| Title | Planetfall: the death of trust |
| Author | Tom Chick |
| Posted in | Game diaries |
| When | March 30, 2021 |
After forty turns of searching for the Psi-Fish I'm supposed to defeat, and whose dwellings are supposed to be abundant, and with whom I'm supposed to be at war, I have found no Psi-Fish..
ouch! It was a great diary, though. And I am still going to try to learn the game at some point … It’s like telling us about a great looking woman and how lucky you were, and then she farted.
This is an example of why I am more willing than Tom to break out the cheat codes and take matters into my own hands (which of course is a tremendously slippery slope to Bad Things). I consider Planetfall a great game, a 10 on the 1 to 10 scale and yet it does have some bugs and flaws. In my recent resurgence to play Galactic Empire mode, I encountered some crash bugs as well as the same Where Are the Psi-Fish? bug that Tom did. The crashes were mostly recoverable b/c of autosaves and i didn’t get burned as hard as Tom on the Psi-Fish bug - as soon I failed to see Psi-Fish in the initial setup, I used a cheat code and was like, Yep back to the menu to choose a different mission.
(As a side note here, I’m pretty sure that on the missions where you are supposed to kill an NPC faction, not only do you see the NPC on the first turn, but they specifically reveal one of the two NPC dwellings on the first turn, as part of the setup. If you start an NPC mission and don’t see that NPC faction immediately, it’s time to restart (or at least fire up a cheat code to check).)
There’s a meta-issue here in that I am more comfortable than Tom in using cheat codes and mods to optimize my personal enjoyment of a game. There are risks to this approach and I do understand Tom’s POV that he’s paying for professional game devs to do the work, but if I held Devs to a standard of perfection I wouldn’t get to play much. On the other hand, sometimes I do ruin games by cheating/modding too much. It’s very subjective. YMMV. Professional driver, closed track. Etc.
Ouch. Tough read.
To be fair, I don’t have “a standard of perfection”! Triumph has known about this specific issue since shortly after they released the galactic empire mode. They’ve had three updates since then and still haven’t fixed it. That’s not “they’re not perfect”. That’s “they’re not fixing things they know are broken”.
But otherwise, I agree with your point. It’s trivially easy to work around this is you know how to identify it. If, for instance, I’d known the Psi-Fish were supposed to show up from the start, this would be a very different write-up. And I doubt there are many (any?) other issues like this keeping the game from working. But I don’t trust Triumph at this point, and I’d rather spend my time with games made by developers I trust.
-Tom
I understand quite well. I have a similar attitude towards the devs of Pathfinder Kingmaker - there was some absolutely brilliant design in there but also some shocking blindness to the played experience and also a repeated disregard to the players need for information such that I’m done with Kingmaker, permanently. Also, although their next game should be deep in my wheelhouse I am going to wait for a full release and some actual reviews. The trust, it is not there.
Oh man, this is so disappointing. I was really enjoying the diary, and it sounded good enough that I’d queued up PF to play once I’m done with The Outer Worlds. Guess I’m going to uninstall it again now. Like Tom, I just can’t justify investing my time in a game (or publisher) that doesn’t respect it.
I feel like there is something specific Triumph can do to address this particular issue without a big investment of dev resources - clarify and expand the Galactic Empire Mode tool tips and ingame help - they are inaccurate or incomplete and lacking in explanatory effect in a number of cases
Some specific examples:
Many players are confused by the yellow Trophy Cup objectives (which are really alternate Primary Objectives) being listed alongside the white Secondary Objectives - the Trophy Cup icon makes sense in hindsight but is not obvious
Also, many objectives talk about building “specializations” when they actually count exploitations - this needs to be clarified
The Absorb a New Colony Empire Quest is not clearly worded - my impression is that a new colony or colonist of a faction not in your current control must be added but the quest doesn’t say that
Note - I wonder if some of these issues are translation related
Ouch indeed, and this is one of the times I am sad to be right.
I did have a feeling about this when you mentioned Psi fish hunting.
Anyway, wrt updating, my understanding (don’t quote me) is that because the game is multi-platform and multi lingual, updating anything takes a while.
Anyway, a reliable source tells me your game diaries have been read @tomchick so maybe this will be changed?
Also,minor nitpick, but I think the chances are less than one in three. You need to roll pangaea map + this victory condition. And you could still win the map, just through brute force most likely.
I had it happen to me once in 600 + hours :(.
I should hope so, but me writing about it shouldn’t have anything to do with whether it gets fixed. They’ve known about it for five months now.
Right, that’s what I meant. On a planet with the Psi-Fish Abundant trait and corresponding Capable Pets mission, you have a one in three chance of being shunted into a dead end. There are three options for landmass on a map: islands, continents, and pangea. One of those three options – pangea – will make the Capable Pets mission to unlock the Void Lure literally impossible.
-Tom
I am not digging this brave new world of 4X games throwing on tons of doos dads rather than fixing the basic, broken game.
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my theory is that doodads distract from bad design. it’s easier to throw glitter on a turd than to make an eclair.
<puts down glittering eclair, loses appetite>
My theory is “$$$$”. You charge for new shiny doodads for the charm bracelet, because having “Fixed the bracelet’s broken clasp!” isn’t going to move new units.
That’s what it boils down to!
Well, they ain’t getting my money! I learned my lesson after Age of Wonders 2, Age of Wonders Shadow Magic, Age of Wonders III, and all the expansions for Age of Wonders III! Fool me 10 times, fool me… won’t get fooled again!!!
(Age of Wonders 1 was great, though.)
That’s not at all what this is. This is an unpatched minor flaw in one of the doo dads themselves. I understand Tom’s frustration and certainly hope Triumph fixes it soon, but it does sound like a problem that’s pretty easy to avoid once you know about it.
It’s your option, of course, to demand 100% perfection in all aspects of the strategy games you buy but, well, you’re not going to be buying many games that way.
Getting dumped into an impossible win condition that you won’t know about until many wasted hours is not a minor flaw, friend.
Nor is 5 months “soon”.
Nor is expecting the simplest of one line config file values to be changed to fix a game-breaking bug translate to demanding 100% perfection.
This isn’t game breaking. It means you can’t win that one map (which I actually don’t understand anyway, can’t you just win using the normal victory conditions instead?). So you quit that one map and move on, no harm no foul. It’s annoying and yes, you’d hope they’d have patched it by now, but it’s certainly no reason to pass on a great game like this - especially since knowing about it makes you immune to it.