already compelled a very detailed list of crucial issues in the game taken straight from your feedback, prioritized it internally, and now we work tirelessly to fix it for you!

All that being said, I have two personal requests to all of you guys:

1. I wanted to ask all of you to play Enhanced Edition branch on Steam even further and share your positive/negative feedback in this COMMUNITY FEEDBACK THREAD or Discord game’s channel [discord.gg]. Please feel free to share your comments, bugs, etc. I will personally look into that feedback and make sure to apply the direction of upcoming changes to fit at least the most important and common reports. I really do hope you will help us to fix our game.
   
2. Now, when the old version is restored, I wanted to ask you a favor. If you have negatively reviewed our game because of the update or changed your previous positive review to a negative one, I would be really, really grateful if you consider changing the reviews. We hear you and we don’t want to do anything AGAINST your wishes. On the other hand, those negative reviews may affect strongly the whole brand for a long time. And it is my strong belief that neither you nor we want to completely bury this game. We can still work together and make the game cool again.

We are now working hard to implement the rescue plan. Which is to stay true to the game’s original vision, but to improve it as well. We hear you and we are here to talk to you on Steam forums and Discord.

Thank you for your support

Dawid

[hot dog]

Originally posted by KlabaterCM:

If you have negatively reviewed our game because of the update or changed your previous positive review to a negative one, I would be really, really grateful if you consider changing the reviews.

I'll change my review, when you change the game: do you really expect anyone to honestly recommend buying this game?

It is shameful that YOU are trying to make us feel guilty for YOUR mistakes.

And it is beyond reprehensible that you are also making "veiled threats".

It appears that leaving negative reviews is the only leverage we have, because ever since Klabater bought HB, we your customers have been completely ignored here on Steam (the platform you sell the game on).

Only now that we have taken this action, are you bothering to talk to us

So NO, my review stands because it is a truthful assessment of the situation.

[❦Xeonzs🎔]

I didn't change my review to negative as a big rework like this is always rough, I'm sure you guys will have it sorted within a jiffy.
Don't worry too much about the salty players, some people are never happy with anything.

[Doktor_Plama]

I was not playing Heliborne for months, so I was kind of interested what this Enchanced Edition will be. I find it very nice that you can admit that "mistakes were made" and I don't really understand such extensive negative backlash from the community, considering the fact that for now you have reverted the unfortunate changes. But I'm really unable to wrap my mind around the fact, that you have released the new version in such state. I mean it's basically worse in every aspect than the older one, not to mention it's buggy as hell. Don't you have QA? Don't you have testers? What about the closed beta you did? It's baffling, because I think I never saw software project botched like this one.

Nonetheless, I wish you luck with recovering from this.

[PolishTank]

Originally posted by KlabaterCM:

We will of course keep the Enhanced Edition on Steam as we need the money

I fixed that sentence for you.

You're welcome.

[I-R0k]

Originally posted by KlabaterCM:

We hear you and we don’t want to do anything AGAINST you.

Like rly?? WTF??

[FC Error]

On one hand, it is good to see this. Much as the anger over the state of EE might (I stress the 'might', here) have been over-the-top, considering the game was entirely or borderline unplayable for some and certainly not 'Enhanced"...

I'll reserve further judgement until we see what shakes out of the testing/QA process. In all honesty I imagine a fair bit of the issues are fairly quick and simple fixes - I would honestly love for EE to be what it promised to be: OG Heliborne, just /more/.

Best of luck to the dev team.

[Johnno]

Dear Dawid,

If you want to ask players to change their reviews, to save face, you should at the very least be honest about this whole ordeal on the Store page, and not try to sweep it under the rug. As such I would suggest that you make it abundantly clear on the Store page that this version is still a work in progress, and by no means a finished product.

At the same time you should consider lowering the price back to $20 or whatever it was. Your company's image will suffer far more in the near future if you keep it at $30 while the enhanced edition it's priced after is in its current state.

If you genuinely believe that you can fix all the issues, and get the game to where it needs to be within a very short period of time, perhaps the price change isn't necessary, personally I suspect that it'll take longer than a few weeks, which is something you have to honestly talk about with your team. Another miscalculation on the timeframe here could be harmful.

It's great that you're honest and humble toward the existing community, but I expect that you have to do the same outward toward potential customers to save your image.

[BrainFlush]

Wanted to buy this for the longest time. Then read everything and now I have to wait again on the promise it gets fixed again. I wish the team and the players the best that it all works out because I will join you if it truly does get fixed. I hate to see games go this way...

[Bird_Dog]

Well, I am honestly surprised that you did listen and listen so quickly.

Making the old version available wile working on the new one is imo the best move to salvage the situation.

I would like to make a sugestion:
Add a seperate install with the new version you are working on.
Call it - for exaple - "Heliborne Public test server" or whatever.
That way we can both enjoy the old version for the time being and try out the new version as you keep improving it and give feedback without the hassle of havong to switch from one version to the other.

[DerJoker]

Well I havent pleyed the Game this much yet. This week i reinstalled it took me some time to get into the gamplay and all. So what can can I say I fell a bit in love with it. For noobs its hard to stand against the pvp players but coop is quiet much fun for me. I cant understand all the hate in the comments about the new patch. For such a small developers Team it is always hard to meet the expectations for their players. Well the new Hud is horrible and performance ... just dont talk about it. But they are still working on it so please dont give such harsh comments. Take a clear statement about what you like and what you dont like what has become better and what has become worse but stop these hate comments. I apreciate the work and time they put into this project and I would like to see it come to life with a big community. So support the Devs instead of flaming and hating them.

Regards :)

Sry for english Im german!

[fggfhfgdhjgdsf]

"Your client version is outdated"
looks like the old version is broken too

[KlabaterCM]

Originally posted by Outer Space 1992:

"Your client version is outdated"
looks like the old version is broken too

We re currently restarting serves in order to implement the old version with all DLCs unlocked. Please be patient, it will soon be ready

[scrontch]

First of all, hats down and respect for your apologies and recognizing your errors.
Such things can happen, although it is obviously a great waste of resources.
And thanks for putting the old game back.
I know this isn't simple, given the time you've spent working on EE.
But it was a necessary move.

That being said, i won't change my review back to positive again until EE is at least playable.

Concerning (hopefully constructive) feedback, here's my contribution:
(Preliminary stuff as i didn't even bother to enter a battle as i couldn't fix my controls setup)

* Graphics: Try to get the visuals as close as possible to the old Heliborne, as nobody ever really complained about bad graphics, did someone? The main complaints about the new visuals are summarized as follows: Overall there's an impression that the game now looks like a cheap mobile game with shiny toy helis. Remove the exaggerated reflections and highlights from helis. Dull/mate looks better! Get the explosions, smoke and water effects back to what they were. It was pretty good the way it was. Generally speaking reduce the color saturation, highlights and stuff. We are not the age group that this appeals to. Otherwise we'd play Fortnite!

* User interface: It was already horrible before to be honest. But now it's even worse.
You clearly lack competence in this department.
I wont go into details as i've already uninstalled EE, but i could provide detailed criticism for each of the game screens if you're interested.
A long demanded feature was to have filters for difficulty level so that we dont need to click through each battle to find the ones we're interested in. I don't think i have seen them?

* Get the controls setup working again! You need to put high priority on this. Users don't want to learn different controls just because the setup is broken. You won't get more feedback from these players as they'll just stop playing. It has been reported there are issues with control axis inversion, assigning Mouse to cyclic axes and on top of that it seems the setup isn't saved properly and you have to redo it every time you run the game?

[FailureToReport]

I grabbed this game back when Jetcat put it out into Steam.....I played a lot and BS'd with some of the devs in game and then shelved it waiting for it to get more finished. Then they sold it to you guys after it never got traction.

Knowing how important a brand relaunch is for a title trying to step out of the Steam shadow, why on earth would you guys release H:EE like this? Soooo many of the problems would have been brought up and made clearly visible to you guys (if somehow they weren't from your own testing) if you'd run a public beta on Enhanced Edition instead of an NDA test right into launch....

I was soooo excited to plug this Heliborne re-launch in the hopes I could pull some people into this little project that deserved to get out of taxi and take off, instead I feel like I'm right back where I was years ago wondering how long it will be before there's a good game there.

Some of the biggest gripes:

Engine Update (From what I read you ported to Unreal, I don't blame you there since it gives you a good framework on an established engine, but guys visually what you're up against vs what you're delivering here is real rough. I'm not saying you need to be DCS levels of graphics, but I have every setting on max and it almost looks on par with some mobile games.

New Mechanics : What are they? You should probably break down the entire change log from Old Heliborne to what Enhanced Edition has changed, because after jumping on for most of the day yesterday to prep for streaming this, it feels like the exact same game but with new bugs and UI.

"Empowered Multiplayer" : I have no idea what that means.....I would bet 90% of people don't.

Updated User Interface : This was probably the biggest disappointment of the new version , not that it "is worse than the old one", they were both bad, but this was your chance to make some sweeping improvements such as -

1. Letting lobbies continue after a match so that the host could select a new mission without everyone having to drop and go their separate ways

2. Making ship loadouts and research more clear and intuitive. The current setup is incredibly clunky compared to your competition (everyone knows this game gets compared to War Thunder / World of Tanks)

3. Server Filters , Server Sorting, Server Creation, all of these things could have been DRASTICALLY improved - instead it feels like the same terrible system with a new front end.




I really hope you guys manage to turn this around. I was really hoping to see a lot of cool new things in Enhanced Edition, instead I feel like I'm playing the same game I was before but with new bugs like weapons not hitting where I'm aiming, Manpad missiels exploding in a bubble bath on my helicopter, the same terrible damage state/representation, no new helicopter mechanics (improved scout helo system please?), nothing new to co-op , like how about more dynamic matches or giving an option to add enemy Helos as a toggle (since for some reason it seems some people just want to seal club infantry and light vehicles)


I don't know why anyone over there at your office thought this build was good to relaunch your new brand, but I hope in the future you slow down and involve the community that was so passionate about this game and seeing it become something bigger.

[[218.]TheLonelyWolf[GER]]

Good to see responses from the dev-team.
But why not revert the game to the original version and put the Enhanced Edition(EE) in the Beta-Tab?
So those who are interested in playing the EE can switch to that branch?

New customers will probably be salty (and leave negative reviews) because the EE is extremely-unpolished.

I liked Heliborne before and i will play EE if it is more playable