[Question] What are your general thoughts about the game?
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I've been following the game off and on for a while now, but have not engaged with it at all. The stories of character wipes and roll-backs really had me concerned about burnout.
With the steam release on the horizon and a foreseeable resurgence in player numbers, how are the current players/veterans feeling about where the game is currently at?
Do you believe that the game is worth engaging with and why?
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Well, the first thing is that there is way more activity on the official Discord than anywhere else. That would be a much better place to see what people thought.
I don't know what stories you've heard about wipes and rollbacks, but there's only been one unscheduled wipe that I know about and that was due to issues with the previous publisher and discontinuing working with them. All of the rest of the time the game has been various alpha/beta tests with wipes intended. Meaning an intentional testing/wipe process to make the game. The upcoming Steam EA is different from that testing and they've said they don't want to do any more wipes, but if there are serious issues they may need to do rollbacks or in extreme cases a wipe.
In my opinion, that's just being realistic/honest with us. Look at New World if you want to see a much larger company having to deal with some pretty bad bugs/exploits. In fact, I think Blizzard had to shut down trading today in Diablo 4 due to a bug. It happens.
Is it worth it? Currently the game is 15 Euro as a B2P title. The meme on the Discord is, "it's a pizza to find out." I think it is. The game's quality is good and it's design goal is specific and something that not a lot of other people are doing. It's not perfect or feature complete, but I enjoy playing and chose to support their efforts.
(But no really, Discord is much more active than anywhere else.)
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@TehGrief The wipes are normal in development. There are so many things that have changed that it would be impossible to test bugs/balance without starting over for some things.
Plus, the start is a very different game from later. This gives you an opportunity to get in and direct how the game will progress. This is actually an issue I see whereas players who are at the start get a much more rich experience in the game than someone who comes later. As such I think the wipes have helped people understand what is at the root of the game and get a better idea of how it works. I know it was announced that there are not planned wipes for EA, but I expect if the devs pull through with all of the added content and changes then a wipe may be beneficial to gameplay. I real issues with the wipes were the short play tests since there is a good deal of spinup time to get the game going, with building towns, advancing tech, gathering resources etc. Iron Bank has dome this every test so far, but even we had a hard time getting things going in time for the previous test. A longer test process will give the players more time to flesh it out and get a feel for how things operate.
