docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_K3ziSxT9zcUUGCddS4sF1uNJTWHSbOwB1CQX2Rx4Uo - THE LIST Don't buy this game, or anything else they make unless it's completed properly.
Mando, if you read this, my friend is one of the two developers on Sonic: Utopia, a fan made 3D momentum-based platformer. Its being hailed as "The best best-feeling 3D sonic game ever made," and even in its demo state, it lives to the hype. If you have the time, please take a look, I'd love to hear your thoughts!
I'm one of the devs they let go, so weird to see my name in a you-tube video. As the teams "Rigger" at the time I can't tell you how upsetting it was for me to be promised to make something new but then being given "assets" to plot into the game.
@Eddie Turbine > buys game in the first month of release > is surprised that he got duped What's better is bitching to someone who was tied to the project, when they had nothing to do with project management or the released end product. Kinda like bitching at a cashier because the store doesn't sell your favorite brand of preparation H. Tl;dr suck it up, your weakness & stupidity is showing
Juno here. Interesting to see the game getting some coverage lately. It was a pretty big disaster. There was a lot of potential there which is why I signed on. Just a lot of people who didn't look at the big picture, and ran it into the ground.
Sorry you had to go through that shit. Lack of communication in a job is terrible to deal with, and you signed up with the best of intentions for a small studio. I hope you're in a better environment now!
For sure, I appreciate the reply. Things are a lot better, and StarForge is what propelled me on my career in PR and games. While it was a big flop, I definitely learned a lot from the experience; it's definitely the best teacher. I am working at a much better place now and more opportunities just keep opening up!
Oh noes, wall of text inbound: Oh hi Juno, I remember you from the old forums. I think we also briefly spoke on reddit via PM or in some thread ages ago, but some time after the community in StarForge went downhill as the forums were locked. Seems like a hazy distant memory these days. What a wild story it was, though, regardless of the anger people (including me) felt it's kinda amusing to look back now. I mean we can't get our money and time back so one might as well chuckle at it rather than think of punching the wall, I suppose. I still remember Sorin or Soren or something (was that one of the devs names? Maybe I'm also mixing up names now) posting pictures of the two (I think they were two initially, maybe 3) in some living-room-looking place where they turned to smile into the camera while wearing white socks. It wasn't really professional looking. Not at all. But it kinda gave them that indie / average (IT) guy look, you know? Almost charming again for other folks, representing the opposite of the "greedy" mainstream publisher people in suits just trying to milk the customer with streamlined games. It only really went up for a while. I remember them later posting pictures of their "new offices" and them mentioning they had gems on the dev team including former Bioware people. And then, it somehow seemed to go downhill and that fast in a short amount of time. Despite some tears or veins popping due to anger, I think StarForge is one of the necessary corpses on the way to perfected or great sandbox games. A natural process where many try, and in the end and with better technology, more refined products make it. There's nowadays many interesting or upcoming games with lots of potential. *Shameless Ad* My next bet for a comparable game (but on the next level) would be "Dual Universe" (DU), currently in development. It combines classic building experience people know from Minecraft and the likes with a single shard and emergent gameplay people know from EvE Online - but you control a character, not a ship most of the time. First person, basically. The development team based in France also seems "coherent" so far. To give an example: Unlike the old team from StarForge that "happily" planned and developed away until they ran out of funds somewhere, the DU team is publicly present on gaming related events such as E3 or Gamescom where you can see and speak to them. They also invited people into their offices last year and stand behind the vision that they also so far think they can reach with the technology they work on. I dunno how much money the StarForge team got back in the day, but DU so far managed to obtain roundabout a 750.000 $ or so (maybe a bit less or more) from the kickstarter campaign and then additionally over a million or up to 3 to 4 from investors. I'd wager that is more than StarForge could get together. In short: so far I am very optimistic and the community is, too. There were a few Pre-Alpha tests so far and things seem to progress. We might see a regular release late 2018 or 2019 perhaps, if all goes well. I have no idea where you are now, Juno, or what you do and whether your new place might put you in opposition to being engaged in other games on a deeper level (professional or private). But I really suggest you check out Dual Universe if you have not already - if not as professional place then maybe simply for gaming in the future, as a hobby. And if you find it interesting enough to sign up on the community forums, let me know here and I'll gladly give you pointers or maybe a player group to work with, should your interest go that far. Take care, until next time.
Incompetence, with a side of arrogance and self entitlement. I am friends with one of the artists that they sacked, we attended the same school for digital media. In fact, it was during our hiring expo that my class was approached by the two original developers. They were incredibly unprofessional, dressed like they just rolled out of bed, and the conversation was very unpleasant. At first I thought they were just underclassmen with a chip on their shoulders coming around to checkout/make fun of our work. It wasn't until they dropped a card on my table that I figured out they were representing a company. I knew right then something was very wrong, and did not follow up on the request for contact. I feel bad for my friend however, his tough position lead him to signing on with them... and throughout his stay with the company it was one giant red flag after another. It was a situation you see jokingly around the internet. Step 1: Have idea Step 2: Hire people Step 3: ??? Step 4: Profit Step three should have been hard work, dedication, and maintaining a line of communication with their backers... but you all got, well you know.... nothing.
The flack that Unity gets is often frustrating to me. Unity isn't the problem and there are a lot of good games made in it. The problem is talentless developers using it poorly. Here are list of great games: Pillars of Eternity, Shadow Run, Endless Space, Endless Legend, Thomas Was Alone, The Sexy Brutale, Ori and the Blind Forest, Kerbal Space Program, Oxenfree, Hollow Knight...and what they have in common is they were all done in Unity. They are good games that enjoyed both critical and commercial success, good things can be done with Unity. That wasn't even a complete list either, just games that I have played personally and that I know used Unity.
Endless Space can be buggy AF. Like planets no longer being clickable, UI elements lingering around when they should no longer be displayed, that kinda stuff.
Thank you for mentioning that this wasn't Unity's fault. As a developer using Unity it worries me that some people just don't even pay attention to games when they run on Unity.
im surprised then that you wouldnt have mentioned something about the part where he said "unity is for non programmers" then goes on to say cuz they just buy pre made assets but what he was actually referring to are asset flippers. unreal engine is designed for non programmers cuz of the blueprint system but unity, for anyone that isnt an asset flipper, is programming intensive especially if you want it to look and feel like anything more than just "good enough". even with pro grade pre made assets a game will run like crap if you lack in the programming department.
OK seriously I heard so many people saying bad things to the channel why so? What really happened? Wjy are people not enjoying the critic and some of his.. "things?" Did he do something wrong? And more important why is he bald now?!
@@MineSlimeTV THe easiest to answer is his baldness, i believe since last year NC has shown signs of baldness, i dont think its anything serious he just so happen to be getting bald early, i know plenty of people who has that. So the channel awesome fiasgo... its a long story but tldr they mistreated several emplyees of the channel, there are rape claims on that other guy who owns channel awesome (Mike something), covering up the Jewario thing and a bunch of other stuff, its a nightmare. I recoomend the videos on it by Quinton, The Right Opinion and Thegamerfrommars ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-FvedKSaHCBQ.html ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-fpcSLjBYYjs.html ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-8NcI-2ih-84.html On top of looking up the whole Document thing with several alegations on what Channel Awesome did, its horrible.
@@WTFooLL its a rather messy and convoluted subject, guess some people just dont bother, others dont really wanna talk about it for personal reasons, some dont care. Some of it is pretty fucked up like the whole Jewario thing. Its just a mess.
Except Starbound is a steaming pile of space garbage. Once you've played for an hour, you've seen the entire game. No manner of infinite star systems will fix that.
@@InternetHydra In the end, No Man's Sky came on top compared to the other two. The game was once a laughing stock at launch, but now has surpassed both of them.
Imhotep sucking 20 bucks out of my wallet was a visual I didn't know I didn't want.
7 лет назад
StarForge was your typical garbage open world early access crafting survival game that got hyped up because the trend of garbage open world early access crafting survival games didn't exist at the time. So I guess you could say that this game was a trend-setter? I would however like to point out that using store bought assets isn't automatically a bad thing. Empyrion for example uses a ton of assets from the Unity store and it's actually an amazing game.
Yeah, pretty sure I recognized Alien Bug 104 from it, in fact. But yeah, I really like Empyrion. Even in its current EA state, it's actually, y'know, a game. And the dev team is really involved and clearly cares about the project. I joined during Alpha 6 and since then I've had so much fun in Empyrion. :)
I think that part of the problem with this game is that the devs couldn't figure out what a minimum shippable product would look like that they could build on top of. They let their imaginations run wild with what features they wanted to include, many of which were too complex or counterproductive and it all wound up as an incoherent mess
@@troodon1096 star citizen and no mans sky have both proven not to be the case. Its just impacient people like you dont know things take time, as both are nowadays very good games.
Despite being one of those burned by StarForge (I bought it when it hit steam) I'm glad it happened. You couldn't be more right when you said 'it's a monument for early access abuse" - I think a game like this was bound to happen, something too hyped up, with extreme feature creep and abusive developers just everything that could go wrong all in one game. It's games like StarForge that encouraged steam to stop inflows of cheap and terrible games littering their store. The consumer market is now far more cautious with early access games. Developers both genuine and dickish can learn from this game and see what went wrong - it'll teach good developers to not feature creep; while at the same time it teaches developers after a quick buck that the market for cheating/scamming a community isn't a successful one. A StarForged was always doomed to happen. I'm glad it happened relatively early (even if it's only within the last few years we've truly seen its total fallout) so that hopefully we'll never see anything quite on the same scale of fuckery in the early access games industry again.
Steam still has an inflow of cheap, terrible games on their store. Plenty of expensive, terrible games too. Steam doesn't give a shit either way. They get their paychecks even if the customers are the ones who get fucked in the end.
@@Malikyte13 in fact the only difference between then and now is that the cheap, terrible games are usually pornography. Because while most gamers are aware of how easily an EA game can be a scam, far too many of them are willing to think with their smaller heads.
The overlain soundbyte of the scream as the creature is falling at 3:34 is one of the best feats of comedic genius I've seen online. You're my fucking hero, dude
Could you do a DoW 3 episode? It's a baffling display of the developers taking everything good the two prior installments made, then throwing it away for absolutely no reason
They threw it away because of terrible decisions made in upper management to hop on genre bandwagons. You know, there is already plenty of MOBA games out there, and these publishers wanna make their own MOBA-ish game by taking an IP everyone loved and ruining it by turning it into a name for their crappy bandwagon attempt.
I remember how excited I was for this after seeing the initial tech demo trailer and watching the Yogscast play it. I was so naive back then, it's amazing the sheer amount of games that have come along since this that have exploited early access. So glad I took the advice of a friend and never got suckered in.
One game that might not have been recommended yet is Pathologic. It's somewhat in the same vein as EYE, but made by Russians instead of the French, as in it's a foreign made genre-mix that plays around with abstract and esoteric ideas that's given an odd mystique by it's wonky translation. And it also has a total remake on the horizon.
I'd also recommend their other game The Void/Tugor which shares alot of the mystique and atmosphere as it, although the gameplay and story are different. And there's an HD version for Pathologic that fixes alot of bugs and translation errors out btw. But he should definitely check out Ice Pick Lodge and their games.
When I was a high school senior with practically no money, I donated $100 to the indie-gogo campaign both for the interesting rewards (which were never made good on) and because I had made a lot of friends and felt at home in the community and we all believed that there would be an enormous pay-off. Dystopia unfolded dramatically. I do believe once things began to be deleted, a particular forum member did archive the remains, but to excavate that could only be depressing and shed no new light. As Juno said, the Devs were absent on the forums. Eventually they did bring in a team member who was oriented toward the community affairs ("Right Click"?) who, I recall, did a number of bannings of popular forum members who were disgruntled and openly critical of Code Hatch. Confusing, traumatic - strange memories.
As a software developer I really don't think there was any maliciousness here. It's a common problem with overconfident developers to overpromise and miss-manage expectations. At this point you either swallow your ego; admit your in too deep; cut back on features and carve out a smaller but functional game or double down and hack together a broken, unmaintainable mess.
It wasn't borderline fraud. It was outright fraud. None of the content in their original promotional video on Steam was in the purchasable version of the game at any point, and all of it was from an earlier build.
The sad thing is that they actually had ores spawning randomly underground in some of their earlier alpha builds before they started stripping out features.
@@Fragenzeichenplatte it may haven’t really aged well,but it was funny for it’s time. I have nothing wrong with this comment,I just wanted to say that-
Thank you! I've been looking for that Expedition book for like 25 years. I thought it was The great Expedition no wonder I couldn't find it and nobody new what I was talking about.
The digging immediately strikes me. I'm pretty sure I saw an identical system implemented into a little Blitz3D demo centered around not Mario wandering around a sandbox world. That was about 20 years ago.
I know I'm late to the party, but it speaks leagues about Steam's Early Access when of the twelve original games lined up: three are completely removed from the store (StarForge, Patterns, Under The Ocean); three are still in, or removed the tag but are in similar states as early access (123 Kick It, Drunken Robot Pornography, Kinetic Void); one is a dead F2P title (Gear Up); only 5 are "completed" (Arma 3, Gnomoria, Kenshi, Kerbal Space Program, Prison Architect).
I remember playing this game before they added loads of the crap content. It was fun, just building a base, surviving waves of worms, progressively getting bigger and opening chests to get weirder and weirder guns. This is a shame.
For example, instead 100 star systems on release, there will only be 5, also the number of moons is being cut down by ~75% for the upcoming 'alpha' 3.0.
It's from a translated Gamestar interview with Chris Roberts and is accurate. Him saying 3.0 would be out before Christmas last year was a terrible mistake, but not unpredictable. I've been thinking of possibly doing a follow-up video that combines some stuff I learned (or got updated) about a few games that I've covered that would include Star Citizen. There's just too little that's happened good or bad that I think would fill a worthwhile sequel video. Stuff like systems being cut down that dramatically for launch isn't crazy to me, because like I said in the first video Chris Roberts gets to decide what the release version will be now and there's no telling what that will entail anymore.
Watching this 4 years later and it's funny how badly this compares now to No Man's Sky which was a bigger critical disaster but has just released it's, like, seventeenth? major content update and is now considered a success story. Also the physics based movement system makes me think that this is the second ever Strand-type game after trespasser?
Funny that I get this again in my recommended feed, I had such high hopes for this game but alas the devs fucked it up, although I did make some friends through that journey on the game's old steam group chat. Cheers everyone.
Great review. This is a textbook example of what Jim Sterling and others referred to as "asset-flipping". On a sidenote, I love the fact you frequently use SWAT 4 background music in your reviews. ;-) And Stronghold music too. Very good choices.
Oh, no, asset flipping is very different. Asset flipping is literally buying a demo for a game and selling it as if it were a complete game. Because people did that. The one thing they'd actually develop for the games were trading cards - because they could scrape additional revenue from them as well.
There’s another unity survival game called Empyrion: Galactic Survival that seems very similar to StarForge, but it actually works and is a lot of fun.
I actually have StarForge in my Steam Library for some reason - I don't even remember how I got it! I'm tempted to actually try downloading it and booting it up, more out of morbid curiosity than anything logical.
hell yeah. the cheats were pretty fun in Shogo as well. you add another dimension to the game by cheating to play as a guy in the mobile suit levels and vice versa. You could also play multiplayer as either a mobile suit or infantry.
the damn plot twist at about 11:10. I've never heard of starforge but throughout the video, certain ui parts seemed to look familiar to me. It finally made sense when you said they also made Reign of Kings, on which I have 40 hours.
They probably realised part way through that it was a bigger project than they anticipated, then they figured they'd just throw a bunch of stuff together to at least have something to release.
Oh god, the nostalgia. It was one of those games I had really high hopes for. It's sad to look back on a game so awesome and to remember how bad it flopped. My friends and I used to create Hitachi servers just to play this game and Minecraft on the school computers. Good times.
Sean Murray had his hands and feet bound and was locked in a room with no windows covered in posters of Starcraft and Halo, while Foodfight played on loop non-stop on an Ipod strapped to his face. he then made this game in 24 hours after being locked in that room for 3 months.
It's pretty ironic some of the No Man's Sky comparisons made in this video, given how that game has been continuously worked on by the developer to make it actually live up to the expectations once put on it, while this game was long abandoned and never came back into use. To be fair to No Man's Sky when comparing this to what it was like on it's initial release though, at least it was functional amd had some kind of base game. It might have gotten boring pretty quick and lacked many expected features, but at least you could notice some effort was used in putting it together.
StarForge taught me a valuable lesson: don't buy a game for what the developers say it'll be, only buy a game if it's worth it today. It was the first and last time I ever got burned by an early access title.
idk if you will see this, Mandalore, but you mentioned one of Wayne Barlowe's works (Expedition). I don't know how familiar you are with some of his other stuff, but he has some of the most interesting interpretations of Hell/Demonkind with his artbooks "Barlowe's Inferno" and "Brushfire", and then he actually wrote a novel set in his interpretation of Hell which is rather good (God's Demon). Very much recommend if you liked his scifi/alien artwork.
Thank you for this review and wrap up. I'm actually getting a bit emotional here because I really believed in the project back when it was in early development. I bragged about it to friends and spent real money on it.. I can't help but to sigh as I sit here typing this. Such a brutal disappointment from Code Hatch. Thank you sir for letting us have some closure on this matter.
Space Engineers did a lot of what StarForge did, but they had a rock solid base to work from - including their own in-house game engine - but they introduced systems over time instead of piling every single idea they had at once and expecting 'polish' to happen.
Hey Mandalore, I know the chance of you seeing this is slim but would you ever consider to cover 7Days2Die? Especially as you are talking about this kind of game in this old video of yours I really would love to know your thoughts on it oo
alksdjf;alsdjf *calls them* "Hello, this is Visa customer service, how can I help you?" "Yeah, hi, I want to get a chargeback from something I bought and I really didn't like..." "Sure, what was It?" "A game purchase" "Okay! And when did you buy it?" "Three years ago." "..." *click* "Hello?" *tone*
Normal job: You do the job, you get paid for it. Games in early acces: You demand full payment for an unfinished product, which you may or may not finish afterwards, but you won´t get paid more for doing so... Crowdfunding: You promis to do a job (with no legal or financial incentive to do so) after you get paid for it. Never pay for the idea of something you like! Only pay if the product is already worth the price asked for, even if development stops at that point.
Not gonna lie this game fascinated me so much at the time that I used this video as the entire basis for a presentation on Quality Assurance back when I was studying Game Development in College.
They released another game this year called Heat. Please look at it if you have the time. I don't know why I'm actually asking you to suffer through that. Ignore my request. Love your videos, and what you do. Keep up the good work.
Hey, I made the guns (fire, obv the models are assets) glad to have them not get shit on in a video, but layerd under piles of performance and design issues I understand them being overlooked
2:29 Actually Unreal Engine has out of the box visual programming language, while Unity doesn't. So currently Unreal Engine is far more suitable for non programmers compared to Unity. Unreal Engine also has it's own asset store, there's just nos as much stuff compared to Unity asset store.
