Unreal Engine Completed Subverse [v1.0] [Studio Fow]

[TM | Twisted Games]

Yeah, I acted fast enough, back when i called it a scam almost everyone was against me. Look how the tables have turned, now even people who paid 250 pounds admit they deeply regret it.

I regret it, but I don't think it was a scam. I believe they honestly tried and thought they could deliver something incredible based on their previous work. Somewhere in the realities and implementation of it all, it went astray. I don't feel so burned I wouldn't support another developer in the future, or hell, even FOW if they went back to making animations, which is demonstrably in their wheelhouse. You always know with Kickstarter and Patreon that you're taking a risk. That said, you did call it early, I give you credit for that.

 

[Kernist]

I regret it, but I don't think it was a scam. I believe they honestly tried and thought they could deliver something incredible based on their previous work. Somewhere in the realities and implementation of it all, it went astray. I don't feel so burned I wouldn't support another developer in the future, or hell, even FOW if they went back to making animations, which is demonstrably in their wheelhouse. You always know with Kickstarter and Patreon that you're taking a risk. That said, you did call it early, I give you credit for that.

I don't call it's scam because it didn't meet expectations, I called it a scam because they openly told tier rewards will not be fulfilled because they think it's better for the game that way. If rewards turns out unsatisfactory - bad luck, risk of backing. If dev openly says they are able to fulfill rewards but they won't because they decided it's not worth it - that's a scam. "We want for people to have full experience, that's why we will release the game in the full so you won't wait months for next update". Yeah, we all know now how it went...

 

[NBV]

I like to think this update has taken a long time because they actually worked on fixing the games issues. Maybe I'm just naive, but game development for certain takes a lot of time. Especially with a small inexperienced team(which FOW was very transparent about from the beginning). As someone who actually bought the game, I'm still fairly confident in the games ability to deliver in the future. If it doesn't though, I'll be the first to admit I was wrong.

I also bought the game on it's EA release. Being inexperienced and going through a bunch of foibles is fine for your first ever game. It's why I've said that I won't judge them on any of their actual gameplay aspects of Subverse, such as the ship parts or the ground combat. It's their first rodeo into doing combat gameplay, so I'm not going to be too critical much they don't get right on their first try. Expecting massive gameplay features is unreasonable IMO. What I do believe they should be able to take harsh criticism of is their porn scenes, since they've done this kind of work for years. Even if the Pandora system didn't exist and we could encounter sex scenes through the story, there's still one major thing they are shirking out on. All the sex scenes currently in the game are only 30 second long loops. They are just glorified webms at this point. It doesn't matter if the next patch gives us 50 more scenes, if they're all still just 30 second loops again. My experience when dealing with their reddit mods, reading their Steam mod replies, and actually dealing with their Discord mods/staff members has shown me that they aren't too keen on hearing negative feedback on certain features. Their staff on all three sites have literally banned, deleted posts, or flat out told people who are giving the same critic of Pandora that they are simply in the minority, as if to tell them that their complaints aren't big enough to listen to. It wasn't until they started getting lots of bad PR for how they handled this stuff that they started addressing "massive changes to Pandora" in their dev notes.

I literally posted screenshots of their staff either silencing a specific kind of critic people were rallying behind, or flat out telling users things are too far done to be changed, or their mods lying about certain features. Hell, we even had the two simps here at one point denying that the sex scenes were 30 second loops over a hundred of pages ago. I had to screenshot a folder showing video files recorded of every single sex scene in the game, with time stamps to how long they actually were for them to drop it.

EDIT: If they were better at handling feedback and didn't pass blame or lie about so much things, I'd be as hopeful as you were. Their last dev diary's whole bottom half is them excusing all their management mistakes on their "senior" members being too old.

 

[CUNTBLAZER420]

I also bought the game on it's EA release. Being inexperienced and going through a bunch of foibles is fine for your first ever game. It's why I've said that I won't judge them on any of their actual gameplay aspects of Subverse, such as the ship parts or the ground combat. It's their first rodeo into doing combat gameplay, so I'm not going to be too critical much they don't get right on their first try. Expecting massive gameplay features is unreasonable IMO. What I do believe they should be able to take harsh criticism of is their porn scenes, since they've done this kind of work for years. Even if the Pandora system didn't exist and we could encounter sex scenes through the story, there's still one major thing they are shirking out on. All the sex scenes currently in the game are only 30 second long loops. They are just glorified webms at this point. It doesn't matter if the next patch gives us 50 more scenes, if they're all still just 30 second loops again. My experience when dealing with their reddit mods, reading their Steam mod replies, and actually dealing with their Discord mods/staff members has shown me that they aren't too keen on hearing negative feedback on certain features. Their staff on all three sites have literally banned, deleted posts, or flat out told people who are giving the same critic of Pandora that they are simply in the minority, as if to tell them that their complaints aren't big enough to listen to. It wasn't until they started getting lots of bad PR for how they handled this stuff that they started addressing "massive changes to Pandora" in their dev notes.

I literally posted screenshots of their staff either silencing a specific kind of critic people were rallying behind, or flat out telling users things are too far done to be changed, or their mods lying about certain features. Hell, we even had the two simps here at one point denying that the sex scenes were 30 second loops over a hundred of pages ago. I had to screenshot a folder showing video files recorded of every single sex scene in the game, with time stamps to how long they actually were for them to drop it.

EDIT: If they were better at handling feedback and didn't pass blame or lie about so much things, I'd be as hopeful as you were. Their last dev diary's whole bottom half is them excusing all their management mistakes on their "senior" members being too old.

I don't really know too much about their PR or anything, nor do I really care, but I would imagine it would get really annoying seeing people dwell on the same criticisms, so I can understand if they're a little bit douchebag-ish. I mean, people treat this game as if it's a final product and not subject to change. I'd probably start banning people and deleting shit too. PR is a rough business. Generally, PR guys are never trained for the job, have no control over the direction of the game, it's almost never their sole position, they likely don't get paid any extra for it, and nerds are notoriously repetitive, nitpicky, and argumentative. I'm not defending their poor behavior by any means, but I completely understand why they might act that way. It's not a job I envy.

 

[NBV]

I don't really know too much about their PR or anything, nor do I really care, but I would imagine it would get really annoying seeing people dwell on the same criticisms, so I can understand if they're a little bit douchebag-ish. I mean, people treat this game as if it's a final product and not subject to change. I'd probably start banning people and deleting shit too. PR is a rough business. Generally, PR guys are never trained for the job, have no control over the direction of the game, it's almost never their sole position, they likely don't get paid any extra for it, and nerds are notoriously repetitive, nitpicky, and argumentative. I'm not defending their poor behavior by any means, but I completely understand why they might act that way. It's not a job I envy.

Good thing you're not PR then, because that's the text book stuff the worse kind do. It's the kind of stuff mainstream developers and game companies get shit on for, which is completely justified. People take all kinds of criticism all the time and not resort to banning users on false reasons. Even before Subverse was a thing, Studio FOW was notorious for having ban happy people in their moderation teams or devs (for their animations) who loved to lie and make up shoddy excuses for things. This is just them doing it on a larger scale audience. Taking a complaint that's clearly not the minority opinion (even on Steam, people have issues with Pandora) and saying that it is to shut it down is not only terrible PR, but it obviously leads to situations where the devs are being fed bullshit by their own community management team. Their bad management throughout the whole project has gotten so bad that they think the issue is that they have a bunch of older adults on their team, and that bringing in younger people will somehow solve the issue.

On the senior level some of us have worked in software development for many decades. Maybe that is the issue. 21st century porn software development is not the business of old men who were born in the first half of the 20th century. Futa, mantics, the anal destruction of robot ladies, the trajectory of explosive fluids from footlong schlongs were never discussed in my classical Latin studies classes. Nor did we create such things on our Commodore 64’s. However, my Latin teacher often said: “Nil satis nisi optimum”. Therefore, we’ve hired young managers to drive this unique game forward, and we will keep hiring the best young talent to make the operation stronger. By learning from the mistakes of the past and with the energy of youth we can speed the releases up. Quod nocet, saepe docet. Our goal is to push a large release every 3-4 months. By gaining more and more experience in game application development we are confident that we can achieve such more frequent release schedule.

This is the kind of logic pushing them forward. They clearly have no idea what they're doing on the management level at this point. They're essentially going to pull what is akin to diversity hires instead of quality ones, focusing on hiring an age group over prioritizing those more fit for the job in general. They still haven't DIRECTLY addressed whether or no they plan to add some context dialogue to the beginning of Pandora sex scenes, something many have asked for. A simple, "We're not sure we can do that right now, but we've acknowledged this complaint" can do wonders for PR. They instead continue to release blanket statements on improving Pandora, so nobody knows what we should we expecting in the next update.

 

[CUNTBLAZER420]

Good thing you're not PR then, because that's the text book stuff the worse kind do. It's the kind of stuff mainstream developers and game companies get shit on for, which is completely justified. People take all kinds of criticism all the time and not resort to banning users on false reasons. Even before Subverse was a thing, Studio FOW was notorious for having ban happy people in their moderation teams or devs (for their animations) who loved to lie and make up shoddy excuses for things. This is just them doing it on a larger scale audience. Taking a complaint that's clearly not the minority opinion (even on Steam, people have issues with Pandora) and saying that it is to shut it down is not only terrible PR, but it obviously leads to situations where the devs are being fed bullshit by their own community management team. Their bad management throughout the whole project has gotten so bad that they think the issue is that they have a bunch of older adults on their team, and that bringing in younger people will somehow solve the issue.



This is the kind of logic pushing them forward. They clearly have no idea what they're doing on the management level at this point. They're essentially going to pull what is akin to diversity hires instead of quality ones, focusing on hiring an age group over prioritizing those more fit for the job in general. They still haven't DIRECTLY addressed whether or no they plan to add some context dialogue to the beginning of Pandora sex scenes, something many have asked for. A simple, "We're not sure we can do that right now, but we've acknowledged this complaint" can do wonders for PR. They instead continue to release blanket statements on improving Pandora, so nobody knows what we should we expecting in the next update.

Dude, at this point, you're just putting way too much effort into thinking about this. You're stressing yourself out over something that's completely out of your control and ultimately pointless. You can't stop them and you can't change their mind. These kinds of things you've just got to step back and say "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown".

 

[kasata]

wall of text Andies

 

[NBV]

Dude, at this point, you're just putting way too much effort into thinking about this. You're stressing yourself out over something that's completely out of your control and ultimately pointless. You can't stop them and you can't change their mind. These kinds of things you've just got to step back and say "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown".

I'm not stressing out over anything. I'm reading your post and replying accordingly, so please stop projecting.

 

[Razrback16]

Ya, I agree with NBV on the PR thing. And I've moderated messageboards before and still am a mod on a sports board. Ultimately the thing you focus on most are personal attacks. Beyond that, you mostly just need to lay off your members and let them talk. That's the point of the messageboard even if you don't agree with all of their opinions. As long as they aren't personally attacking your employees or other members, then there's no reason to delete their posts and ban them. I do think SFOW's mods are WAY WAY WAY too aggressive in that regard. I've watched it myself on the Steam boards with legit discussion getting zapped because they wanted to minimize topics that made them look bad even if they were legitimate, whether it was related to them never being able to hit release projections, or legit criticism of the game in certain respects, etc.

 

[Ruination Games]

I am with NBV, Studio FOW's mod team is really terrible at what they do.

I backed the game and have been on the Discord group since day 1 despite not really being active in it, I only kept the announcements channel open.
Then when they released the Subverse manga one shots I was confused since the content didn't match what was promised, so I dropped in the subverse-general chat to ask about it and first thing I was told was lie about how the devs never said what the content was, I had to go and dig out the update where they mentioned that the manga chapters would be a canonical prequel to introduce each of the characters and instead what we got was fan fiction with bad ends. Then I asked why the manga was put online on dodgy free hentai websites instead of being sent to the backers in PDF format via email and at that point the mod told me "if you don't like it you can leave", it was a terrible first interaction and I haven't used their general channel again ever since.

At that point I started to have a bad feeling about the project and go figure, the game itself is full of broken promises — Seems like the skill tree was removed, the navigating the ship and walking in on the girls having sex with xenos or other characters have been removed and the scenes themselves are now short loops in the Pandora, they decided against giving early alpha builds to their backers to test for some dumb reason but then sell an alpha build on Steam through early access .

One thing I find extremely disturbing about their mods is how they like to speak for the dev team and it's all assumptions based on incomplete information that they get from the updates.

 

[Readerf2b]

Since the day it was released on steam i had a feeling that moders had some agenda of covering up negative pandora feedback.

 

[Sharks are Evil]

Since the day it was released on steam i had a feeling that moders had some agenda of covering up negative pandora feedback.

aren't all moders like Reddit moders? XD

 

[NBV]

I am with NBV, Studio FOW's mod team is really terrible at what they do.

I backed the game and have been on the Discord group since day 1 despite not really being active in it, I only kept the announcements channel open.
Then when they released the Subverse manga one shots I was confused since the content didn't match what was promised, so I dropped in the subverse-general chat to ask about it and first thing I was told was lie about how the devs never said what the content was, I had to go and dig out the update where they mentioned that the manga chapters would be a canonical prequel to introduce each of the characters and instead what we got was fan fiction with bad ends. Then I asked why the manga was put online on dodgy free hentai websites instead of being sent to the backers in PDF format via email and at that point the mod told me "if you don't like it you can leave", it was a terrible first interaction and I haven't used their general channel again ever since.

At that point I started to have a bad feeling about the project and go figure, the game itself is full of broken promises — Seems like the skill tree was removed, the navigating the ship and walking in on the girls having sex with xenos or other characters have been removed and the scenes themselves are now short loops in the Pandora, they decided against giving early alpha builds to their backers to test for some dumb reason but then sell an alpha build on Steam through early access .

One thing I find extremely disturbing about their mods is how they like to speak for the dev team and it's all assumptions based on incomplete information that they get from the updates.

This is one of the biggest reasons why I critic the game so much. Their mods and community managers don't know what they're talking about half of the time or flat out lie on their dev's behalf. I also paid for the game and entered the discord on day of the release. I rarely post after how bad my experiences with their staff was.

The usual suspects in this thread sometimes do the same thing the mods do. They'll claim Fow never made these promises and that we're the ones who thought these things up. They've only lessoned up on those things after people started posting screenshots of older dev tweets and advertisement of the game that confirmed these as true. The common talking point used now among the mods and simps is that Subverse was intended to be a game with porn, rather than a porn game. Of course, we all know that's total garbage. The game was strictly advertised as a porn game and their twitter+dev diaries does nothing but hype up and advertise its porn. Their PR is an endless flow of uses, lies, or downplaying their reasons for promised features not existing.

The part where they decided not to give those high paying backers early Alpha builds was one of the most fucked up situations as well. You promised this to them. You can't just run it back later and then charge them for EA. You should have at least given them the EA version at a reduced cost, if not for free. Then again, they claimed they were not going to put the game out on EA, ever. This changed when they obviously started running out of money.

 

[Ruination Games]

This is one of the biggest reasons why I critic the game so much. Their mods and community managers don't know what they're talking about half of the time or flat out lie on their dev's behalf. I also paid for the game and entered the discord on day of the release. I rarely post after how bad my experiences with their staff was.

The usual suspects in this thread sometimes do the same thing the mods do. They'll claim Fow never made these promises and that we're the ones who thought these things up. They've only lessoned up on those things after people started posting screenshots of older dev tweets and advertisement of the game that confirmed these as true. The common talking point used now among the mods and simps is that Subverse was intended to be a game with porn, rather than a porn game. Of course, we all know that's total garbage. The game was strictly advertised as a porn game and their twitter+dev diaries does nothing but hype up and advertise its porn. Their PR is an endless flow of uses, lies, or downplaying their reasons for promised features not existing.

The part where they decided not to give those high paying backers early Alpha builds was one of the most fucked up situations as well. You promised this to them. You can't just run it back later and then charge them for EA. You should have at least given them the EA version at a reduced cost, if not for free. Then again, they claimed they were not going to put the game out on EA, ever. This changed when they obviously started running out of money.

The game got way more attention than they expected it would, then it fell into Kickstarter trappings of backers starting to demand stuff that was not what the devs were pitching which resulted in the devs panicking and making changes without thinking about the consequences.

People who didn't understand what the game was started demanding that they didn't want to see any sex that wasn't with the main character because I quote "we aren't cucks" *sigh* I honestly think some people don't know what cuckolding is but I also think it's FOW's fault for calling the characters wifus, I saw it as them being humorous but many backers took that literally. Also it's Studio FOW — 99% of their movies and shorts aren't vanilla and tend to focus on corruption.

Don't get me wrong I don't dislike the game, I was just extremely disappointed.
The sexual content was really poorly implemented (probably the worst thing in the game tbh), the turn based strategy combat is decent but needs a few more design passes, the story is trying too hard to be funny and the dialogue just ends up making my skin crawl at times, the space combat I like since it scratches that arcade itch. And there is the fact that the game should of been further along after 2 years of development, especially since the team isn't just 2 or 3 ppl. It feels like a good chunk of the early development was spent on them going back to the drawing board and trying to make changes that would please everyone.

 

[UZone]

I am with NBV, Studio FOW's mod team is really terrible at what they do.

I backed the game and have been on the Discord group since day 1 despite not really being active in it, I only kept the announcements channel open.
Then when they released the Subverse manga one shots I was confused since the content didn't match what was promised, so I dropped in the subverse-general chat to ask about it and first thing I was told was lie about how the devs never said what the content was, I had to go and dig out the update where they mentioned that the manga chapters would be a canonical prequel to introduce each of the characters and instead what we got was fan fiction with bad ends. Then I asked why the manga was put online on dodgy free hentai websites instead of being sent to the backers in PDF format via email and at that point the mod told me "if you don't like it you can leave", it was a terrible first interaction and I haven't used their general channel again ever since.

At that point I started to have a bad feeling about the project and go figure, the game itself is full of broken promises — Seems like the skill tree was removed, the navigating the ship and walking in on the girls having sex with xenos or other characters have been removed and the scenes themselves are now short loops in the Pandora, they decided against giving early alpha builds to their backers to test for some dumb reason but then sell an alpha build on Steam through early access .

One thing I find extremely disturbing about their mods is how they like to speak for the dev team and it's all assumptions based on incomplete information that they get from the updates.

Speaking of Kickstarter promises, I'm surprised no one has brought up the £400 000 goal in this thread yet:



Take a look at this goal and Lily's tits literally hanging over the number and tell me what you initially thought these "additional animations" and "cinematic cutscenes" would contain? I was certain when I backed the Kickstarter that it meant we would get additional adult content WITHIN those cinematic cutscenes for "every single major plot event in the game". And what did we actually get? Some SFM/Machinima style animations you would expect to find on Youtube that have literally ZERO adult content (and I don't expect they ever planned to have that in future chapters either).

But that's OK, I'm sure someone in this thread will try to gaslight us again about how FOW never promised stuff like that

EDIT: Unsurprisingly, there seem to be differing opinions on whether backers should have expected those additional animations to have adult content, so here's a strawpoll out of curiosity:

You must be registered to see the links

 

[Readerf2b]

Speaking of Kickstarter promises, I'm surprised no one has brought up the £400 000 goal in this thread yet:

View attachment 1451973

Take a look at this goal and Lily's tits literally hanging over the number and tell me what you initially thought these "additional animations" and "cinematic cutscenes" would contain? I was certain when I backed the Kickstarter that it meant we would get additional adult content WITHIN those cinematic cutscenes for "every single major plot event in the game". And what did we actually get? Some SFM/Machinima style animations you would expect to find on Youtube that have literally ZERO adult content (and I don't expect they ever planned to have that in future chapters either).

But that's OK, I'm sure someone in this thread will try to gaslight us again about how FOW never promised stuff like that

/fow_simp_mode on
DO YOU KNOW HOW EXPENSIVE HAVING A STUDIO IS? YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR FOW TO EXIST
ITS NOT A FINISHED GAME!
IT WASNT PROMISED TO BE A PORN GAME!
PANDORA IS GENIUS DECISION, CONTENT-SETTINGS ARE DUMB!
FOW BEST ANIMATIONS, YOUR SOLO ARTISTS ARE GARBAGE!
/fow_simp_mode off

 

[TheUnsaid]

I also think it's FOW's fault for calling the characters wifus, I saw it as them being humorous but many backers took that literally. Also it's Studio FOW — 99% of their movies and shorts aren't vanilla and tend to focus on corruption.

I swear if they were just open about their tastes a lot of people wouldn't have gotten their hopes up to be disappointed anyway.

But honestly? I blame the consumers. Who spends money supporting a group they have no clue about?

Take a look at this goal and Lily's tits literally hanging over the number and tell me what you initially thought these "additional animations" and "cinematic cutscenes" would contain? I was certain when I backed the Kickstarter that it meant we would get additional adult content WITHIN those cinematic cutscenes

/fow_simp_mode on
DO YOU KNOW HOW EXPENSIVE HAVING A STUDIO IS? YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR FOW TO EXIST
ITS NOT A FINISHED GAME!
IT WASNT PROMISED TO BE A PORN GAME!
PANDORA IS GENIUS DECISION, CONTENT-SETTINGS ARE DUMB!
FOW BEST ANIMATIONS, YOUR SOLO ARTISTS ARE GARBAGE!
/fow_simp_mode off

Yeah, I'm actually gonna push back on this.

You're actually reading more into what the stretch goal said than it actually said.
When I saw that I thought exactly, they will add more visual flair to regular game cutscenes.

I thought they were going to do cinematic stuff for their regular adult stuff already, and I saw this as a stretch goal and thought, oh so for EXTRA they'll add animations to important scenarios in the game as well.

So sorry man, I just completely disagree with that take. They're literally doing exactly what they said word for word.

 

[kasata]

Speaking of Kickstarter promises, I'm surprised no one has brought up the £400 000 goal in this thread yet:

View attachment 1451973

Take a look at this goal and Lily's tits literally hanging over the number and tell me what you initially thought these "additional animations" and "cinematic cutscenes" would contain? I was certain when I backed the Kickstarter that it meant we would get additional adult content WITHIN those cinematic cutscenes for "every single major plot event in the game". And what did we actually get? Some SFM/Machinima style animations you would expect to find on Youtube that have literally ZERO adult content (and I don't expect they ever planned to have that in future chapters either).

But that's OK, I'm sure someone in this thread will try to gaslight us again about how FOW never promised stuff like that

That's not it Billy, there's no mention of the "additional animations" being adult content, so in that regard they did deliver.

 

[Ruination Games]

Speaking of Kickstarter promises, I'm surprised no one has brought up the £400 000 goal in this thread yet:

View attachment 1451973

Take a look at this goal and Lily's tits literally hanging over the number and tell me what you initially thought these "additional animations" and "cinematic cutscenes" would contain? I was certain when I backed the Kickstarter that it meant we would get additional adult content WITHIN those cinematic cutscenes for "every single major plot event in the game". And what did we actually get? Some SFM/Machinima style animations you would expect to find on Youtube that have literally ZERO adult content (and I don't expect they ever planned to have that in future chapters either).

But that's OK, I'm sure someone in this thread will try to gaslight us again about how FOW never promised stuff like that

Hhmm...I think you are reading a bit too much into that one, it says cutscenes for important events so I read that as there being more cutscenes on top of the sex ones. Or you are being sarcastic and it completely flew over my head xD

 

[UZone]

I thought they were going to do cinematic stuff for their regular adult stuff already, and I saw this as a stretch goal and thought, oh so for EXTRA they'll add animations to important scenarios in the game as well.

So sorry man, I just completely disagree with that take. They're literally doing exactly what they said word for word.

And yet there is zero "cinematic stuff for their regular adult stuff already", so there is nothing to add "extras "on top of in the first place.

Hhmm...I think you are reading a bit too much into that one, it says cutscenes for important events so I read that as there being more cutscenes on top of the sex ones. Or you are being sarcastic and it completely flew over my head xD

Nah, I wasn't being sarcastic, I 100% expected these new cutscenes have adult content. And what do you mean by "I read that as there being more cutscenes on top of the sex ones" when once again there are no such sex cutscenes in the game? It's like you and TheUnsaid are both agreeing and disagreeing with my viewpoint lol. Plus, I can already see several other users liking my post, so I can't have been the only one.

That's not it Billy, there's no mention of the "additional animations" being adult content, so in that regard they did deliver.

*clap clap* Well done, legally speaking that's exactly what it means, and this is the same marketing trick used by countless companies in the video game and non-video game world. In my view, however, this goal was absolutely misleading to backers and such important funding goals shouldn't be a matter of interpretation at all. The studio should have been absolutely clear on what you are paying for at each Kickstarter milestone, because otherwise the result is this whole thread.