CO Word of the Week #3

[vilkas622]

We are also working on the performance not only because it's necessary for the console release but also for PC platforms to allow the creation of huge cities.

I'm sorry but this is a really awful explanation and I hope its a slip up.

This sentence implies that performance targets are required for release on consoles but not on PC. And while that is exactly what we've expected (since a non-performant game will get delisted on console stores), to put it in writing is quite something else. It paints the picture that CO/PDX believes that PC gamers are expected to fork over money for unfinished, early access-like, products. So you can gain revenue and later "finish" the game for other player bases. To just segment an entire population of consumers as lower-tier and undeserving of quality product is an extremely disappointing outcome.

 

[[Delta ²k5]]

If asset importing isn't operational then why are there custom assets literally in the game in the Region Packs trailer?

Developer tools differ from what kind of editor the users get - they also created all other assets in game by importing them in some way.
Likely CO devs has some batch tool to batch import and pack assets, so the stuff from the content creators was delivered to them in raw format and batch imported and detailed with props afterwards.

 

[aaffonso]

As a reminder. I hope people here don't forget to leave a review on Steam. That's a metric they care about more than us complaining here.

 

[MohawkWolfo98]

Even the content creators, who have good relations with CO, are more and more critical about CS2. They are actually going back to CS1 or considering playing completely different titles. It speaks a lot how bad this release was.

Which content creators? I think it’s really brave of them to do so, unlike many popular ones who rigidly can accept this is an acceptable game state.

Its a shame that none of them apart from the less popular ones never investigated any of these mind boggling fail safes or bugs or anything, instead focusing intently on the trivial matters in the end like performance (which shows just how broken this game truly is).

 

[MohawkWolfo98]

As a reminder. I hope people here don't forget to leave a review on Steam. That's a metric they care about more than us complaining here.

That’s true, but CO and Paradox only care about one thing and that’s their wallets. Dont buy the DLC unless u want to support abhorrent business practices.

We got screwed over, just need to move on.

 

[Blackoth]

Thanks for all the feedback and apologies for not having time yesterday to write answers to your questions! I see some already answered so I'll just write a summary that hopefully answers at least some of the concerns raised.

You have the right to feel disappointed for the Editor not being already available. We have no intention to delay its release more than necessary. The asset import feature (where a user imports an asset created in a 3D modeling software to the game) is severely delayed due to various technical issues related to it and given it's mid November now we have zero chance of getting it ready before the Christmas break. When it comes to the map editor we'll see if it can be released before the asset import is ready. Regardless of when the Editor is released it is planned to be supported and improved upon based on the feedback from the creators and modders using it. The delay is most unfortunate but we are doing our best to getting the Editor out as soon as possible.

Gameplay issues are being actively worked on and we've been also looking into some pathfinding errors. Some bugs take longer to fix than others and it would cause added stress to try and keep a specific cadence so at no point have we committed to one. Since we've had weekly patches thus far I found it best to warn that it's not to be expected in the future, with the sole purpose of trying to manage expectations. While the patch cadence is expected to be longer going forward it doesn't mean we have stopped working on bugfixes.

We are also working on the performance not only because it's necessary for the console release but also for PC platforms to allow the creation of huge cities. I'm sensing that most are actually able to play with acceptable performance level if it starts to feel like we should be focusing on the other things more, but we are internally not satisfied with the current situation and will keep working on improving the performance until we are.

I will keep bringing you news every week, hopefully good ones but we must be able to discuss setbacks as well, if more occur. For those wanting to leave the game behind, I fully understand and respect that and I hope you will find your way back again later in time. We're not going anywhere.

At least slap an early access tag on it so future buyers are not fooled into thinking this game is in an acceptable state. It would have helped immensely if you started with the early access classification.

 

[MohawkWolfo98]

We're investigating the bug reports and fixing issues. There's a lot of people enjoying the game so we are not looking to pull it of the market.

Actions speak louder than words: patches will be released and the game improved. I'll share the latest news next week and I hope to see you all then!

I agree. Actions do speak louder than words, and with respect, your decision to force your developers to release an unfinished products speaks far more than the volumes of dev diary’s, insights, words and the marketing team obviously excellent job of selling a game that wasn’t ready for release. There has been no transparency whatsoever.

I respect you for coming here to chat, it must not be easy as the CEO, but ultimately this game is fundamentally and by design not what was promised.

 

[Askorti]

It's humans working at Colossal Order! Just like you and me. So go ahead and throw the first stone if you never did misstakes.

Yes, they're humans indeed, and humans make mistakes, that is true.
It is a mistake to overestimate how ready your game is for release. But it is not a mistake, but a conscious decision to then release it anyway.
It's not like CO and Paradox did not know that the game wasn't ready. They couldn't possibly be surprised by its state unless some astronomical level of incompetence was involved. So they knew what they were releasing.

Also, the way I see it the responsibility for this situation lies mostly with Paradox and not CO. CO made the game, yes, but it's Paradox who market it and actually make decisions on when to release it.

As such, any apologies from CO's CEO ring kind of hollow, because, unless I'm mistaken, she's not the person who's even responsible for this situation in the first place. While she might be responsible for some of the communication on the part of CO community managers(if they're even CO employees, and not paradox people), it is at the end of the day Paradox that calls the shots here.

 

[purplegamer]

What I'm hearing is that you're shifting priority to focus on getting the console editions ready for launch, presumably because you want to see that sweet sweet influx of cash in time for a holiday/quarterly earnings call. Instead, if you have any respect for the people who have already paid for your product, you will focus on ensuring the live environment meets a level of quality not currently met. This includes providing tools which were communicated to paying customers would be available in days, not months as you're currently claiming.

This is disappointing, frustrating, and for me has caused a significant loss of respect and trust with CO and Paradox both.

 

[TheMax85]

What I'm hearing is that you're shifting priority to focus on getting the console editions ready for launch, presumably because you want to see that sweet sweet influx of cash in time for a holiday/quarterly earnings call. Instead, if you have any respect for the people who have already paid for your product, you will focus on ensuring the live environment meets a level of quality not currently met. This includes providing tools which were communicated to paying customers would be available in days, not months as you're currently claiming.

This is disappointing, frustrating, and for me has caused a significant loss of respect and trust with CO and Paradox both.

I dont understand it like that. There are people waiting for a preordered console version. This is more a message to calm them down than to bother us PC players with delays. Optimizing the performance enough to be able to launch there is also required for us PC players as the current situation on performance is so bad that it should be absolute overkill as soon as all the content / anminations / mods come in that everyone wishes. You just can't have one without the other.

 

[OillyRag]

For those of us who aren't so much interested in city painting: What does that mean for the myriad of bugs and issues with the simulation? When will we see improvements to the gaming part of the game?

I too am more interested in the gaming side of this 'game'
Can I ask for some difficulties and balancing to the economy because right now i don't have to even glace at the budget panel because I know:
A it's broken &
B the government subsidy will take care of everything anyway

I'm not a a painter I'm a gamer, sounds ridiculous even having to say that in a gaming forum doesn't it

 

[Reid777]

Which content creators? I think it’s really brave of them to do so, unlike many popular ones who rigidly can accept this is an acceptable game state.

Its a shame that none of them apart from the less popular ones never investigated any of these mind boggling fail safes or bugs or anything, instead focusing intently on the trivial matters in the end like performance (which shows just how broken this game truly is).

Well, maybe better not mention them by name, but those the ones whose names pop-up quite frequently. They are still pretty mild in their videos though, but on the other community platforms (Reddit, Discord) they are much more open in expressing their disappointment.

I think it is unfortunate, but most of the creators are more focused on visual side of the game, not really concerned about deeper mechanics.
On the other hand I suspect that at least some of them were also very surprised that the build they were playing, ended up being so close to release version. They used so many times "beta version" comment in regards to many issues, I believe that at least some of them were genuinely convinced that those issues will be sorted before release. I am certain that quite a few of them feel bad about taking part in promotional campaign leading to this release.

 

[unmerged(524934)]

I dont understand it like that. There are people waiting for a preordered console version. This is more a message to calm them down than to bother us PC players with delays. Optimizing the performance enough to be able to launch there is also required for us PC players as the current situation on performance is so bad that it should be absolute overkill as soon as all the content / anminations / mods come in that everyone wishes. You just can't have one without the other.

Don't be misled by the "performance is bad" narrative, there's a whole lot more wrong with this release than the performance issues, and unfortunately *those* problems only start to surface once you're a few hours into the game.

Focusing on performance issues, as @co_martsu has been doing, is pretty clever because that's something they can do something about (albeit slowly, seemingly). It's all the other problems the game has which she *doesn't* talk about which bothers me.

 

[Jermayan]

At least slap an early access tag on it so future buyers are not fooled into thinking this game is in an acceptable state. It would have helped immensely if you started with the early access classification.

When they announced before launch that the game wasn't meeting their expectations is when they should've announced that they were still releasing but in an early access format while they finish polishing. Or that they were delaying launch to address these issues.

 

[Skeksis25]

To all of those here that are that much angry:

It's humans working at Colossal Order! Just like you and me. So go ahead and throw the first stone if you never did misstakes.
Remember that this is just a game. They try to correct it and it's not the end of the world.

I only truely hope that the team does not have to crunch because of all this.
And that they can get some good rest arround christmas and recharche batteries so that they can bring us what we all wished for without a burnout.

I am pretty sure that studio and publisher learned their lesson, so calm down.

I'm sorry, but what world do you live in? In just about any job, if the company deceives the customers, lies about what they are selling, create false expectations and still charge a premium for the product, there will be fallout. Its not a "mistake". Nowhere else would customers be expected to "just calm down" and things may get fixed at some unknown point in the future. Just about any other company would have to engage in refunds and make goods for this. Start handing out coupons and shit. But somehow, CO should get a pass and its the customers who need to "calm down"?

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting people start harassing them or make personal attacks. But people at the very least should have the right to express their frustration on the forums, leave negative reviews at various outlets and just vent about being sold a bill of goods.

 

[Misha02]

Thanks for all the feedback and apologies for not having time yesterday to write answers to your questions! I see some already answered so I'll just write a summary that hopefully answers at least some of the concerns raised.

You have the right to feel disappointed for the Editor not being already available. We have no intention to delay its release more than necessary. The asset import feature (where a user imports an asset created in a 3D modeling software to the game) is severely delayed due to various technical issues related to it and given it's mid November now we have zero chance of getting it ready before the Christmas break. When it comes to the map editor we'll see if it can be released before the asset import is ready. Regardless of when the Editor is released it is planned to be supported and improved upon based on the feedback from the creators and modders using it. The delay is most unfortunate but we are doing our best to getting the Editor out as soon as possible.

Gameplay issues are being actively worked on and we've been also looking into some pathfinding errors. Some bugs take longer to fix than others and it would cause added stress to try and keep a specific cadence so at no point have we committed to one. Since we've had weekly patches thus far I found it best to warn that it's not to be expected in the future, with the sole purpose of trying to manage expectations. While the patch cadence is expected to be longer going forward it doesn't mean we have stopped working on bugfixes.

We are also working on the performance not only because it's necessary for the console release but also for PC platforms to allow the creation of huge cities. I'm sensing that most are actually able to play with acceptable performance level if it starts to feel like we should be focusing on the other things more, but we are internally not satisfied with the current situation and will keep working on improving the performance until we are.

I will keep bringing you news every week, hopefully good ones but we must be able to discuss setbacks as well, if more occur. For those wanting to leave the game behind, I fully understand and respect that and I hope you will find your way back again later in time. We're not going anywhere.

I think it is important to remember that none of the three main issues, editor, gameplay and performance, were unknown to CO before launch. In fact, they were well-aware of them, and deliberately concealed the facts until people have already come aboard. What really irritates me is their continued non-response to this misleading practice, and labelling the entire situation, a hole which they dug themselves, as "unfortunate".

 

[DJQuad]

If the CO team can't keep up with the demand, why don't they hire more people?

Because that would make way too much sense.

 

[Licenturion]

I think it is important to remember that none of the three main issues, editor, gameplay and performance, were unknown to CO before launch. In fact, they were well-aware of them, and deliberately concealed the facts until people have already come aboard. What really irritates me is their continued non-response to this misleading practice, and labelling the entire situation, a hole which they dug themselves, as "unfortunate".

To be fair, I think that editor, asset packs, mod platform etc were probably 85 percent done and ready to go not long after the 1.0 release and they had no clue of the horrors to come at that time with the performance aspects.

From the official posts it feels like they hired some external Unity consultant to help look into performance and basically discovered they have to redo/rework all assets and LODs by hand from scratch. I saw this exact thing happen with a few other Unity games I follow as well (altough on a smaller scale and in actual Early Acces)

This is a massive work, the underlying engine probably needs some tweaks to support those reworked assets and as a result the mods framework, map editor assets and the free content creator map assets all need revision. On top of that they have a gazillion of gameplay and technical bugs to solve int between this. With a fairly small team so much work is probably a huge challenge. And in december usually not a lot of work gets done with all the holidays and leftover leave days people have still saved up.

I think if they had knew beforehand they had to redo all assets they would probably delayed PC port as well. But once the cat is out of the bag...

 

[DJQuad]

If they decided to hire more people now, it would only delay upcoming patches. Remember that all new hires have to be onboarded and brought up to speed, and to do that someone who is already there needs to be diverted from what they are currently doing to said training of those new hires.

So while it might help in the long term, in the short term it would actually be detrimental to their release cadence.

This is true for software development in general, but it is not necessarily true for Unity development. There are devs and even entire studios that do contract work that focus on Unity development.

 

[alcarcalimo2364]

Some of us are enjoying the game. I'm voting not to pull it off the market as some have suggested.

Are there fixes that need to be made? Absolutely. You can search through my post history, I have my own criticisms about things that should be fixed or improved. Am I disappointed that mods and assets are going to take longer? Sure. Still, I already have 140 hours in the game. I have got a fair amount of enjoyment out of it despite its flaws. The game isn't going anywhere. This isn't some single player rpg you play in a week and put down. The game will improve with time, and I'm excited to see where it goes. I get being upset with the state of the game. I'm not as upset as everyone else, and don't want to say that people's opinions aren't valid, but I think it would do everybody a world of good to just take a breath. Right now, it is what it is. There's nothing we can do to change the situation besides wait. If you can't play the game in its current state, then put it down and come back. CS1 was very barebones on release. It didn't have the same amount of bugs, but also, the game was much smaller and the simulation was meager. Still, I could see the bones and understand the potential. I see the same in CS2. If you can't, that's fine. Put it down. I'm going to continue to enjoy what I have and wait for improvements.