It’s a reinforcement of an idea that delays are a sign of mismanagement. It could have used time travel and a proper development cycle where all the people know what game are they making, not doing it on a go trying to preserve the vision of the trailer.
Oh, I see. Yeah, that makes sense.
It does not, for sure. But I think it’s fair to say it will at least be more polished in August than it would in April, even if it’s still rough.
Whether the delay improves it or not will be anyone’s guess, unless you can compare an April demo against the final game. I’m happy for the delay, though, as it’ll give me time to continue with the pile of games I’m currently trying to make my way through, without skipping out yet again for something new.
To me, a last minute delay is a strong signal that the game has problems. It is most probably true that delaying the game will be better for the game than releasing now (although not always!), but since us gamers are just looking for signals on whether a game is worth time and money, a delay should shift expectations down and not up.
True. If a week ago they thought that they can still release the game in a month and now they realize they need 5 more months it feels wrong. Signifies mismanagement as well as readiness to release an unfinished product. They’re not ready to release game that needs 4 more months of full-time development. Would they release it next month if they’d calculated it only needs 2 more months?
Given the lack of notice I suspect the mismanagement is a fight between developer and publisher. The former knowing full well it needs more time, the latter unwilling to listen until the last minute.
Strikes me as a very likely explanation. Although it still causes some level of worry how it will all come out.
Their blog explains a lot of why they made the delay announcement. It actually seems reasonable that all the testing feedback led to revisiting where it was headed.
Although, it does suggest they didn’t expect the playtesting to go the way it did, either.
This gives me hope this might well end up being one of their better 4X games, that they took the feedback to heart and are trying to tailor the game to it. More or less and fairly or not but their 4X games are beloved from a concept and style point of view but are apparently completely tepid from a gameplay perspective. It’s not clear though that “good enough AI” is anywhere yet on their radar. Most style-point, shallow end of the pool 4X games today just toss “barbarians” at you to keep you preoccupied in the early game anyway.
Seems like reasonable reasons to delay and I could see how they would want to take a few months to dial those things in. Sure, you can do that in post-release updates but you only make a first impression once. And with how crowded the Steam marketplace is, I think that first impression is important.
There is a 10-day openDev play period for owners starting a couple days ago. Anyone try it or plan on trying? If it’s good I’d consider buying and jumping in quickly.
Thanks for the heads up! I’m usually not too keen at playing early/under baked strategy games but I’d be curious to take a look at least. Need to get it installed and I’ll see if I can poke around with it in the next few days.
Cool, keep us informed! I may break down and just get it without a recommendation though :-)
Wasn’t able to try this. Got it installed and changed my resolution to ultrawide and now the mouse is completely glitched in game, it keeps blipping to the left edge of the screen no matter what I do. I’m sure I can dig around in a settings file somewhere and change the resolution back, but… other things to play and I’d rather play games in my downtime than try to get the alpha working. :)
Picked it up yesterday figuring that it was a game I would buy at release anyway, so I might as well take a look. Yesterday and today look to be busy days, so I probably won’t get too far with it until Monday, but first impression it does not feel much like Civ. Early choices seem interesting. My only negative so far was that the map may look nice, but I often cannot see important stuff like elevation/necessary routes.
That’s encouraging
Map readability has always been a huge issue for me too! EL map is very busy and it’s hard to distinguish between special resources, villages, temples and cities. I spent most of my time zoomed-out in EL which defeats the purpose of having such a nice map.
We’re supposed to be able to watch 3 hours of Twitch videos from official streamers to get access to the OpenDev, but it’s not working for me. After 3 hours there should be a Twitch drop that once claimed, triggers a Game2gether gift, that grants access to the opendev on Steam. I’ve had videos playing overnight and today while doing other things, but no Twitch drop for me.
Edit: OK, now I’m making progress on the Twitch drop to get access to the opendev. I had to pick a live stream.