Well, that kinda depends on your point of view. Just because Tencent have a small (<20%) stake doesn’t make EHG what some think they are, a wholely owned subsidiary of Evil Corp staffed by soulless corporate drones. And as a fully qualified soulless corporate drone (with ~17 years PQE), they really ain’t it.
Regarding the small indy-ness, IMO, yes they are. They have no publisher (hence indy) & i think they have less than 50 employees (which would make them small by the UK gov’s guidelines on SMEs).
I truly don’t understand, this is one of the cases you can have it both ways, at least technically:
You can have a fully offline mode.
BUT if you want to use cosmetics in offline, just must allow the system to connect to the servers and validate your cosmetics ownership (or any DLC content for that matter), from time to time.
Then you can use any licensing system with expiration dates, so cosmetics have a license attached, when it expires, you must connect to the servers and automatically renew the license.
This kind of technologies have been around forever, nothing new under the sun.
i get your point.
It feels funny however that you still call it fully offline mode when you want to go online to buy MTXes to go back offline again to use it. Its not fully offline than technically speaking which is fair of EHG thats what a lot of offline players wanted.
Why would you want a almost fully offline mode?
The only thing i could think of is so you can play at places where you cannot have internet or were you have bad internet.
If i were EHG i would run a big poll on if offline players would like this.
Than they can evaluate if its worthing putting time into…
In the end if enough people would want it it could give them extra money.
At the same time i understand that they have to prioritize stuff so a few people on the forum telling they want this wouldnt cut it for me aswell if i were them. A poll in the future for this matter would make sure of it.
This game already have two “modules” (clients), one for offline and one for online.
I’m not talking about an offline shop with connectivity, but you need to go online, buy the DLCs, then DLCs are downloaded into your game files with the license system, and your offline “module” can consume them seamlessly.
When license is expired, you simply not get access to the DLC content, until you connect to the online client and extend the license/s.
Is just an example anyways, there’s a lot into it, but definitively doable, and already done in the past.
I explained in the next post, you can keep a fully offline module, and use the online existing one for the purchase/ download/validation of the DLC content.
If you don’t engage with cosmetics/DLCs you could completely bypass any online requirement, and if you do, you only need to connect from time to time to validate the DLCs.
Again, just an idea, there are lots of ways to achieve the same goal, This is the most standard I know of.
If the developers provide cosmetic assets to offline mode in a fully offline state, the first mod that is created will be a “UNLOCK ALL Cosmetics!!!” mod. This is their holdup and why you can’t have a fully offline non-authoritative game client and cosmetics being developed in the online game.
Of course the cosmetics will be datamined and recreated and added to an offline mod at some point, but the pace will be slower as the assets aren’t being directly provided. Also offline mode will have the modding scene behind it with whatever models and assets those creators make.
If you plan to play offline, just don’t purchase cosmetics from EHG? You won’t be able to use them.
Personally I’ll be playing online to be able to play with friends and participate in leaderboards. I’ll probably be purchasing a supporter pack.
That number of 75-ish Judd used also included play-testers and in-house QA people.
So yeah, seems to include contractors to some degree.
This seems to mostly be because of past backlash EHG received over, even for a moment, stating that their offline mode would be anything but true-offline.
I remember when they wanted to have a verification so every like 2 months you’d need to connect to their server for a few seconds and people on Reddit and the forums blasted them for falsely advertising what was on Steam and Kickstarter.
This is not correct. There’s a single executable client.
There are many ways to make such a client work with online and offline modes, some of which would make it very impractical to have intermittently authenticated features.
Usual story with software dev, every choice has consequences and trade-offs, some of which we dont realise until much later (see, e.g. multiplayer)
The main problem is that some backers cannot use their currency and enjoy the rewards in offline.
The devs themselves explained offline and online are different game clients, and was one of the main reason the MP took so long, as they needed to redo a LOT of code. Anyways two clients can exist in the same executable, think of it as two game modes, or program modules.
Personally I will play offline most of the time, as long as the offline experience remain more polished, also I plan to buy a supporter pack… just to support the devs.
Didn’t one of them post something about asking the community about it previously and being told that a completely offline experience was what was wanted?
I’ve not tested, but ive heard it said that offline is a less buggy experience (ignoring lag) than online. How could that be if they both used the same code (ignoring lag)?
And some people complain that the devs never listen…
I imagine it has a heap to do with whether or not what you’re playing is server authoritative or not. Online is, even if you’re playing solo. Offline isn’t, since the saves are locally on your own drive.
Somewhere in that, the server and your local machine is getting something messed up to cause certain bugs and issues.
What a stretch to defend the game is the same client. When (please correct me if I’m wrong) the devs already stated the opposite.
Many skills have different animations, and behaviors, is not only extra bugs, I doubt they operate under an unified code with lots of small conditionals, if that’s the case offline could get a lot of newfound bugs, I think is not the case. Also hubs in offline allow you to attack and dash, but not on online.
Based on your reply I can see no matter what explanation you are given, you won’t be happy. Good luck getting cosmetics to offline mode, hopefully they decide that it’s better just to provide them, it doesn’t affect my purchase at all.
And yeah, in the future try not to misquote and ignore someone’s post just because you disagree with the statement.
