Manywhelps: Message passed on! Can't promise anything seeing as it's just one slack message, but there you go.
vidsgame: Thank you. That was quite nice of you. I appreciate you responding to the comments about why you went with Gearbox instead of publishing on your own.
It makes a lot sense in terms of money. The issue basically boils down to either money or time. It could be done without money but then the release date gets pushed back by I have no idea, a few years, a decade or two. When you have money you could have a team work on more problems at the same time instead of tackling one at a time.
How long would people are really willing to wait? Another question is, especially for people just starting to get into the business of making video games: How long are you willing to delay making something big that a lot of people will buy?
Tough question. Typically we're limited by funding. In this case, Gearbox isn't funding development, we have separate funding for that. Gearbox is helping in other ways (and in good ways too - this is far from the typical predatory publishing situation).
From what people have told me, they'd rather wait than have a game rushed. But that's a gamer comment, not a developer comment. A developer will just do the best in the time they have, which is dictated by funding. Only very big companies "rush" things out the door to meet yearly sales targets. Most of us rush it out the door because we're out of time.
Mjauv: The danes behind "Interstellar marines" called their game "Indie AAA". Things haven't exactly worked out so well for them so far.
Well, kudos for the transparency and the fact that you actually take time to answer all questions.
I have personally always longed for more AAA-releases on GOG so I'm happy about things and the fact that WHF is having more narrative focus.
And since you are so transparent, which people would you say bitch the most in the comment sections on average, GOG-players or Steam-players? ;-)
I think those labels aren't particularly helpful. There are some small Indie games that provide a better experience than AAA games that don't do anything new. I think each game should be judged on its own merits.
Hah, you know, GOG players can get pretty riled up but at least they read responses and are fair, thinking people. A lot of Steam players just rage against the machine. It can be quite maddening.
Manywhelps: Honestly, when we went into Kickstarter, we didn't think we'd do Early Access ... we began to realise what people wanted we needed to find other sources of funding ... we only did because Gearbox said "go bigger, you can do it". If we had made 10-20x the amount of money on Kickstarter, then we may not have gone down this route.
They'll get something much bigger than we anticipated and they bought into ... if people weren't immediately "what the fuck, this is a survival game?" we might not have focused as much as we have on story.
artistgog: I just have to say there's an awful lot of 'we're transparent', yet none of these changes were communicated, until now, and also way too much 'if customers hadn't' blaming. Really sick of it, and this is a no sale, even if it comes to Linux, which I don't expect Gearbox to allow. People don't have to give or be interested when there's these kind of things going on, and the 'we had to' and 'you'll be glad in the end' is the final straw. What a depressing thread, that just isn't about play at all, but about big business and agenda being pushed. Now that's said, I'm done with this.
I think you're looking for something to be angry about. We have communicated weekly for over two years. We haven't released the full story because we've been preparing for this for a while... that's not being untransparent, but when you're still working things out you don't talk about them. That's normal.
We've stated repeatedly that the game is coming to linux. It's in our trailers. It was in our Kickstarter. You're the person that's jaded here, not Gearbox, and not us.
drealmer7: So the creators didn't have a clear vision of what they wanted to make when putting up the kickstarter, (even though the KS was like 'THIS IS WHAT WE WANT TO DO!") Then they decided to cater to the more vocal desires of their backers (who were backing a smaller independent project, that is what they were supporting, at least in part), and then decided to go major publisher and change their game, again, to be bigger scope, because the publisher pushed them to.
That sounds like zero creative integrity and makes me sooo much less interested in this game.
It is also seeming to me like the Life in Technicolor update + price increase is a "whoops, we made the game wrongly at first in so many ways (AI, UI, game mechanics) and now need to remake it a bit and so that's going to take a lot more time and money."
Visions change man. That's exactly what creativity is. You start with something, and evolve it every step of the way. In the end, the world lore, game mechanics, and story are all still within the umbrella of what we decided in early 2014. It's just that the scope of each thing has increased. The story is more developed, the cutscenes are higher quality, the mechanics are more polished, etc.
I think you're also not very familiar with how game development works, and you haven't played the game. We reworked the AI because we wanted to do more with it, we reworked the UI because the art was always temp and we wanted to add more functionality/polish. Why you think changing from a grid to a weight based inventory system mid development and improving what you build is beyond me.
And I think you have to be looking for an argument if you think We Happy Few isn't all about creativity.
Instead of ranting complete and utter nonsense, why don't you ask
why we made these calls? I'm literally right here to answer. And I'm very happy to - game development is very complicated and I like talking about it.
