The game being in beta has nothing to do with the direction it took. The game being in beta isn't an excuse for Helius to have such poor communication skills. The game being in beta isn't an excuse to cut off single-player and solo modes in attempt to stop cracked versions of the game popping up despite all the feedback of actual supporters being against it, like seriously, have you read the messages in Discord/Steam Forums? It's not surprising that people that have been keeping an eye on this game are disappointed and/or see it as Helius just trying to make a quick buck at this point, especially when he has said things in the past like being interested in making mobile versions of the game, going live-service, and the gacha-esque mechanics the game already has going. There's also the fact that Helius is making all these changes without so much as giving a quick heads up in official messages for supporters that aren't reading messages in the Discord server 24/7, y'know, so that they can cancel their support if they disagree with the new direction the game is going.
Like I mentioned a few messages back, I had to find out the game is now online only by looking through old Discord messages within the last few months, there was no Patreon posts, no pinned posts, no announcements, just nothing by Helius stating this in an easy to find manner for older supporters to keep up to date with everything. There was nothing that suggested the game would go this direction when I originally supported, yet here we are.
It's one thing if you're fine with the way the game is proceeding, but don't make excuses for Helius, especially when you can see other devs(some even on this site) actually making an attempt to keep supporters in the loop. Speaking of which, apparently Helius has a habit of making announcements for upcoming progress reports in free public channels but locks the progress reports behind paid Patreon posts. So if you've supported the game but have since cancelled your Patreon membership, you're just out of luck and blind as far as knowing what they're actually working on, or at least that would be the case if other supporters didn't post the progress reports in public channels for others to see for free.
Do you intend to actually reply to the content of my post or just take it out of context for an agenda?
This game is so disappointing. So much potential and the developers just seem to want to drag it out to make a quick buck.
Exhibit A of person not understanding what a alpha/beta is. Meanwhile, probably doesn't realize games typically take 4-10 years to develop even for AAA studios.
Their response was about the rebuild taking time and being, effectively, pissed its not getting constant content updates, not ready in a high quality polished functional state, and so forth. They fail to grasp that the game was clearly not in a good place, technically, and required a massive overhaul delaying the progress updates similar to what we frequently see with most Patreon and Kickstarter games such as Virt-a-mate, Star Citizen, and so on. Devs got it going but it was built on a state of immature skills that grew over development and hit a bottleneck with where they can improve or take development without a major overhaul and a stronger foundation from the ground up with a rework.
Your agenda about single player and solo modes have fuck all to do with anything I said in that comment. However, since you brought up that point I will only briefly speak on it. While it would be nice to keep those solo modes there are legitimate reasons for the removal of those no matter how much you want to complain about it. Ultimately, their goal is to make money and stopping piracy and security risks helps their game. If they have to sacrifice a small subset of people, because most wont actually give two fucks about online only no matter how much you want to spin this tale, if it helps them comprehensively can you really blame them? Obviously you are trying but it is based on more selfish logic that disregards the reality of the situation.
I have no idea what you are talking about with regards to Helius making these "changes" without giving a heads up. We've known and even seen, as it is currently in the fucking beta you can play, those grind and gacha mechanics. The gacha mechanics aren't even that bad in their current implementation, with the only real issue being exp grind is needing fixed but Helius has already acknowledged it needs fixed. Hell, the gacha mechanics are far less problematic then those seen in other games like Genshin Impact or mobile games and unless you are trying to grind every single character it probably wont be much of an issue for most. Have you actually even played the beta before making these comments? Would I prefer to have everything unlocked easily or from the start? Fuck yeah I would, but I also recognize the devs want to actually make money, too. As long as their system isn't total bullshit I'll get over it. As for the online only... we've known about it since beta launched. Actually before then. You didn't look very hard.
Things change in development. For instance you complain about the nature of the game's changes and here is an explanation from Helius:
Hydroë — 09/09/2021 6:07 PM
Was there a decision with the most violent reaction from the Patreon community specifically that's not the "buy out" one?
Project Helius — 09/09/2021 6:08 PM
i have discussed about the options in a poll a long time before
Project Helius — 09/09/2021 6:09 PM
so there're two ways: we either sell the game standalone, then call it done and move on after the final product is completed or we make it service-ish and keep expanding the game in the future
now you know the answer
Now the part of your post I can totally get behind is Helius has shit communication. This could see major improvement. Sadly, its not going to happen until Helius makes a conscious disciplined decision to improve this or hires someone to do this part of the job for him.
When you say 10 years, you mean only star citizen right? Because I don't know or atleast remember any other game, even rdr2 took 8 years but atleast it was worth it(worth for me, for developers they were pretty much fucked with all the crunching in rockstar).
I gave a range of 4-10 years. Not a range of 10 years only... If you want to see games that have taken around 10, or even more, years just Google longest game development and you can find plenty of games listed off far more than just Star Citizen. The usual range is 4-7 years, however, but its been becoming increasingly common to see 7+ such as your example of RDR2. Those are for AAA developers with hundreds to thousands of employees and contracted workers, too, unlike a very tiny indie project. Yeah, Rockstar, CD Projekt, and some others have certainly shown how mismanagement can hurt development productivity and result in some nasty manhour crunches.
Fallen Doll 1 had its demo release in 2016. It was never completed and was rolled into this project instead. If you supported the OG Fallen Doll you literally got bamboozled. This game has almost seven years of development already.
BTW, why are you comparing a glorified porn gallery to a AAA game? Last time I checked AAA games had story and gameplay, both of which this game hasn't shown in seven years. Forget about AAA game, it can't even compare to Night of Revenge.
How is shifting development directions a "bamboozle"? Its like complaining that a AAA dev was working with one type of game in mind but part way through realized a much more desirable game they wanted to shift direction to even if it was a different genre, especially if technological reasons prohibit or permit influencing such decisions. FD: OL isn't all that different from FD:O, anyways. If anything, it is mostly just an improvement of the original aside from character customization has replaced with high quality but currently limited characters with supposedly 15 in the works, and more to come. If you look at their update history they were very clear and consistent all the way back from late 2016 until around beta when Helius just stopped giving a fuck about updating properly. Whether because rebuild causing frustrations or eating up too much attention or the community just wearing on Helius the project was extremely transparent at least as far back as 2016 when it was Fallen Doll: Origins.
7 Years of development isn't particularly strange for a AAA developer, much less an indie project. Look at any other porn game out there. How many completed already? How many are even remotely close to even the poorly optimized beta in terms of what they offer? How may are actually clearly superior, and even more so finished? This should put it in perspective. What we have right now is an actual totally playable beta that just requires above average hardware to run well. There is clearly a game its just frustrating because we have to wait on the rebuild before we start getting updates due to how Helius has chosen to hold off adding content until rebuild is done. However, we are seeing content being worked on and Helius has already described plans for speeding up content dropping both at rebuild launch and within the first year to compensate.
This isn't to defend Helius as I don't agree with every decision, especially regarding a lack of diverse characters at current, but spinning conspiracy theory bullshit and not placing a project within realistic expectations and expecting them to outperform AAA devs or anyone else that still hasn't as I pointed out above is just unreasonable. Calm down and wait until the rebuild launches which has an ETA of next month, or possibly if delayed January. If things go amiss then consider based on the context if you want to rant at that point.
