Hello Commanders.
I`m a long time gamer and a big fan of the franchise, especially my beloved frontier and FFE that i play to this day every couple of months.
I have been visiting the forums for a couple of years now, even before kickstarter, just never bothered to join and write posts, so I know most of the long time posters and their post history.
Having said that, unfortunately, I am one of the disappointed backers and to be honest I`m probably mostly here to express my concerns and fight the ongoing "white knighting" or whatever people call it these days, because i feel its damaging to the game, the kickstarter ideals and consumers overall.
As we were told by The Man himself the key to success is "to under promise and over deliver" but as it often is in life we ended with the opposite and both FDev and the most involved fans are to blame here.
Yes, I went there. A huge part of my disappointment can be attributed to some of the more active forum members (I could write exactly who what and where but that would solve nothing and would be against the rules) who assured me and many others on youtube and "the other game`s" forum that the DDF is a set in stone feature set for the release, that my concerns (that at that time were few and very mild) are unwarranted, uninformed and silly and that i should expect greatness and nothing less. Well so i did... to my disappointment
To make it clear, my complaints are not formed because FDEV didn`t make a game to my likening. Sure If I were to decide I would rather choose a single player Frontier: Elite IV with stardreamer and full Newtonian flight but I accepted their direction before pledging and I am fine with it.
My disappointment comes from FDEV`s inability to materialise their own plans, visions and goals, the lack of features, lack of promised richness - basically the horribly unfinished state of the game that is evident across the board from ubiquitous spelling mistakes through missing ships and kickstarter rewards to the missing ironman mode and multiplayer features.
To brighten my post a little I have to admit that there are things that are really well made and that still gives me some hope for the future of this game. Most of the things that came in before PB2 are very well made. The flight model is great, the controls responsive and the dogfighting engaging and fun (I recognise that despite my personal preference), the graphics engine is pretty good (could be better but that`s not that important) especially considering the amazing scale and realism of the universe (many things are astill misiing though), and the sound design is probably the best in the industry to date. As many have stated, the base is here... but its no longer a beta for it to be acceptable
This game requires a lot of work. Much more than many here imagine. I would say judging by progress so far that they would need to double the development efforts this year to give us a real finished 1.0 before the end of 2015
As far as expansions go I would not expect any this year. Maybe some super simplistic in-ship activities.
I also no longer believe that Frontier are able to create proper planetary landings expansion with fully explorable planets and EVA. What they have shown in the procedural department is very lacklustre (I`m a huge demoscene fan and procedural generation fan so I somewhat know what is and what isn`t possible).
To use D.B.`s own words it feels very "samey" because "[...] the artist provides the ingredients, and so if the ingredients are varied enough then so is the end result" "[...]it`s the content that comes from the artist that makes it feel different" and this is where FD fails so we end up with "[...] BAD procedural generation, we see cities (in this case the galaxy) going on forever, we see things where you can see the patterns that are too simplistic, its to obviously computer generated [...] essentially it`s bad art if you like"
I have never imagined my introduction here would look like this but reality bites hard.
I hope they will get their things together and deliver. But my hope is getting fainter and fainter every passing day.
![[VR] Deggial](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/47/47252.jpg?1553527110){kind=avatar}
