Get To Steam and Review People

I was on steam today and though, I wonder what the clockwork reviews look like. I am not so sure I paid much attention to them when I bought the game, I think I watched the video trailers, checked out a youtube video for a couple minutes to see some gameplay and bought the game.

So the last few weeks only 43% were positive.

The reason people are posting negatives A LOT of time (I read a lot of comments) are because they think the game just quits working. Hell I thought the game quit working a lot of times when I played it early on. My very first post on this forum is a lot of jibberish. Despair and anger cause people to quit working. You feel like the game quit working and you get pissed off and leave a bad review. Several reviews say something like "the game is fine early on but once you build a colony the game just quits working, I have the materials to to make this but it never gets made or my kitchen wont cook food to feed my colony and they all starve"

This game is taking a bit of excessive bad review for peoples lack of knowledge of why things are happening. If anyone hasn't reviewed please go do so. These guys deserve it, they put a lot of work into this game and just look around the forum at how communicative these guys are with ANYONE AND EVERYONE on here.

Thanks

 

Yeah, I agree. The harsh reviews and feedback do pain me, but that's Steam for you. I'm a "wait till it's done to review" type of person, but I'm thinking I'll jump in and finally give one fairly soon.

 

I never really review, but I felt they deserved it and wanted to slightly help the recent reviews section since it was in that undesireable red font that will turn people away from a game faster than anything. Ill admit if I see reviews are negative like that I ignore the game, and I am sure there are cases of it being a game like this one that people are playing poorly and do not understand why things are not working, but generally it is just a bad game. That's not the case with this game, so I really do hope everyone that reads this and enjoys this game will go ahead and slip a review in, idk how the games had positive reviews all the way to this point and the recent ones are poor but that is what it says.I am sure the upkeep trunks had a bit to do with it. They sure made things feel "more broken" than they really were, when people were despaired and you just saw all the buildings needed upkept and nothing happens it made things very frustrating.

My favorite review on their page is one from a guy who has like 670 hours playing, and he leaves a bad review... Like good job man, you paid 30 bucks, played 670 hours which equates to less than half a penny per hour for your dollar and you think it is a game worthy of a bad review when you played that much. Mmmmk.... Some people are pretty stupid.

 

I fear the concept of pre-release has generally escaped the Steam "community". So many reviews fail to concentrate on the intended mechanics and gameplay - what is the purpose of the game, how does it accomplish that, how does it feel when working, is it fun etc. Instead, they treat it as a finished bit of code and focus on failings that clearly are not intentional and need exposing during pre-release.

A strange double-edged sword for devs this early access aspect of Steam. Like many things in life, my curmudgeonly outlook thinks people need IQ and common-sense tests before being able to sign up (or have dogs/children/twitter accounts ....).

Humpf.

 

While I do think that some reviewers are pretty thick -- I'm especially annoyed by the people who complain about bandits, since there's a peaceful way to deal with them -- I also think that some reviews can be valid. The latter are often made by people who expected something else from the game when buying it and are disappointed afterwards. These reviews should be seen by the people who also expect the same wrong things from the game, so they wouldn't feel that they've been cheated. "Like Dwarf Fortress but Victorian" isn't really how this game plays and there's very little early game and only some late game steampunk advertised by the title of the game, but that's what people expect when making a purchase.

The mixed reviews fluctuate pretty heavily, so there's really nothing you can do about them. The largest drops are often brought about by recent poorly accepted features like upkeep while there are no immediate review reactions to recent amazing features like the lighting system (I mean overall, the game looks very good aside the graphical glitches). The game has sat around 70% recent positive reviews and I'm pretty sure sometimes it has dropped below 40%. You can't really game the review system. The fact is that there will be more negative reviews when the recent score for the game is positive.

The good news is that the overall score is okay, though it has been lowered recently by people expressing their frustration at upkeep in the form of review ultimatums. But some of these reviewers often delete their reviews afterwards, that is, if they still care about the game.

The game still changes constantly, I don't know what's it going to be in the future. Just look at the development of the game. It started out as a battle with hunger, a cabbage growing simulator. For some time it existed as a fort builder, hostiles were harsher, caviar a plenty and fishpeople raids grew exponentially. I didn't play for about a year and suddenly the game had grown more relaxed, allowing for bigger populations. Foreign office, trade office, laboratory added to the passive growth of the colony, but also required more overseers to hold the colony up. Overseer manager became very important. Recently the game had come to be more and more about management with the addition of upkeep. With the addition of the Advanced Workbench that is no longer the case. So as you see, the game changes.

For these reasons I will wait at least until full release before giving a review.

 

At the same time I do think this is something every developer who's releasing early access is aware of, or at least should be aware of.

 

Totally agree Clint, it sounds shitty but I wish people were pre approved to have children hahaha.

And Nora, I read that comment last night. Looked up dwarf fortress. Downloaded the game (had no idea it was free.... that's crazy) and made a world, (took 30 minutes maybe) then started playing for about 1 minute and laughed at the comparison. I think ill try to play DF a bit just because I'm curious how playable it is. It is going to be extremely hard for me I am not too fluent with a keyboard (I use my two middle fingers and my thumb for space and pinky for shift and can type 80-90 words a minute but it doesn't translate well for video games on the PC, I prefer a console game 90% of the time- and I like CE because it really doesn't require you to be fluent with a keyboard, I can manage the wasd and qe as long as I don't have to go al over the keyboard, when I am trying to use every finger I lose track of where things are pretty badly.

Dwarf Fortress reminded me of the old game from the early 90s. Oregon Trail, except on protein shakes steroids HGH cocaine mescaline and meth. DF seems like a game it would take 100 hours to start getting accustomed to.

 

I'm sure you will find more similarities as you keep playing. Many elements are inspired by Dwarf Fortress. But you will also find many crucial differences. Two reads.
Super simulations are great until the moment something you expect to be complex at a crucial moment suddenly isn't. For example allies shooting you in the back in Rimworld.

 

Oh yes, DF is undeniably brilliant and has the deepest simulation structure of any game ever. One of these days a dwarf is going to write the Great American Novel. But breaking the Steel Coconut Shell that is the U.I. and graphics layout to get to the sweet sweet milk inside can be... daunting. For DF I mostly just enjoy watching other people play. Quill18 is a great one.

 

I tried to warn several times in the post I made in the forum .. I knew this would happen because: at the beginning the game charmed many people as I .. I bought the early access fully excited, it looked like a colonial construction game and resource management, trade and military that everyone expected due to lack of development for these games .. so instead of finishing the game as advertised. they wrapped very creating events and situation that hindered the progress of the development .. so after two years .. they have a wonderful game that is full of crash and bug and not finished, and that the way will be not ready so early, do not get me wrong, I love the game and eagerly await the release. but I can not keep waiting and checking the website for new updates.

Total game played in hours: 500+ = is more than lot of games that i own

 

I mean yea there are similarities in the sense that dwarves get angry and you craft things and you start with a small number and build but I wouldn't call the game similar just because it is so hard core compared to CE. CE is a casual game and DF is a nerd out hard core game. I just tried to start a game in DF, but I cant invest the time it would require to play it. It would consume way too many man hours. I would prefer Gnommoria get finished (I wanted that game but to know the guy who made it abandoned it makes me not want to buy it just for principle that he would net a few bucks off the transaction and didnt finish the game) over DF. But I can appreciate DF and what the guys who made it put into it and how long they have spent and how in depth it is.

 

So are you suggesting they should have just fixed the bugs they had on day one and put nothing into it and print it sell it and be done with it? I am kind of confused what you mean by this post if you do not mean they should have just thrown it out early on. I have seen a video or two of the first versions of this game and it was nothing, it was bare bones. Early access helps smaller groups fund their project, I honestly like playing early access games.

 

course not, i was suggesting to they conclude the game engine instead add events, wicht brings up bugs and crashs and takes weeks to fix ...and when we expect the fix .. come a new patch with everything re-design .. and start the bug and crash again ...

my point is if they had finished the balance of a colony build simulator... they had all the time to focus on events and stuff to make that difference they want, i understand that is more easy to code it together .. but u can also make a code that expect changes later.

Exemple that i cannot understand why: Food engine was never done .. in my gameplay i had lots of problems with the food...instead to fix it for good.. seens more important create a cult event that cant be stopped that will bring a monster beast to end your game...

edit: this happens in all my sweety games that my wonderfull colony breaks after the cult start .. and the killing spread . and the panic and fear memorys consumes all my colonists and lead to a endless cult looping.

 

As I posted elsewhere previously, in my view yes, it is more important; with the complexity of all the systems in the game and the fact events are supposed to disturb their equilibrium, they have to be developed side by side, particularly if you are a resource-constrained studio. This isn't so much about coding such that change is possible as not investing too heavily (effort + time) in implementing a system design, say for food, that has an operating envelope (for different player skill and understanding levels) that isn't workable with events which define the game itself and distinguish it from others in the genre. Particularly when such systems are all deliberately intertwined to create a web of consequence.By

doing so the need for changes in design, such as events with no win state or systems that are actually more fragile than intended, gets identified early, while the cost of adjustment is still low and subsequent features haven't baked the first attempt in, rather than trying to do so post release -- when the watching audience is if anything less forgiving.

 

You're arguing hard for us to give a positive review. While I agree the game has a lot of promise, and some of the design ideas behind it are simply genius (no other base builder has had such an ingenious way to deal with professions like CE's work crews and them being linked to buildings, as far as I know).... I really wouldn't recommend it to anyone I know, at this stage. You say it doesn't stop working, but it does for me - colonists get stuck in some behaviors and die from starvation because they won't move on with their lives. You assign them to complete events but they never do, causing you to fail them, although you had everything read for them (zeppeling investigations for example). You tell them to hunt, they all walk past the pests and your crops get ruined. You tell them to build a zinc bar, but the order eventually disappears, and no bars were produced.

And this is ignoring common script errors and crashes I've been getting... so yeah. The game is far for complete, and people have a right to grade it on it's current state rather than it's future potential. So this is why I'm holding off from reviewing it until I can give it a positive grade - because to me, that means I'm recommending it to my friends. And I can't do that atm, especially with that relatively big price tag.

 

I am not saying it never stops working Kaldo, but there are a ton of people who think it stops working in occasions it does not stop working. And also when you leave a review to understand it is early access. There are (I wont say supposed to) going to be bugs. So anyone leaving a negative review is doing an injustice (unless they truly do not like the game) because A. it is early access and not finished, this is how early access games are B. most of them say "this game has so much promise, so why not leave a POSITIVE review and say something like "i cant wait til this is out of early access this game is going to be great" instead of feeling better about themselves for leaving a negative review like they are some kind of game guru who is qualified to give a great review and people are relying on it. C. the reviews are made as if the game is not early access.


But yes there are bugs where colonists freeze, but it isn't rampant with them... I have never had more than one colonist go into that at a time and rarely every more than one occurrence of that in a game period (I usually play 50-75 day games before new version pops in) also if you are having the cults pop up a ton, there are things you could do better to keep happiness in the colony high. The cults only pop up when needs are neglected and people are despaired. Make sure to put rugs in the house, and check the quality number of every building (u want it at 6 or higher) if you do that and keep a stock pile of a variety of foods for each type of citizen (laborer overseer aristocrat) and also have barracks full (prob need a barrack with 4 soldiers for every 40 people - well when u get to 40 its nice to start thinking about that 2nd one, def need it before 50-55 in my experience)

And I have zero problem with you or anyone holding off reviewing, that's what the people writing the negatives would be better served doing in my opinion and I possibly should have mentioned thati n the main post haha, but it never struck me. I just merely was posting this to let the several of us that are active on this forum (because we genuinely like the game) to go post a review. I wasn't really directing it at someone like you perse but hey if you felt like leaving it a positive, that's great obv haha. I have no stock in the game, I just know the people working on it do a great job communicating here, which is definitely not easy to do, I am sure the thing those guys enjoy the least is logging onto a forum to read a bunch of stuff that's 90% garbage (hell I post garbage 90% of the time easy and I know it when I do it)

 

Yeah, I can see what you mean. I'll make sure if I ever see something that could potentially show something stuck or broken I'll send it over.

 

I won't make a review, because my recommendation would be to not buy the game yet. And since the "yay or nay" system of steam does not take my reasoning into account, making that review would harm a game that I really like.

But it's not something I would recommend anyone purchasing as anything other than a donation to the developers. It is not a good game as it stands now. There's basis for a GREAT game, and I both hope and believe that it will get there, but it's simply not a good experience right now, unless you're making it your hobby to find workarounds all the problems, and enjoy remaking colonies over and over again because there's currently not enough content to provide gameplay past the "get things up and running" stage.

- Once there's a proper UI
- Once the AI is clearly communicated and works how the common player would expect it to
- Once there's a ton of mechanisms and other clockwork things incorporated, turning the setting from "charming colonial life with occasional fish dudes" into the steampunk setting promised by the title
- Once there's meaningful choice in how you build you colony, instead of the system having a clear "solution" and the only challenge is discovering that
- Once the plethora of bugs is reduced to a more manageable amount
- Once the world map is incorporated, with meaningful interactions between the colonies and the other factions
- Once there's either an endgame or enough ways to branch out your colony to make it personal and unique each game
- Once missing core basebuilding features like roads, city walls, watch towers, etc. are added

That's when I'll make a review, and recommend everyone in the entire goddamn world buy this game. But the game as it is now, is not something I'd ever tell someone "you'll probably have a lot of fun playing this", or even "You'll find more fun than frustration in this".

I am not in a rush. I don't mind waiting for the game to be either finished, or far enough along that it's actually a pleasant experience to play. But I'm not going to make a dishonest review.

 

In my opinion it would help the game much more, if people would be reporting bugs with all the requested information as seen in the bug forum...playing early access games also means some responsibility to provide feedback and bug reports back to the developer and not only playing the game. If everyone just ignore errors waiting for someone else to find and getting them fixed it probably won't become something stable, because people are fascinatingly incredible good at doing thing completely different than the developer would expect them to do.