Game Bashing On Steam

[VR Dextrovix]

Seriously though, while we're in the 'bash elite/fdev' sort of thing... how many here still play seriously... say 7 hrs a week...

Er no, take 7 hours off from that per week.

I think it's been a year since I last played seriously, but when I did I could easily put in 7 hours, usually over the weekend.

I used to enjoy spending my time in asteroid fields mining, then finding places to offload my Void Opals. Before then, undertaking community goals when FD actually cared.

 

[[DOOK] Droogie]

Gonna bash the game harder than Will Smith on Chris Rock.

 

[Erei]

Er no, take 7 hours off from that per week.

I think it's been a year since I last played seriously, but when I did I could easily put in 7 hours, usually over the weekend.

I used to enjoy spending my time in asteroid fields mining, then finding places to offload my Void Opals. Before then, undertaking community goals when FD actually cared.

Can't win that. If you don't play anymore "why are you still posting then ?". If you still play "You must enjoy it if you keep playing".

 

[VR Dextrovix]

Can't win that. If you don't play anymore "why are you still posting then ?". If you still play "You must enjoy it if you keep playing".

I'm not repeating myself, read my initial post on page 1.

TLDR is I've been here since 2013, I'm an alpha backer, and I wish since Oddity the content, performance and VR support hadn't gone down the crapper. I post here to voice my displeasure at these turn of events.

Whereas you've been here a year so if you bought in at Odyssey release, I feel for the poor deluded you.

 

[Erei]

I'm not repeating myself, read my initial post on page 1.

TLDR is I've been here since 2013, I'm an alpha backer, and I wish since Oddity the content, performance and VR support hadn't gone down the crapper. I post here to voice my displeasure at these turn of events.

Whereas you've been here a year so if you bought in at Odyssey release, I feel for the poor deluded you.

You misunderstood. I was saying some people will always declare your argument is invalid no matter what. It's a fight you can't win.

 

[TiberiusDuval]

STOP THAT we're not here to enjoy Elite

Seriously though, while we're in the 'bash elite/fdev' sort of thing... how many here still play seriously... say 7 hrs a week...


Bill

<<<currently a mindless monday zombie

I don't usually play any games combined 7 hours per week more like 7 hours per month...

 

[Dane Icaza]

I can't even begin to explain how frustrating the viewpoint OP has shared is. This sort of mindset is one of the reasons why the quality in the gaming industry is in the toilet.

This exactly. OP's viewpoint isn't just a poor argument, it's fundamentally damaging to the hobby. The idea that game developers must actively be shielded from criticism, that critics should be silenced, is not just childish, but actively encouraging bad products to be released.

You see it with many games, and other media like movies. A certain subset of fans of a product with mixed reviews will somehow take negative reviews personally and actively crusade against them as if they themselves are being criticized.

And for the record, I LIKE Odyssey, and my Steam review of the game is positive. I personally enjoy Odyssey, just like OP, and think the good outweighs the bad. But I don't get angry that other people dislike it.

 

[Biff Stryker]

I just bought a biowaste ton of games from the Steam sales this past weekend. I will not review a single one as I play them because I'm lazy. If the game moves me or is really good I may give it a thumbs up..
Gaming is a harsh world, wouldn't recommend it

 

[CMDR Bao Bao]

This exactly. OP's viewpoint isn't just a poor argument, it's fundamentally damaging to the hobby. The idea that game developers must actively be shielded from criticism, that critics should be silenced, is not just childish, but actively encouraging bad products to be released.

You see it with many games, and other media like movies. A certain subset of fans of a product with mixed reviews will somehow take negative reviews personally and actively crusade against them as if they themselves are being criticized.

And for the record, I LIKE Odyssey, and my Steam review of the game is positive. I personally enjoy Odyssey, just like OP, and think the good outweighs the bad. But I don't get angry that other people dislike it.

I agree with you but I also feel the OP’s frustration a bit. I love ED and am really enjoying Odyssey. I would love to see it fleshed out more the way Horizons was after launch. I think the negative reviews make that less likely. Ultimately that’s FDev’s fault for releasing the game in the state it was in (I quit playing for 7 months when Odyssey was released because I was so dejected.)

There’s another angle to this as well. ED is a game from a niche genre: space sim. Adding parts to that outside of space flight sim further carve that niche. A lot of the criticism of Odyssey is of the form “I hate it because it doesn’t add to the flight simulator.” FDev painted themselves into a bit of a tough spot. People fell in love with the game and become really upset when it doesn’t develop in the direction they want. This issue also could have been managed by releasing a really good product rather than one that was gonna need six months to become playable.

 

[Kynami]

I'll admit I gave it a rather scathing review at release of the DLC. It absolutely earned that review because I gave it a week to settle after launch and take stock of how things actually shook out. Bugs like broken LoD settings making it look like parts of the game were from a PS2 release. Actually several different ways of getting stuck in an Apex taxi in such a way support would be required to recover. Frame rates absolutely in the dumpster. Graphics being incapable of giving what the promotional screenshots promised.

Have I gone back to update the review? Nope. But at the same time Frontier hasn't actually given a decent amount of content to make that DLC worthwhile when 90% of it boils down to steal everything in sight and be a murder hobo otherwise engineering for the new content is basically unobtanium. The data sample minigame isn't good. The FPS mechanics are positively ancient and they after almost a year still haven't gone back to re-balance some of the weapons that are massively under performing. Plasma AR anyone? They mostly papered over the worst problems. The fact that they pretty much skeleton crewed fixing the product and have more recently completely given up on consoles isn't favorable in terms of gaining and maintaining customer trust.

I really haven't played more than a few dozen hours in the past year... and that is still probably several times as much as some of the others I used to play the game with that got even more irate at how substandard the product they received was. Saying we shouldn't have given a negative review is blindly disregarding that FDev blatantly did not respect their customers when they shoved a gold tin-foil wrapped turd out the door as a fully complete product.

There was so much potential that could have been had with the on-foot content. Finding a crashed megaship or two and wandering its twisted wreckage to find data-logs of a doomed voyage. Actually giving some additional stuff around the alien sites that could be explored on foot. Revamping places like Dav's Hope and letting players actually take an elevator down into the depths for additional story pieces. Instead its just a series of cookie cutter outposts to be looted and a very small number of concourse configurations.

 

[Martind Forlon]

In reaction to OP, personally I do not wrote my review about Odyssey yet. On release it was bad, now imo it seems they found solid ground below feets and slowly are moving up. I really like on-foot possibilities and perspective change coming with Odyssey (especially in colonia region it imo changes this game completelly, positive direction, in many aspects). I however really miss information about what is planned or what to expect from this game/dlc further (yes, I look on you dev-diary promised to us in January) and therefore I for now will still wait with review.

 

[CMDR Harada]

Honestly, of all the possible criticisms one can have "crashing twice within the hour" suggests either outdated drivers or 'creative writing'. EDO has performance issues, but it's pretty stable. I've had pretty much no crashes in any version outside of patch day. Also, you can't refund a dlc if you played the main game more than two hours, typically.

It ain't my problem, but it seems you are mostly trying to win an internet argument with him rather than genuinely care how EDO is. I would recommend spending your time on more enjoyable things instead. EDO or otherwise.

OK.. Yeah, creative writing and trolling, you got me ( serious here ), and I admit it. But at this point he's not listening, so I figured WT Heck, might as well go that route too.

The point of the thread was about reviews, and game bashing, on Steam. I ( and many others ) use game reviews on Steam since you have to actually buy the game to leave a review. That plus the forums here, and the pro influencers, have produced a negative pic of the expansion. Given all that, even filtering for recent stuff, it still produces poor results. 'Nuf said for me.

I'm out.

 

[GreySix]

 

[Ian Skippy]

The point of the thread was about reviews, and game bashing, on Steam. I ( and many others ) use game reviews on Steam since you have to actually buy the game to leave a review. That plus the forums here, and the pro influencers, have produced a negative pic of the expansion. Given all that, even filtering for recent stuff, it still produces poor results. 'Nuf said for me.

I'm out.

Oh that makes perfect sense. Especially since you cannot get a refund just trying it can be a bit of a gamble. For what little it is worth, here would be my take on it all (and not trying to drag you back into a discussion, just figured I'd give a more extended take from my perspective):

EDO
Positive

• The gameloops themselves in the installations are the most fleshed out of any in ED. Learning guard routes, sneaking into buildings to disable stuff, the way you can have one person sneak in to disable anti-air defense and another person then pepper the base from above is great for example
• Systems became 'bigger'. It is now very much possible to truly have a home system, and spend most of your time in that system alone doing all kinds of stuff.
• Its very 'immersive'. Walking around is a very logical next step in that sense for ED, and I hope they extend on it. And the visuals are great. Its hard to go back to EDH when you have a good rig/monitor, EDH seems washed out and bland.

Negative

• Performance is still not what it should be. On my 2070S, 32GB and i5 7500 I can play at 4k high/ultra with some FSR, but in situations like ground CZ and some installations it drops to 30'ish. Maybe playable from a console perspective where that is often the norn, but it is far from where I want it to be.
• The grind. And this is from someone who sometimes defends the main game grind. The grind in EDO is atrocious, and cynical. There is also not that much you can do, its basically just upgrading them (one type only per item) so you get more slots for special effects. Picking which four effects you want is essentially the only creative bit, and some mods are way better than others. So its grindy and uncreative, the worst combination for a crafting system.
• The combat itself, without engineering, can be extremely annoying. The weapon switching for every. single. opponent. is just universally declared as being very much not fun. It gets better with good gear as you can engineer yourself around this game design flaw, but it is weird and unneccesary.
• Exo-biology has no 'middle ground'. The basic loop is extremely basic and to most rather boring. On the other end you could manually gather data about all these lifeforms by finding them and noting the details (stuff you see and sysmap properties), and then use that data in statistical analysis software to figure out patterns in where they appear. Its as close to 'real science' as it could be, but it is way to nerdy and boring for most people. In between there is nothing; what it needs to make it fun for most is some kind of faux-sciency mini-games of sorts. They had one in alpha, but it was so horribly they removed it upon our (me included) request.

Summary
A shame there is no demo, as EDO might genuinely be fun to you. It might also be a huge disappointment, unfortunately. Just the few points above can be all one needs to be happy, or all one needs to be very much not happy. For what it is worth, I have as of yet not recommended it to my friends despite me enjoying it. That is mostly because I feel I can overlook some stuff that I know others find much harder to accept. On the bright side, things have improved over the last year quite a bit. Its been slow going, but it all adds up.

Influencers
Just keep in mind these fellows say whatever they think their audience wants to hear. If there is an outrage in the community, they will be outraged. If there is a swell of positivity, they are positive. Its their job to say what their audience already thinks. A good example is Obsidian Ant, who will in one week do a video about how the performance is very bad in EDO and then do a vid about Star Citizen where things are in development and will probably improve with time. Its just a 'ED fans are currently upset, so I better say so to, SC fans are hopeful so I better not be too critical' kinda thing. This goes for most other genres too, not just ED or games. Influencers amplify the prevailing opinion, nothing more.

Forums

• Go to reddit for general ED discussions.
• Use the various sub-forums here to have normal discussions about specific parts of the game.
• The general forums here are for mindless arguing back and forth forever. I've been here since 2014, and the general forums have always been an endless moshpit of 'haters vs fans', 'solo vs open', 'game is dead vs stuff is coming' and so on. These forums are a bit like waldorf and statler: amusing if you take it for what it is, but don't let it influence your enjoyment of the show. If people become too annoying, just flip them on ignore.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

The problem is that the few enthusiastic players playing Horizons

Just wanted to say again that horizons is absolutely amazing and still leaves a very positive experience.

I do hope they go through with their latest implied decree of keeping horizons around unchanged, forever.

 

[Spikey]

STOP THAT we're not here to enjoy Elite

Seriously though, while we're in the 'bash elite/fdev' sort of thing... how many here still play seriously... say 7 hrs a week...


Bill

<<<currently a mindless monday zombie

I got the game years ago while it was in beta. I've played it off and on since, but I've very recently got back into it since Odyssey. To be fair I didn't start until it had been well patched and for now, I've been avoiding the planetary stuff like the plague, so I probably missed many of the initial problems.

Now that I am retired I've been playing the game for anything up to 6 hours a day (more on weekends). I wouldn't say I play it "seriously" as I have little clue as to what I am doing. For example, getting the FSS scanner to work is still a mystery to me, even after reading and watching various tutorials. I know I'll work it out in the end and that it's all part of the "journey" Needless to say, I'm enjoying the game immensely, with all its quirks and "faults".

What I always find amusing/sad with Steam reviews is when someone leaves a negative review after they've played a game for a thousand or two thousand hours.

 

[danteuk]

I posted a negative review of Odyssey because it's terrible. It was almost identical to the Alpha release but maybe slightly worse performance. I actually enjoyed the Alpha, I accepted the issues as 'alpha issues' and just enjoyed it. The release however was suppose to be a full release but apart from some things looking slightly worse and the performance being worse the full release offered nothing that I hadn't already seen in the Alpha.

I really wanted Odyssey, I have 3 Elite accounts ( I'm glad I only got Odyssey for one of them! ), two of them are Elite in exploration and trade, and the other only Elite in exploration, I've playing the game on and off since it's release. I bought a VR headest just for Elite, I've got through 3 HOTAS over the years, just playing Elite ( build quality on HOTAS's is shockingly bad! ).

Odyssey was and is a massive disappointment in every way - features / content / graphics performance / Frontier's official responses, then silence etc

I've often compared Odyssey to Cyberpunk, obviously they are very different games but...
Cyberpunk: I got just after launch, I got playable frame rates and really enjoyed it, it looks stunning, even on my old GFX card, I had maybe 2/3 crash to desktop moments, but no game breaking bugs and I've completed it multiple times.
Odyssey: at launch, frame rates at the ground settlements were unplayable, visually it's nothing close the level of detail in textures or geometry or lighting as Cyberpunk and yet the performance was ( right up to a couple week ago when my PC died ) terrible, the new game play was frankly dull and as 99% of it takes place in ground settlements where the frame rates made it unplayable - I would've / should've asked for my money back - but I believed Frontier would knuckle down and patch it. After 8 months and 10 updates the performance on my old PC was still not really playable in settlements and aside from fixing all the new UI bugs they added ( and were reported during the Alpha ) the updates have done little to improve anything ( sure they added emotes, ground defences and sitting in the bar, but those things should have been there in the first place - most were likely planned for release but got patched in since - just further proving that Odyssey's launch was at least 6 months too soon, more likely a year too soon. )

Either Frontier were lying when they said they were surprised by the poor performance and bad reception of Odyssey or the management was so out of touch with the development team... Mr Braben's apologies did not make me feel any better because there was no explanation of what went wrong and no reasons given for releasing something that clearly wasn't ready ( the release date was set in stone by their financial year end - but they will never admit that ).

 

[Brrokk]

I can't even begin to explain how frustrating the viewpoint OP has shared is. This sort of mindset is one of the reasons why the quality in the gaming industry is in the toilet. The game bashing on steam is entirely justified. When you pay $40 for a product that isn't marketed as early access, you expect a level of polish associated with a fully released title. We received a game that essentially was in a state of early access, it couldn't run on recommended hardware, charging full price and the OP questions why there is negative reviews on steam ...

Idk whether OP understands anything about software development, but what usually happens is that you at least polish the software to a point where it is in an acceptable state for release. You don't just craft the software, skip any form of refinement and bug fixing and go straight to release. I bet you think the criticisms for CP2077 and BF2042 are also unjustified. Its a new trend in the gaming industry for devs to just produce low quality products for game franchises because the market audience is already established and will likely buy the game anyway. Unless people voice their opinions through reviews and make it clear when their software is garbage, they won't change and we will keep getting served poor quality products for the franchises we love. I highly doubt CDPR will ever release a game in as bad a state CP got released in, and I hope that Frontier will never release a game/expansion in the state Odyssey was in as the backlash, the negative reviews and the media criticism has hurt potential sales considerably.

I don't like the way games are marketted today; releasing in unfinished state and bringing out "expansions" to provide missing features. Many publishers are doing this, not just FD. I'm from the era when you bought a disc, whacked it into the drive, and played it for a time depending on how good you found it.

However, by the standards of that era ED is pretty amazing. (We thought the original was amazing just because it managed hidden-line removal). It's also no more costly in real terms than the original. I've played for about 2000 hours and had my money's-worth many times over. For such a brilliant game I overlook a few blemishes.

I don't yet say the same for Odyssey. It's a nice idea, but so far it's so clunky that I'm staying with the Horizons I enjoy so much. I've bought Odyssey to try out, but I'm not going to spend time on a buggy game when I have a very similar and much better one next to it on my hard drive.

 

[Ian Skippy]

Mr Braben's apologies did not make me feel any better because there was no explanation of what went wrong and no reasons given for releasing something that clearly wasn't ready ( the release date was set in stone by their financial year end - but they will never admit that ).

It made it worse for me. It basically was "If only we had known it wouldn't work well for some people, anyway it works great on my old pc so whatevs."

It sounded very much like he was talking over the community to the shareholders. "The problems aren't widespread, we did our work properly, I tested it myself on some old decrepit pc and it is fine."

No David: they are, you guys didn't, you did not and it doesn't. It was an even sleazier version of "I am sorry to hear you are so easily offended." kinda faux-apology.

 

[myothershipisacobraiv]

The only niggle I had with the Brabology was that the line to Elite at the beginning, while true no doubt, seemed canned and thrown in for favourable framing.