I love the "You have to buy the game to be able to criticize it" comments, that's some of the silliest shit I've ever heard in my life. Whether somebody pays for a product or not has no influence on how accurate their criticisms are. If a company gives somebody a free copy of their game to review, does that invalidate their review? Wouldn't paying for a game potentially invite more bias into a review? People will go through great lengths to avoid admitting they've made a mistake. I feel like I'd trust the review of a pirate more than a paying customer, but maybe I'm weird. It takes the "They could be lying or withholding their true feelings because they don't want to admit they bought a subpar game" out of the equation anyways.
If anything, why should devs care more about people who have already payed than potential customers? Not saying they should or shouldn't care, just throwing that out there lol. If your goal is to make money and you already have money from somebody, shouldn't you be aiming for new players to pay even if the chance is low? This isn't patreon (thankfully).
If a group of people are saying "I don't see the difference between this and their old game", there's probably an issue. Again, I'm not strictly saying there is or isn't enough difference to warrant a new game, but that it's a common theme here is telling. I guess the tricky part is telling between the people who are giving a genuine critique and those that are just entitled douchebags. Saying "The game doesn't seem like an improvement over HS1", isn't entitlement and doesn't require you to pay for a game to be allowed to say that. If it doesn't seem like much of an improvement to them, then it doesn't seem like much of an improvement to them. Entitlement would be demanding free content, I haven't seen much of that here.
An example would be this is potentially like somebody giving you free food and you think it tastes like shit and refuse to eat it. Entitlement would be expecting better food for free. Most the people I see having an issue with this are just like "I'm not interested in playing this yet", lol.
My opinion away from all the above devil's advocate type stuff is that because of all the mods and shit the previous game had, a new version of HS probably should have had more going for it by default. Somebody unintentionally made a point against them releasing HS2 as is when they said "Who expects the game to be as good as HS1 immediately when HS1 had years of mods already", yeah, that's kinda what people here are getting at. The game seems to kind of be a downgrade in a lot of ways and will be until the mods catch up. We have to wait for players to make the game as good/better than the previous version, shouldn't that burden at least be a bit more on the devs?
I have heard of some improvements, and some downgrades over previous games of theirs. I guess I'll have to wait and see what happens. Fun thread to read though lol.