mutat

Fine line between greatness and POS

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Fine line between greatness and POS

from Stardock Forums

First off, I rarely post about anything.  It takes something spectacular to make me want to express my thought to what I believe to be random people, whom I could care less what they thought of my opinion.  I am only posting this message in the slim hope that someone with some authority at Stardock will read it and at least give it some thought.

 

I have been a loyal customer of Stardock for many years.  They have a good vision, good delivery system and some great games.  Hats off to GC II, one of the best games in its genre.  Elemental may become a great game, I can see glimpsed of greatness beneath its dirty unpolished surface.  I did not buy the game with future greatness in mind, I bought the game with the reasonable expectation, based on the the fact I love 4X games, that it would be playable.  Heck, I would go as far as even being reasonably playable.  What I have is a game that is buggy, glitchy and if I am lucky, won't crash after 5-7 turns when I am well into the game.

 

Before you ask, I have a high end gaming system.  In no particular order here are some problems that directly affect my expectation of reasonably playable.

 

- Cursor gets 'stuck' on some object, must click other thing or use unit select to finally select the unit.

- Some creatures have 52/33512 stats.  WTH, how do you fight that?

- The further along into a game I get, the more frequently it crashes.  I get about 10 turns if I am lucky.

- alt/tab to desktop always crashes the game.

 

I have other gripes about the UI and many other quirky issues, I won't go into them in detail but they further augment my main argument, which is that this game should not have been released in the state it is in.  I truly feel betrayed as a customer.  I do understand that you must have significant pressure to release this as far in advance as CIV5.  Was the thinking internally that you would release it and then fix the bigger bugs?

 

Someone at Stardock, released this before it was ready.  That person needs to know of that immediate sales now may mean fewer customers in the future.

 

What you should do is issue all customers who bought the game prior to the version that should have been released a credit towards future purchases.

 

If you refer me to tech support to get my issues resolved, I will say no thank you.  I am not your beta tester.

 

DK

elemental
19,310 views 31 replies
Reply #26 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Dethedrus, reply 24



Quoting Rune_74,
reply 23
OK Bob, not as creepy as this guy.


Is that even remotely constructive?  Sheesh.

 

Oh come on, did you even read all that?

Reply #27 from Elemental Forums Top

Can anyone take a joke here?

And seriously no one else has a little bro-mance for Brad? After Will Wright released Spore and ended our fairly intense relationship I was all about the Wardell!

TouchTasks - Access tasks with ease on Windows touchscreens.
Reply #29 from Elemental Forums Top

Yes, Stardock has cost themselves a huge amount of goodwill with this extremely premature release.  I think if I was weighing up early cash vs. focus on not losing incredibly important and valuable goodwill, I'd go for the goodwill every time.  That's why I say now, please, when you think of the earliest date for release, choose the latter release window, okay?  If you release another game (or expansion) in this state, you will have no credibility whatsoever.  It's as close to a fact as anything can be that hasn't happened yet. ;P

Best regards,
Steven.

Reply #30 from Elemental Forums Top

Fanboys unite and say stupid things - maybe someone from stardock will thank you for blindly kissing ass.

BTW, I love Stardock and Brad is one of my favorite people in the industry because he talks to us, the fans.  Stardock are active in their forums.  It's a MUCH tighter community that way than you find for any other mainstream game company.

But no matter how much I love SD, I think Elemental was released too early.  I did preorder.  I did pay to beta essentially, and I knew it and loved the idea.  Other people are expecting their $50 to reflect a quality retail purchase and that is not really what happened because the game is essentially still in beta.

Few games are ever "done" - there could always be something more - but there is such a thing as release worthy.

Reply #31 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting dragoaskani, reply 4
Lets see your Dxdiag, see how "high end" your system is, we might even catch some obvious driver errors that might be causing issues.

 

AHA of course! Its the drivers!!!

Damn those drivers, they cause so much problems.