Lying and arrogance

[Yourinnertrollvoice]

Dear Backer Dear buyer of the game. Have you ever wondered why this game is so bad?

I am convinced that otherside funds from the Kickstarter project have been used to work on System shock 3. Quite simple example .... How can it be that a game like outward comes out with the same engine is even more complex and runs much better what comes from a team of 10 people? Otherside is a team full of veteran developers. They had almost a million dollars together. Certainly more then the developers of outward and yet they have failed. Take a look at the trailers on underworld-ascendant. All trailers look like an inexperienced team of 14 year old kids. Nothing looked promising.

Check out the trailer of System shock 3. This is not a world wonder but far better than what we were offered before.

I'm convinced these developers have more or less stolen money from us to finance their other project.

Of course I love the old thief series and I know that it was this team that developed thief. But that was years ago and people are changing. These people are nothing but liars and arrogant spinners.

Did you see the interview when one of these guys said that without any problems they get such a project, despite the fact that they are so small because they are so experienced in the development of games? I hate this man. He is a perfect example of a person who gets to much money and can't do s.it because he is a useless person who have nothing more of empty words to say.

[DrBunsen]

Flarechess joined OS around a year ago IIRC and so probably didn't know everything that went on prior to that, and is now having to field the public and backers on behalf of the management in hiding.

I don't blame him for anything. He is the poor guy having to manage all the hate UA receives. Sorry man, and thank you for doing this.

[B166ER]

Originally posted by DrBunsen:

Flarechess joined OS around a year ago IIRC and so probably didn't know everything that went on prior to that, and is now having to field the public and backers on behalf of the management in hiding.

I don't blame him for anything. He is the poor guy having to manage all the hate UA receives. Sorry man, and thank you for doing this.

Thank him for what: PR-gibberish, avoiding conversations with critical customers and trying to spin the sorry state of the game as an unavoidable result of the star constellations during development?

When was the last time you thanked your waiter/hairdresser/postman/cashier etc. for doing their job?

[Flare]

At least I'm still here.

Yes, it's my job to talk to the community and relay how people are feeling about the game to the developers, and then to communicate the work on the game to the community. I don't want to be your enemy, and even if it would be too much for you to be my "friend," I am supposed to be "working for you" too. I advocate for the community to the developers, and then from the developers to the community. I'm the one who processes all of the community bugs to the development team, helps write the build notes, answers and adjusts all of the backer information and orders and writes up the newsletters. The idea is to keep you all informed and in the loop.

It's true that I haven't been around since the beginning. I joined in late August of 2017, 2 full years after the KS had already funded, and just a year before we would ultimately launch. I didn't even know the full extent of the KS rewards until I started working through our commitments, coordinating rewards, and making sure the team was working on those while fleshing out the game.

We have admitted that mismanagement was one of the many large factors that damaged UA's development. We lost sight of the vision of the game, which made it hard to tie all of our components together as individuals worked on entire systems. The BioWare article that recently came out jumps to mind. The team that launched UA in November 2018 only has some of the same people that started the KS in 2015. This is all on top of a dwindling budget and we started to crunch about two months before launch.

Not everyone had the same information, and a lot of this "deception" manifested due to scoping down based on budget, general mismanagement, a confusing production pipeline, and many other factors. We've improved a lot since launch with new production strategies (thank you, Rich) and we've had the opportunity to work on updates that align reasonably closer with the original vision for UA, with scope and budget still in mind.

[Chief Redpill]

In other words, LGS all over again. Some neat titles were achieved, not all titles were good or were completed to publish, but the end result looks to be the same: Floodgate 2 and Mo-Pets 2.

[Nyast]

Funny how you linked to the Anthem horror story and how they played around for almost 5 years before taking firm decisions and entering full production. Now what other company did take many year playing around with physics and innovative game concepts, just to abandon them all and do a rush job just to get a product release cause the deadline was coming and the money was running out ? Hmm, somehow that does ring a bell, not sure why.

[Cat of Darkness]

Originally posted by Nyast:

Funny how you linked to the Anthem horror story and how they played around for almost 5 years before taking firm decisions and entering full production. Now what other company did take many year playing around with physics and innovative game concepts, just to abandon them all and do a rush job just to get a product release cause the deadline was coming and the money was running out ? Hmm, somehow that does ring a bell, not sure why.

Nothing about UA is innovative. Every element in the game has already been done, and done better include the physics and fire propagation. In many ways it's actually regressed (storytelling, save system, rpg elements ect.)

[Cat of Darkness]

Originally posted by Flarechess:

At least I'm still here.

Yes, it's my job to talk to the community and relay how people are feeling about the game to the developers, and then to communicate the work on the game to the community. I don't want to be your enemy, and even if it would be too much for you to be my "friend," I am supposed to be "working for you" too. I advocate for the community to the developers, and then from the developers to the community. I'm the one who processes all of the community bugs to the development team, helps write the build notes, answers and adjusts all of the backer information and orders and writes up the newsletters. The idea is to keep you all informed and in the loop.

It's true that I haven't been around since the beginning. I joined in late August of 2017, 2 full years after the KS had already funded, and just a year before we would ultimately launch. I didn't even know the full extent of the KS rewards until I started working through our commitments, coordinating rewards, and making sure the team was working on those while fleshing out the game.

We have admitted that mismanagement was one of the many large factors that damaged UA's development. We lost sight of the vision of the game, which made it hard to tie all of our components together as individuals worked on entire systems. The BioWare article that recently came out jumps to mind. The team that launched UA in November 2018 only has some of the same people that started the KS in 2015. This is all on top of a dwindling budget and we started to crunch about two months before launch.

Not everyone had the same information, and a lot of this "deception" manifested due to scoping down based on budget, general mismanagement, a confusing production pipeline, and many other factors. We've improved a lot since launch with new production strategies (thank you, Rich) and we've had the opportunity to work on updates that align reasonably closer with the original vision for UA, with scope and budget still in mind.

All you've given us is obvious PR speak. You always dodge the real questions either ignoring them or giving non answers. You STILL haven't properly explained why UA didn't launch in early access past non answers like "we weren't aware we needed to" and "we needed to release it immediately which are both completely BS answers to the question.

[Flare]

Originally posted by Collision:

All you've given us is obvious PR speak. You always dodge the real questions either ignoring them or giving non answers. You STILL haven't properly explained why UA didn't launch in early access past non answers like "we weren't aware we needed to" and "we needed to release it immediately which are both completely BS answers to the question.

Maybe I need to bold those sections / only answer one thing at a time.

We had a deadline of November. If we didn't launch in November, we would not launch at all.
There were miscommunications between the various levels when we signed off that made multiple groups believe that Early Access was not possible / not an option and that the game was ready.

[Cat of Darkness]

Originally posted by Flarechess:

Originally posted by Collision:

All you've given us is obvious PR speak. You always dodge the real questions either ignoring them or giving non answers. You STILL haven't properly explained why UA didn't launch in early access past non answers like "we weren't aware we needed to" and "we needed to release it immediately which are both completely BS answers to the question.

Maybe I need to bold those sections / only answer one thing at a time.

We had a deadline of November. If we didn't launch in November, we would not launch at all.
There were miscommunications between the various levels when we signed off that made multiple groups believe that Early Access was not possible / not an option and that the game was ready.

And again as I said the last time you said that: that's total BS and a non-answer and also contradictory. If you believed that it was November or nothing you could have still launched it EA. In fact, that would have been better than a normal launch because it would allow you to secure even more funding while being honest about the state of the game to your customer base. Theres no situation in which EA is not possible and if you were really worried about November or nothing than EA would have given you extra time. And how is it that you aware of the miscommunication within two weeks of launch but not before hand. What you're saying doesn't follow any normal rationale and it's hard to believe.

[Flare]

Originally posted by Collision:

Originally posted by Flarechess:

We had a deadline of November. If we didn't launch in November, we would not launch at all.
There were miscommunications between the various levels when we signed off that made multiple groups believe that Early Access was not possible / not an option and that the game was ready.

There's no situation in which EA is not possible and if you were really worried about November or nothing than EA would have given you extra time. And how is it that you aware of the miscommunication within two weeks of launch but not before hand?

I've given you an answer but you seem to not trust it because you're dead-set convinced that EA was a viable answer. I'm not even denying that EA would have worked better for us on launch, if we had the option.

We didn't think we had that option.

Again: we had a deadline and a contract that we had already extended from October and were already working on our own funds to finance past that date.

[Nyast]

Well, since you're there Flarechess, you might as well answer my big question: how come you guys seemed to be so convinced the game was ready, when 99% of the feedback from your testers / backers was negative and implored you to delay ? There's a serious contradiction here. There's no way you could not have known. I was on the forums that time. I saw very few positive comments, and even your best defenders were basically in "wait & see & cross our fingers that they've been holding back on a big secret build" mode.

[Chief Redpill]

As Flarechess explained elsewhere, it was either release in November or not at all, probably by demands of their publisher 505 Games.

Which I think seems a suspicious reason given the post-release updates and the upcoming console release(s).

[Cat of Darkness]

Originally posted by Flarechess:

Originally posted by Collision:

There's no situation in which EA is not possible and if you were really worried about November or nothing than EA would have given you extra time. And how is it that you aware of the miscommunication within two weeks of launch but not before hand?

I've given you an answer but you seem to not trust it because you're dead-set convinced that EA was a viable answer. I'm not even denying that EA would have worked better for us on launch, if we had the option.

We didn't think we had that option.

Again: we had a deadline and a contract that we had already extended from October and were already working on our own funds to finance past that date.

Did you not even bother to approach your contract holder with the option of early access? Why wasn't EA considered from the start or even at the point where you started to realize youd be paying out of pocket? And how did the miscommunication happen when people were very vocal about the games problem during the backers beta. This stuff just seems so head scratchingly obvious, it hard to believe things worked out the way you claim they did.

[Chief Redpill]

Originally posted by Collision:

Did you not even bother to approach your contract holder with the option of early access? And how did the miscommunication happen when people were very vocal about the games problem during the backers beta. This stuff just seems so head scratchingly obvious, it hard to believe things worked out the way you claim they did.

Keeping the KS backers appraised of the situation would have softened the public's expectations by a great deal, who without warning had been expecting the title to have been as advertised. It would have turned a NOPE into a "wait and see, it could improve" without the mad dash to patch up the holes in the hull before another ship sinks.

But then again, most developers figure backers as free money despite KS often being more like a loan against the sales those people would have bought along with the word-of-mouth they would have promoted to others, and this regard for that source of funding didn't just take a back seat - it was tied to the bumper.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HbBL62IiRE

[Nyast]

Originally posted by l'Original:

As Flarechess explained elsewhere, it was either release in November or not at all, probably by demands of their publisher 505 Games.

Which I think seems a suspicious reason given the post-release updates and the upcoming console release(s).

That's a separate issue. They could've admitted that they ran out of money and had to launch the game in the state it was, explaining that it'd be in a poor state but they'd improve it along the way.

But this is not what happened. If you listen to Flarechess's explanations, they weren't aware of the poor state of the game. Doesn't matter if it was scheduled to release in a month or 6.. they were convinced the game was in a good state, despite their entire forums telling them otherwise ! This is the contradiction I'm speaking about, and that needs explanations.