Of course, you're right to a point. But the devs have been very vague on their promises. Probably on purpose. It's easier to claim success on a vague target. We make those promises out to be more than they turn out to be. I'm as guilty as anyone.
But all in all, the devs have delivered on what they said they would do. Even if it hasn't been what we expected.
I've learned to lower my expectations and look at the promised updates with the view that they'll be of the lowest common denominator. I haven't been disappointed there. I expected worse on the 2.4 update and it turned out to be better than I thought it would be.
So lower your expectations and don't get excited when FD announces anything. It's not worth getting all worked up.
For me, I'll remain cautiously pessimistic and continue to enjoy the tidbits that come along. Overall, it's still the best spaceship flying game available. I can't see that changing in the near future.
My expectations are as low as I can make them. To set my expectations for 2.4, I looked at the past 3 years, and the trends of what they've done. I thought they weren't gonna add new game-systems, they'll re-use what they've got as much as possible. My expectations were:
- Thargoids will have great visuals and audio. FDEV always nails the visuals and audio. Kudos where it's deserved.
- Thargoids would basically be in conflict zones just outside the bubble. If any attacks on stations happened, it would be very limited and wouldn't hit the bubble so as to not to upset the playstyles of those who don't care to engage. (I'm not saying this is a bad thing necessarily) Attacks on the stations would be mostly scripted - we wouldn't actually see any of it - it would all be implied in the BGS and the switches would be flipped during the weekly maintenance.
- The story would be very basic and largely already known. No real surprises for anyone who already knows a bit about the lore.
- The narrative would be at a snails pace and basically just be a bunch of CG's, because FDEV has no other way to engage a large amount of players on a large scale.
- It would be all combat focused with nothing for traders or explorers aside from maybe more thargoid bases/ships. Maybe some data points or something added to the bases or something.
- Some people would really love it, but alot of people would be bored within a month.
I got mostly what I expected. The things that were different than I imagined were actually worse that what I thought. Signal sources instead of conflict zones - even more boring. CG's are just running cargo - not even mass mobilization from the superpowers to fight alongside epic fleets from the Feds or the Imps to try to push back the Thargoids. There seemed to be alot of people bored literally day one. I thought maybe they'd at least learned their lesson and have more testing in the beta, and let us test the fixes until we were reasonably sure things were mostly working right. Seems I gave them too much credit in that regard. I don't know that my expectations could have been lowered too much more.
When people set expectations at the bare minimum level, and it meets those expectations, I'm not sure that calls for a celebration of a job well done.
