Also addition for blizzard resources D4 project started around 2014 so why is blizzard taking so long?
9 years if its gonna be released in 2023 and my research was right.
In perfect world D4 should be in every aspect way WAY better game and there shouldn’t be any doubt.
But as we can see thats not the case.
I’m glad that EHG doesn’t rush things and cut corners.
Not really related to LE discussion but you asked - D4 may have started dev in 2013/14 (codename Hades?) but it was restarted in 2016 due to various problems with dev and design disagreements and director replacements. The reboot (codename Fenris?) has also suffered delays due to management changes, the Blizzard lawsuits/sexual harrassment and Kotick management causing walk outs on at least 2 separate occassions. Pretty obvious that any of those events/changes could have set back the game 6months to years each. and thats not even considering the morale of the developers/people actually doing the game and the reports of burnout/staffturnover.
Even the big boys can stumble. I am with EHG on their approach - get it done right and it will be successful. They have no control over what other game devs do or release so why kill themselves worrying about it or trying to force a deadline.
Wolcen is a perfect example of that. There was so much hype for that game, and the shitty release completely destroyed their chance to take a seat at the table. Now, even though they’ve supposedly fixed many of their early issues, most aren’t willing to go back, and have moved on to other pastures.
Wolcen is a completely different case.
There was no release of any similar game around the time they released.
The only reason it was so hyped was that it released during a ARPG drought.
The reason it released in such a bad state, was, that they ran out of funds.
The project had 3 major features cut out AFTER there already was work put into then and then realizing they can’t make it.
(Environmental interactions with elements, open world, rotatable camera)
LE is even more different in another way.
EHG probably could have released the majority of planned content and features already, with the quality level of the 0.7.X patch cycles.
But because LE became so popular and the funds became bigger and bigger the scope and quality of the project increased significantly.
But it’s a perfect example as to how a botched release can permanently affect the success of the game. No one has been willing to go back and give the game a try, even after they fixed the majority of the flaws they had.
In most cases, players go back to check things out after hearing about fixes or patches. But not with Wolcen. It was like it was infected with radiation fallout, and no one wants to get infected.
Personally, Wolcen was on my wishlist and I followed it on and off until the mess happened. What stopped me from buying & playing eventually were the negative reviews on the very poorly handled launch…
What has stopped me giving it a shot after they supposedly fixed things, was the way that the devs handled things, radio silence, went back on promised features and delivered a game that is arguably not what was promised. That soured Wolcen and those devs to the point where I will not give them any of my money - even if the game becomes the best arpg over time, I will not support those devs.
EHG has been vastly different in their approach and that is far more important to me.
For me, ive looked into picking it up and every time I do, I check recent reviews and well…
Usually they like to point out old problems that are still there. There is still glitches, still lack of content etc.
I think wolcen just not only flopped at the start, but never got recovered enough.
No mans sky is a totally different genre, but a game that failed miserably on release to the point of having to go back into the oven to bake.
But after that? its done nothing but thrive, it overwhelmingly positive and all the recent reviews are positive.
You can 100% recover a bad launch if you actually can back up things you promised and work on the issues.
I think wolcen just not only had a bad launch, but their project was outside of their scope and because of that they can never make it what they promised, and never fix it.
Yeah, No Man’s Sky is definitely the poster child for how to un-f### a disastrous launch.
It’s taking blizzard this long because they completely abandoned previous iterations. Such as being more like Dark Souls. they’ve also changed leads several times over the years.
https://www.usgamer.net/articles/report-diablo-4-project-hades-dark-souls-blizzard
Wolcen could have recovered if they were prompt with fixes and improvements. they weren’t and it has been forgotten. They also stunk in terms of communication so there was no reason to hold out hope after a while.
Wolcen was doomed, honestly, when they did their 3rd(?) game revamp since their EA opening. It was just a big pile of messy spaghetti at launch, and nothing was coherent, much less working. The skill wheel, as interesting idea as it was, was just a big ole cluster fsck…
The Wolcen team had massive turnover, including at the top levels of design. A competent team could have pulled them through. But I get the impression they lost some architects and key figures.
I’ve been playing LE for eons and I’ve enjoyed the game but I really do think they’ve missed-the-boat at this point and I’m wondering if they’ve not just quit completely…
2 patches in a whole year is a joke and whatever you may think, LE “needs” multiplayer if it wants to develop any sort of playerbase (currently the non-multiplayer and quite old Grim Dawn has a FAR bigger playerbase)
Multiplayer should not be taking this long because the game should have been built around it from the start - their original plan was F2P with cosmetics and that demanded multiplayer (no-one needs to look good playing on their own!?) so I’m assuming something has gone awry at this point and I’m just waiting for them to admit it.
There was a time when LE looked like a solid alternative to PoE with better QoL and D3’s popularity was waning with no replacement in sight but now D4 and PoE2 are approaching and they will move the genre on leaving LE looking like a last-gen effort.
Getting MP working earlier could have led to a soft-launch with leagues/ladders/challenges which would have gotten the community/streamers more active but instead they’ve focussed on some far-off “1.0” target which - frankly - they’re not doing much to achieve…
Can they still launch a 1.0 and make some money? Sure - Wolcen did and we know what happened there (refunds on Wolcen must have been ENORMOUS) but I don’t see how LE will be anything other than a game some people enjoyed until it quietly died…
No, their original plan (on Kickstarter at least) was a box price ($10 for the cheapest one) plus cosmetics.
They developed SP in parallel with MP so they needed to add all the stuff they created for SP to MP which is why it’s taken so long, plus they’re a small studio. Their view on this is that developing the SP content is what has allowed them to get to this point to be able to fund the MP development. You may disagree with that but given nobody outside of EHG knows what their financials are, we can’t gainsay them.
Wolcen was a very different beast & implying that LE is going down the same round is somewhat dishonest.
It does suck that it’s taken them so long, the devs won’t disagree with you on that.
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).
No, they’ve got way more than “a handful”.