I’ve just looked back through my emails as I had a few exchanges with the developers in the early days and I’m shocked to note that was THREE YEARS AGO - the Kickstarter was over 4 years ago was it not?
Either way, the cosmetic shop always meant multiplayer was core to the game but they have developed the game since as-if it’s single player and that’s a weird thing in itself - they’re also talked about restricting trading (you can’t have it with edittable savefiles!!) and - I’m not sure quite what they’re thinking and I know they’re not doing much at all(*)
(*) however hard MP is it doesn’t take the entire team - artists and level designers and other tech staff can’t do anything to make MP work so what ARE they doing?
I agree with both points, I don’t know why they’ve done it how they’ve done it but there we are.
That, at least, is not correct. They’ve reworked several enemy models, several minion models & some new armours all with the attendant animations. How long will that have taken them? How many art/etc people do they have? Absolutely no idea. Hopefully they’ve also started on kicking out some ideas for the gfx for the unreleased masteries.
We can only measure what they’re doing by what they’re announcing and releasing and currently that is ‘absolutely nothing’ so…
They have a lot of job posts on their site but many have been there for a LONG time - LinkedIn lists about 50-60 employees which is about half what GGG have (not totally representative but gives a hint of their size perhaps)
Of course they got money from Tencent this year - nothing like the 80% ownership they have of GGG as I understand it but with money comes obligation?
One thing which nags at me - the player community is absolutely tiny and yet they asked people to opt-in to their community MP test which - erm - means they probably have a handful of people on that at best - not sure why you’d ever bother other than to announce ‘something’??
The size of the community right now they could release multiplayer-only characters for with the caveat they could disappear/get binned at any time and they’d be lauded for doing it and get more feedback (and likely find more exploits) - so again I’m wondering…
Actually - I’ll be honest - I’ve given up, I’ve had my fun and I’ll likely play more but I don’t see LE even reaching the popularity or playerbase of Grim Dawn - let alone PoE - hey ho…
Why is it necessary for you to play a “popular” game? From your posts it seems you don’t care about MP so much. So why bother?
Sure, you’re affected by MP development in that regard that there wasn’t any meaningful content update for a long time. But that’s it.
It’s not correct to imply that they’re not doing much and have quit. The CT program has become relatively big from having a hand full of people to having several hundred.
Not having had an update doesn’t meant they don’t work on stuff. It’s the opposite. They’re working on MP all the time to get it ready for release. Maybe it’s harder than they thought, technically. Then there are design changes of systems and mechanics that are important for multiplayer.
Yes, it could’ve been easier to develop a MP client right from the start. But that didn’t happen for reasons we don’t know (although @Llama8 already wrote a reasonable theory, based in infos he gathered for years now).
I get it that people are frustrated. But all the “devs have abandoned LE” is absolutely not true. I don’t know where this is based on. I just can say that as a long time CT, this is and never was the case.
Go on discord or on the livestream and ask all your questions there. There’s a big chance that a dev might answer directly.
Mike has explained it many times on his Friday streams. They did not design the code for multiplayer, it was 100% designed for single player. He’s also stated that if they started developing for multiplayer from the beginning, they’d be far less along at this point in everything else given their team size.
20/20 hindsight makes it easy to criticize choices made by the team. But what’s the point in that other than to vent frustration? And while impatience and frustration is normal, you’ve reached the point of calling them incompetent. Which I think is completely out of line considering this is their official forum.
As far as restricted trading, that’s only for when MP releases and data is stored on their servers and not clients machines or cloud saves.
I don’t think they should even consider a 2022 release of 0.9.0 now. As they will lose any hype to POE’s next league and the likely opening of preorders for Diablo 4. They’ll also potentially have to deal with engineers working over their holidays fixing Server, Database or other networking issues in addition to any game breaking bugs that may pop up.
I do think they need to get 0.9.0 out in January though as the D4 open beta is rumored to be launching in February and I have no reason to doubt that leak. But if it’s ready I’m sure they will make the 0.9.0 and 1.0 release date decisions that are best for the game and studio.
Apart from all this stuff, which I was referring to, and is quite obviously and objectively not nothing.
That was 6 years ago. I thought I read that they had closer to 300-500 but since their stat accounts don’t include staff numbers and the linked articles was the only number I could easily find, I have no backup.
Plus it depends whether you want to go with head count (total number of people including part time people, which I’d imagine EHG has & has had quite a few), FTE (counts part time employees as less than a full time employee), contractors (which, again, I believe EHG uses quite a few of).
Imo, Popularity do matter a lot. More popular it is, more people will see it, and will likely buy the game, Leading to more funding for the Devs, so in general more content in longer run.
I should not have to seek-out the developers to find-out what’s going-on - that’s not how this works - I just play the game, play other games, wait for things to happen…
My post is a summary of how I feel about LE based on my own experience - even if they released MP and 0.9 this year (100% not happening) I feel they’ve missed their chance to establish their game before the next-generation of Diablo and PoE arrive and that’s going to hurt the game in ways they can’t undo.
Look at the forums, reviews and the comments thrown at the announcements of the developer stream - people think it’s a scam or an endless EA and no-one is saying otherwise…
As for multiplayer - even if you NEVER play the game with anyone else it’s 100% essential to a title which intends to sell cosmetic content and fund indefinite development through that (both stated aims of LE from the start) so the fact it’s “hard to do” after years of work is inexplicable.
Without robust multiplayer and robust server-side character storage those things won’t ever work - right now you can edit your savefile to give yourself any item or any stat so you’d never need to buy anything - you’d never need to grind for anything - what were they thinking?
Also - to be clear - I’m calling no-one incompetent or lazy - what I’m saying is that I feel EHG prioritised things wrongly and have taken FAR too long to get the game out they promised FOUR YEARS AGO
I also think they’re doing a terrible job of explaining what’s going-on in a world full of developers who just ‘disappear’ leaving unfinished games all the time
D4 is going to be big even if you don’t play it - games like that change the landscape - PoE is also evolving and those 2 are the games LE needs to compete with to be the “endlessly developed ARPG” they promised all those years ago and that seems less likely by the hour…
Is my point in a nutshell
im the only one that think that they dont even work on this game anymore? 9 month zero content really? when MP take so long to work on it, they should give the community any content, maybe a pre season or some other stuff while we waiting. i have 1k hours in this game so i wont say rip money.
They spend alot of time/effort/dev time on actually porting out the patches. So they dont really wanna release a patch piecemeal when they are so close to just being done.
its sorta like if your car needed its breaks, transmission, and A/C fixed, and they kept telling you to come pick it up after 1 thing had been fixed.
They would rather just keep it in the shop to finish it all in one go.
Bizzare reading through some of these comments by people who have been playing for a while now who think the game is dead/never going to finish or release from EA. (here and on the discord channels).
I have been playing for over 2 years (2k+ hours in game) and actively participating on the forums and Discord and I honestly have no idea how these players have reached these conclusions. Without defending anyone or past delays, I feel the devs have been very forthcoming in what they are doing, the game has had a lot of progress with only the most recent being delayed (again explained by the devs) and devs respond on discord almost daily, Mike has streams weekly and they drop info/update information regularly. The community testing program is so oversubscribed they havent been able to process all the requests and from what I understand (without breaking non-disclosure agreements) that its going well (as well as things like this go).
Its almost as if we (myself and those who feel otherwise) are experiencing totally different games by totally different developers. It really is odd.
Sure I am waiting patiently for updates and would like to get my hands on new content but I dont have the same negative feeling that some of these other players do.
Perhaps its because I understand how the dev process works. Perhaps its because I view this as a game and have had more than my monies worth in entertainment value already. Perhaps I am just far more relaxed about all of this and are simply more patient. Perhaps I dont feel like I am entitled to anything more than I have already received and dont feel the need to demand anything more.
Definitely amazed. Its just a game, surely there is no need to let it affect yourself to a level of such negativity and dissapointment. That cannot be healthy.
I will say as someone who has chosen not to partake in the CT program to not spoil myself.
I sorta would like to point out that if you do have access to it, you are sorta skipping the waiting part as small or as large as it may be.
I hold no ill will to the devs, but I guess I sorta thought we were skipping a patch cycle to get MP done, which I was fine with. But it feels like its coming close to skipping 2 even potentially 3 cycles of content for this patch.
I can definitely see how its getting to the point where people are going “is this really happening?” And judging by responses in the dev channel on the CT program, at this point they have gotten well more then they actually need to test. it feels like they are just letting people in so people dont feel left out because its taking quite a long time(But this could just be speculation on my part.)
I just sorta feel like so much is happening behind closed doors still that it makes it feel like nothing is happening at all.
Im happy to wait, but I wish we could get more roped in as a community instead of having to wait for insider access.
I’d say that even if people won’t get tired of ARPGS because of D4 & PoE 2, LE’s Early Access has been too long( will be 5 years in 2023) and the game has been in it’s mostly bland state for so long that whoever has been interested in this game or genre, has already chewed through it’s gameplay and loop enough to not be interested in it anymore.
It’s kind of like how these simulation and colony games end at a save that you were supposed to finish later but you never do because while the game isn’t bad, there isn’t really that much new stuff that you can imagine to justify the time expenditure.
Not hating, just how I see it.
I am not part of the CT program by choice. I am in the same boat as all normal players.
Honestly, and I am not trying to be contrary here, I dont understand the “is it really happening” attitudes based on what I have perceived over the years.
The more I think about it the more I think it just boils down to understanding the development process from being involved directly with it in my professional life. So my attitude to everything comes from a place of understanding the devs perspective.
I dont think that the game has been in a bland state for the 2k hours I have played. Yes, its got issues and I have reduced my playtime in anticipation of 0.9 and the changes it will bring, but I have enjoyed the time I have spent on it so far.
Perhaps that is a good point - what is considered too long for EA state of a game?
Dev projects of this level of complexity can take years and years of effort - far longer than 5 years. From that perspective, I dont think LE is taking that long. I consider EA as simply just a different name like alpha and beta - which are usually just states/milestones in the development cycle. Sure they (EHG) have by their own admission had some missteps in their planning cycles and directions, but honestly, thats all NORMAL in dev projects. Especially with new teams/first time products/changes in scope are expected and where estimating deadlines are nothing more than guesses - hopefully educated guesses, but still guesses that can sometimes be wildy wrong.
Now for a normal person without this experience, EA may seem like its an “almost done” state of the game. I dont consider it to be. I consider it to be more of a “here is a working version of our game, please support us so that we can carry on developing it”. And with that the risk of the simple fact that the game may fail anyway. The only difference to me is that in the past, when EA didnt exist, people did the work behind closed doors and eventually launched (or failed) without anyone knowing what was happening - and probably struggled financially while they did so.
The part of this that I find so odd is the emotional response that people are having. Perhaps I am just wired differently.
And 0.9.0 patch is exceptional with time it requires you can figure when jumping from
0.8.5 → 0.9.0. Its not in the same boat with other “content patches” we got average every 3-4 months.
That is why there is a signifier before that adjective. It was pretty bland in 2018 - 2020 which is where most of the players experience lies.
I work as a programming development project manager so I understand that but that does not change anything in how people perceive the game. This should be a variable in making decisions, not an excuse.
Most of all people play games for entertainment and nothing more. The point of my post wasn’t that there will be hordes of people who will complain that the game has failed, but worse - that people won’t even come back because they’ve played the game through already 1-2 times. Indifference, not anger.
I think losing interest for multiplayer after waiting for 5 years and it being at least 2 years late is very reasonable.
