Ursprünglich geschrieben von Solitude:

if you are cooking up some other form of singleplayer content, you shoud've included it in the announcement.

Agree, but If you would have waited with announcement until you got something else to show, the community would have had some idea due to testers saying something or whatever. It would have been better PR wise, but less transparent (which I prefer ofc). So I understand the decison

Above the rest of the opinions, I want to highlight the transparency and recognition of the failure compared to many other developers who ignore the issue, or triple A games that simply rip off 70€ a year for adding one or two mechanics to the same game they realeased the previous year

I only got this game for this...

Appreciate your clear communication on this tough choice and no doubt it'll be a major disappointment to players who were invested in the idea of a campaign mode.

That being said I'm looking forward to carriers bigly! and I'm also interested to see how you redirect development to give more battle-to-battle value in lieu of a full campaign.; (I do hope some version of the track-analysis can be involved in this, as that was just so damn cool.

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Routs:

Above the rest of the opinions, I want to highlight the transparency and recognition of the failure compared to many other developers who ignore the issue, or triple A games that simply rip off 70€ a year for adding one or two mechanics to the same game they realeased the previous year

This tbh. The balls it has to take as a dev to stand up and say "I'm not going to deliver a ♥♥♥♥ product" even while sinking a lot of time into it is pretty based ngl.


At least for me, I hope the singleplayer experience WITHIN the current skirmish gamemode is improved with better AI and maybe some reworked gamemodes. Especially when conquest won't be eating up all of the dev's time.

I'm not a developer, but i believe that this was a good choice. Even the artist must hold close his creative vision, lest he lose it. The people here, saying that Conquest was the only reason they bought this game, have no right to complain. This game was and still is clearly marked as in active development, and ultimately do not have the final say in what the game will be.

Thank you for being clear and upfront with us.

I look forward to what's next!

These singleplayer people are crazy. The PvP mode is perfectly acceptable and great. It needs more factions, ships, and a handful of weapons to level out the balance. There doesn't need to be many changes that would make taping conquest back in, and conquest needs the variety of what PvP needs. The obsession of making skirmish battles matter has been a waste of time since the start of conquest. It should be an afterthought. New players shouldn't complain about being unable to understand the skirmish meta because the game is hard to understand, so you need to just copy/paste a fleet and give it time to understand human players. I see great potential in making a slower simulation time posssible for many more ships in a LotGs kinda awesome space opera sense, but that can come later after multiplayer is getting along well. At the moment it is not doing so well because of the narrow variety leading to OSP spam fleet domination.

I only bought this for the singleplayer content that was promised. The game is dead to me if the campaign is not coming.

Will the "single player" icon on steam be removed? It would be fair.

Nebulous has probably been the only game of which I've "followed" its development, I've always found it interesting learning about the problems you've faced and how you've got around them. Of course, I was really excited about Conquest, and of course, I'm sad to see it go, but I'm also going to assume it is a lot more complicated than my less-than-basic knowledge of game design thinks it would be.

But I don't think that a move from large-scale moving of fleets is specifically a bad thing. I'm now imagining more of a zoomed-in focus on one specific fleet, maybe with an adaption of the crew system to flesh out the stories of each individual ship, (so instead of just flag officers, we can learn about ensign Jenkins and his friends on a damage control team. you know, like a star trek- lower decks vibe) Then each loss of a ship isn't just "Oh no! My ships gone boom!" It's watching the ANS-All That Ends Well, explode whilst your stomach sinks somewhere below where you are sitting, hoping that Ensign Jenkins was on one of the three lifeboats you saw launch because you just know that Captain Hayden has gone down with her ship.

Having a more personal focus could be a boon, rather than a Loss, I still believe. Besides I'm one of those idiots who have played for hours and never touched multiplayer, I just sit there, designing, deleting, and then accidentally redesigning the same ships only to watch them get annihilated again because I really should have kept them next to that asteroid. I just love how this game plays to my imagination of a ship and its crew. Looking forward to seeing how this goes!

P.S: Soooo looking forward to carriers, i can't wait!

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Guffrus:

The tactical game is broken garbage (you even said it yourself but you unfortunately you don't actually understand your own words - it is highly tuned and only works within a narrow set of parameters, right, that's because it's broken garbage; you ran with your first idea and then cobbled that together into something that appeared to work on the surface) you can't tell because your loyalty is to your 'player base' i.e. to your clueless discord echo chamber.

Your loyalty is not supposed to be to the player base, it is to THE GAME.

You should certainly listen to players but your job is to understand why they are saying what they are saying and use that knowledge to shape the game to the best of your ability.

You also cut yourself off from getting any help because anyone who thinks outside the current paradigm isn't welcome in the discord.

This so much. 4X games with open breadth take a long time to develop, then there are AI quirks until the end of time. The tactical game shines in multiplayer. With variety then people wouldn't feel so bad putting a fleet together and getting into a match. It's like MW2, if everything is kinda high damage, then no matter what you pick you will have fun. Dev is obsessed with taking out multiplayer before it is even finished and could be left alone.

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Raw:

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Kyo21943:

There's gonna be plenty of comments regarding the game's direction and conquest/campaign promises, but i got a different bone to pick so i'm just gonna point it out and say that the "we got players with 1K hours in the game" i've seen you mention multiple times is not the argument you think it is, and matter of fact, is detrimental.

Every SINGLE game in existance has a select few in their community that are utterly obsessed with the game, having people whose playtime goes in the thousands of hours is nothing special in the *slightest*, even more so for multiplayer games where the experience can be prolonged thanks to their intrinsic nature, heck, even i have 1K hours in two games and i've seen multiplayer mobile games where people go into the 3K hours, lol.

So that whole thing is not only not worth mentioning, but the fact that you've made and continue to make a game that appeals to a smaller potential demographic while ignoring the huge amount of people which have only expressed interest in the project because of it's gameplay mechanics IN singleplayer modes, is the perfect way to kill your own game in the long term, and that's exactly where your "some people like our game enough to play 1k hours of it" factors in.

Did it ever cross your mind the experience of your average new player who, even if they were interested in the multiplayer skirmish, would just encounter players who have been playing for years in a COMPETIVE setting?
Do you understand that PvP games tend to match players based on their playtime and statistical rank for a reason? Or do you believe that simply being "fun casual skirmishes" suddenly makes it alright for the 1500 hour player to play against the guy using default fleets which they dont even undestand how to use?
And on top of that saying "just go to discord and ask questions, people are friendly there!" is a real solution to that issue? Seriously?

You've successfully made a game which appeals to it's currently existing multiplayer audience and only that, you've utterly disillusioned the crowd interested in singleplayer campaign/conquest and basically "gatekeeped" your influx of new multiplayer blood by making a complex niche game with no REAL way to ease new players into the difficulty spike and then stacked them against the most loyal and experienced players which will never drop the game, and worse still, this will only become more pronounced by each passing year.

Conquest not only had a larger amount of potential players than you make it out to be, but it could've also been one of the best ways you had to inject new life into an otherwise "multiplayer only" game through a less hostile introduction.

This unironically has the makings of a so called """dead game""" in a couple years but i guess that's fine, because i bet you'll argue that "we got players with 4K hours! See? Some people just love it that much! Just ask in the discord and someone may wanna play!"
Maybe by that time your "new vision" for conquest will be in it's testing phase, and whether it was too little or too late will be a problem for that future.

I will tell you as someone who was testing conquest that it was not some perfect wholesome little way to on board people on to the game. I saw the makings of what killed Foxhole for me the complexity of the facility system. Foxhole used to be a game with a large number of relatively simple systems that interacted in interesting ways. With the facility system, the logistics became a massive complex headache. Conquest was a mess of systems that usually produced boring one-sided fights with a few moments of brilliance. I believe whatever Mazer comes up with to replace it will probably serve that purpose better.

Interesting take. I too was involved in conquest testing but my main worries was the sheer number of bugs were were uncovering. Shelving conquest for the time being, working on more feasible additions and then coming back with a new and improved redesign later down the line is much better imo then leaving people in the dark for multiple years then coming out with something that is okay at best. I wish the developer all the best for the future, his mental health comes first and as he ain't even working on the game full time (he has a career outside of games), it's perfectly understandable.

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Kyo21943:

There's gonna be plenty of comments regarding the game's direction and conquest/campaign promises, but i got a different bone to pick so i'm just gonna point it out and say that the "we got players with 1K hours in the game" i've seen you mention multiple times is not the argument you think it is, and matter of fact, is detrimental.

Every SINGLE game in existance has a select few in their community that are utterly obsessed with the game, having people whose playtime goes in the thousands of hours is nothing special in the *slightest*, even more so for multiplayer games where the experience can be prolonged thanks to their intrinsic nature, heck, even i have 1K hours in two games and i've seen multiplayer mobile games where people go into the 3K hours, lol.

So that whole thing is not only not worth mentioning, but the fact that you've made and continue to make a game that appeals to a smaller potential demographic while ignoring the huge amount of people which have only expressed interest in the project because of it's gameplay mechanics IN singleplayer modes, is the perfect way to kill your own game in the long term, and that's exactly where your "some people like our game enough to play 1k hours of it" factors in.

Did it ever cross your mind the experience of your average new player who, even if they were interested in the multiplayer skirmish, would just encounter players who have been playing for years in a COMPETIVE setting?
Do you understand that PvP games tend to match players based on their playtime and statistical rank for a reason? Or do you believe that simply being "fun casual skirmishes" suddenly makes it alright for the 1500 hour player to play against the guy using default fleets which they dont even undestand how to use?
And on top of that saying "just go to discord and ask questions, people are friendly there!" is a real solution to that issue? Seriously?

You've successfully made a game which appeals to it's currently existing multiplayer audience and only that, you've utterly disillusioned the crowd interested in singleplayer campaign/conquest and basically "gatekeeped" your influx of new multiplayer blood by making a complex niche game with no REAL way to ease new players into the difficulty spike and then stacked them against the most loyal and experienced players which will never drop the game, and worse still, this will only become more pronounced by each passing year.

Conquest not only had a larger amount of potential players than you make it out to be, but it could've also been one of the best ways you had to inject new life into an otherwise "multiplayer only" game through a less hostile introduction.

This unironically has the makings of a so called """dead game""" in a couple years but i guess that's fine, because i bet you'll argue that "we got players with 4K hours! See? Some people just love it that much! Just ask in the discord and someone may wanna play!"
Maybe by that time your "new vision" for conquest will be in it's testing phase, and whether it was too little or too late will be a problem for that future.

Exactly. Since I have thousands of hours in other multiplayers games, I witnessed everything as you said. It is a shame.

I guess, I had to wait for some game designer who can actually do what he promissed: great tactical and strategic combat.

This is actually very disapointing and frustrating. I had recommended this game at every opportunity I got (and not, I don´t have 1k hours of playing it, I pretty much only play single player and was expecting the strategic layer to really get back at playing it) and mentioned the promissed campaing feature, both to friends and game channels I followed. It is a shame.

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Maladict:

Will the "single player" icon on steam be removed? It would be fair.

It's still coming, just in a different form. If your concern is that “the game won't have singleplayer content” you are fretting over nothing

Disastrous update for me, I bought the game for the campaign mode.
I was excepting something like Highfleet.