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Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes |OT| There Is Another
- Thread starter ghostmind
- Start date
I just read over General Skywalker's kit. They missed a huge opportunity to call him Guild Killer Skywalker. We lost 2-3 members when Padme was announced and General Skywalker's abilities make her look like Lobot with pink eye.
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So I saw this on the official forums:
"So, to sum up, his kit allows him to dispell all debuffs including "undispellable" ones even though he'll already have insane tenacity, he prevents every revive mechanic in the game, he negates every single massive damage or annihilate mechanic in the game, he counters 100% of the time ignoring Defence and can't be evaded, cannot drop below 100% health while any 501st allies are alive, prevents health damage to all 501st unless he's under cover."
Seems nuts. I can't even imagine the next character that will be more powerful than him. The power creep is really ramping up now.
"So, to sum up, his kit allows him to dispell all debuffs including "undispellable" ones even though he'll already have insane tenacity, he prevents every revive mechanic in the game, he negates every single massive damage or annihilate mechanic in the game, he counters 100% of the time ignoring Defence and can't be evaded, cannot drop below 100% health while any 501st allies are alive, prevents health damage to all 501st unless he's under cover."
Seems nuts. I can't even imagine the next character that will be more powerful than him. The power creep is really ramping up now.
His son will be better. Whenever that releases, if our Guild is still around, it will need to be put on life support.
Yey! new content i cant wait to get saving to get to it in 6 months when it's out again......
MISSION CLASH ON KAMINO
Recommended:
- 50,000+ Power
- Crew Relic Level 3
- Crew Mods rarity Mk VI
Recommended:
- 22,000+ Power
- Relic Level 3
- Mods rarity Mk VI
- Zeta ability upgrade
Capital Games.....
Seriously MMO's learnt this years ago not to put out content only a minuscule amount of people can actually do, and thats with those games putting out other content as well as raids. This is new content which is impossible for anyone but the top 5% spending thousands on the game to get to in any reasonable timeframe, CG isnt even hiding what they're doing now, what CG and EA are doing is disgusting.
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Dont take every forum comment at face value. Annihilate works on him.
Yeah that is great to know. DN is one of my favorite characters and I have mine sitting one piece short of g12. Can't wait to use him again outside of tw.
Darth Nihilus's defense is about as effective as wet tissue paper. There is no chance he'll ever outlive his cooldown.
Just got to get him to r7 and get his speed maxed, also throw in a super fast thrawn and have him swap turns with DR every chance he can.
I know we haven't seen him in action yet, but with GAS ignoring defence and increasing cooldowns on crit I'm not sure I see it. If you don't get to Annihilate before he goes into cover you've got to keep Nihilus alive even longer.
It may work while he's G11/5 star, but once he starts getting maxed out himself things are less likely to go Nihilus' way.
It may work while he's G11/5 star, but once he starts getting maxed out himself things are less likely to go Nihilus' way.
Holy shit I beat the wat mission. On the final wave clone sergeants ability block came off and he hit my team with an aoe and took everyone into the red, I was sure I was fucked. Luckily I had my geo solider modded for 100% CC so I was able to call in the tank 3 times. I had my poggle at 90% potency so he was ability blocking on every attack. That is without a doubt the best designed mission in the game. Challenging but with clearly defined mechanics. I can't wait to unlock wat, hopefully he doesn't get nerfed to hard. :p
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OMG the Malak even gives more shards if you replay it. This is by far the coolest thing CG has ever done in this game. Even if it was unintentional they should totally say it was the plan all along. Spend your currency to get a huge early advantage or wait for the event to come around 3 times to get the shards.
Yeah I saw they are going to take the shards back. I dont get it at all. Seems like a huge headache just to piss people off.
Everything in the game seems to be getting so darn stingy these days, starting to feel like the game may have run its course for me. All the new events just give shards and titles for the rewards now, gone apparently are the days of getting zetas, omegas, gear, crystals, and credits for legendaries. GAC rewards are just abysmal, where even if you full clear every round and finish in kyber league you get barely enough currency (from a month of effort) to buy enough Mk5 droid callers for one full craft. Compare that to HSR which gives enough guild tokens (on top of already fairly generous direct gear rewards) for a top five finish to buy nearly a whole Mk3 carb from a single run... and which happens twice a week. Now we have events running less often, and for half as many days when they do, along with a ton of additional gearing required for any squad to even be semi useful. The only positive we've had on gear is the changes to the daily box, and while 3 kyro a day and an improvement to the other gear is appreciated, it's nowhere near enough to even make up for the things CG have removed or tuned downwards over the past few months.
I'm usually one of the ones trying to be being optimistic and trying to see the best in things, but the last year or so from CG has gone from bad to worse unfortunately. Everything seems to be based around milking existing content for everything it's worth, while the new "content" raises the power ceiling on our existing collection without CG having to put in much effort. The only reason I can see that the developers would head in this direction, is if they are no longer willing or able to create new content in the traditional model (characters, game modes, raids) etc. I'm probably going to give things until the next Road Ahead post and see what they have planned. If it sounds like the fun is coming back at some point I'll stick around, otherwise I think (like many other people) it'll be time to move on.
I'm usually one of the ones trying to be being optimistic and trying to see the best in things, but the last year or so from CG has gone from bad to worse unfortunately. Everything seems to be based around milking existing content for everything it's worth, while the new "content" raises the power ceiling on our existing collection without CG having to put in much effort. The only reason I can see that the developers would head in this direction, is if they are no longer willing or able to create new content in the traditional model (characters, game modes, raids) etc. I'm probably going to give things until the next Road Ahead post and see what they have planned. If it sounds like the fun is coming back at some point I'll stick around, otherwise I think (like many other people) it'll be time to move on.
One thing that really annoys me is that they took away the Geo ship event. I was making good progress on all my ships thanks to that event, but once those ships became important for Geo TB the stopped running that event. Now you have to buy the shards from the different stores for those ships and it really strains our limited resources even more.
Yeah, this is another good example. The "old" CG mindset always seemed to be that this game was additive... more events, raids, etc were added over time, but they were all new, additional sources of income. Look at how raids all have their own tickets, instead of forcing you to choose whether to do pit, tank, or sith. The "new" CG mindset appears to be that everything needs to be a difficult choice for the player, or that before some new source of resource income can appear CG need to remove something which already exists. The fact that people are seriously considering running old hoth TBs and ignoring the new geo ones just in order to get more GET1 and finish GAS to 7 star quicker says it all really. I don't know who at CG is in charge of player progression and resource income, but they seem to have somewhat lost touch with what makes these kinds of games fun.
Well, as Guild leader I FINALLY got around to changing our Guild name from one that references the site that shall not be named to something more ResetEra. Unfortunately, every name I wanted was already "taken." Not sure how that's even possible with names like:
Max Rebo and the ResetEra Band and variations of that all the way to Max Rebo's ResetEra Orchestra. HOW IS THAT TAKEN?!?!??! HOW?
Anyhoo... I got frustrated trying to get what I wanted and just typed in Salacious B ResetEra and that's what we got. So, if you are here and looking for a Guild... Salacious B ResetEra is here for you.
Max Rebo and the ResetEra Band and variations of that all the way to Max Rebo's ResetEra Orchestra. HOW IS THAT TAKEN?!?!??! HOW?
Anyhoo... I got frustrated trying to get what I wanted and just typed in Salacious B ResetEra and that's what we got. So, if you are here and looking for a Guild... Salacious B ResetEra is here for you.
Just picked this up again after 4 years of inactivity (star wars hype!) I shot an invite request to the guild. Same name as on here.
(578-729-612)
(578-729-612)
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So yesterday in grand arena I had something crazy happen.
It took me 21 tries to beat his FO team. The team that finally did it was Sabine Wren, Papaloo, and Wicket. My Sabine is only level 70 and g6. Armor shred was the key though. So glad I finally thought of that. I would have lost if I hadn't cleared that zone.
It took me 21 tries to beat his FO team. The team that finally did it was Sabine Wren, Papaloo, and Wicket. My Sabine is only level 70 and g6. Armor shred was the key though. So glad I finally thought of that. I would have lost if I hadn't cleared that zone.
So yesterday in grand arena I had something crazy happen.
It took me 21 tries to beat his FO team. The team that finally did it was Sabine Wren, Papaloo, and Wicket. My Sabine is only level 70 and g6. Armor shred was the key though. So glad I finally thought of that. I would have lost if I hadn't cleared that zone.
KRU with the zeta recovers health for every debuff inflicted, which is nasty if you're not prepared for it. Resistance with Jedi Rey is a good counter but I'm not sure what else before you get her.
EDIT: Under KRU, when an ally receives a status effect, they recover 5% health and protection. 20% turn meter when they crit. Sorry if you're already on it, but if not there it is for next time.
NO JUST KEEP PLAYING MY GAME, GDAMNIT
ahem
I stopped playing after a couple of months, but Marvel Strike Force is in the same genre, as well it should be since they hired a bunch of our people and did a copy/paste job but who is keeping track ;)
Yeah, there's a DC game that looks similar too. Gonna play em all.
LEGO® Legacy: Heroes Unboxed - Apps on Google Play
Immerse yourself in a LEGO® world full of action, battles, sets & heroes
This just came out last week and I've been having some fun with it. Forgot what it's like to start from scratch again, it's kinda fun. It's... extremely derivative of GoH though... even has squads in it that use courage and prepared as mechanics - it's not even subtle.
Raging Spaniard The Lego game has a client in the windows store (https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/p/lego-legacy-heroes-unboxed/9n8k8g736394) which is amazing. So nice to play on PC with a buttery smooth framerate and see all the attention to detail. I would love it so much if you guys did the same thing so I could stop using an emulator... hint hint!
LEGO® Legacy: Heroes Unboxed - Apps on Google Play
Immerse yourself in a LEGO® world full of action, battles, sets & heroesplay.google.com
This just came out last week and I've been having some fun with it. Forgot what it's like to start from scratch again, it's kinda fun. It's... extremely derivative of GoH though... even has squads in it that use courage and prepared as mechanics - it's not even subtle.
Raging Spaniard The Lego game has a client in the windows store (https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/p/lego-legacy-heroes-unboxed/9n8k8g736394) which is amazing. So nice to play on PC with a buttery smooth framerate and see all the attention to detail. I would love it so much if you guys did the same thing so I could stop using an emulator... hint hint!
Lol if you think lack of content is an issue now, imagine if we did a PC port, haha. I do like seeing people on an emulator, their framerate is much better than the shit I get in Unity, haha
Galactic Legends are going to be dope, btw, busting my ass on these
Will check this out, cheers mateLEGO® Legacy: Heroes Unboxed - Apps on Google Play
Immerse yourself in a LEGO® world full of action, battles, sets & heroes
This just came out last week and I've been having some fun with it. Forgot what it's like to start from scratch again, it's kinda fun. It's... extremely derivative of GoH though... even has squads in it that use courage and prepared as mechanics - it's not even subtle.
Raging Spaniard The Lego game has a client in the windows store (https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/p/lego-legacy-heroes-unboxed/9n8k8g736394) which is amazing. So nice to play on PC with a buttery smooth framerate and see all the attention to detail. I would love it so much if you guys did the same thing so I could stop using an emulator... hint hint!
Also been using bluestacks when I'm at home. Wish Pokemon Masters worked on it.
I guess there's a whole load of bureaucracy to deal with when taking things to a new platform. I figured being Unity based that making a windows build ought to be fairly trivial though? Would just be so nice to see all the new art and animations like they were intended to look... maybe it's just me, but Bluestacks runs GoH at around 10-20fps and has the most insane stutters, dips, pauses etc - it's a real shame. Speaking of the new art, the new Poe looks incredible! Congrats to everyone on the art team who worked on him.
I'm excited to see what the GLs bring to the game. Going to be a while before I'm unlocking one if these new capital ships are required. I'm mostly excited about the new PvE mode you guys have been teasing though, fingers crossed you've got a really cool ongoing game mode in the pipeline which will sit alongside what GAC does for PvP.
On a purely technical level you can use bluestacks on your PC so its trivial.
The issue is strategy. Doing things "just because" is something that is inherently risky and short sighted, I'll elaborate cause this is a good thing to know.
We have about 100 people working on the game at all times and, regardless of reddits opinion, we are all really busy at all times. Adding a completely new platform, including platform specific stuff (origin, steam, micro transactions, account migration, etc) Would need to be heavily researched, marketed, tested, optimized and would be a giant time sync for a good chunk of the team, including the art team. Many of our artistic choices, UI decisions and limitations are done because we are a mobile game meant to be seen on mobile devices. Turn it into a PC game and suddenly the demands and expectations would rise to a level that we 100% CANNOT commit to, not just from a fans perspective but internally and with our partners.
This would also add a substantial amount of ongoing work for engineering and QA. Youd have to test the game on different PC builds, different video cards, have PC only bugs. Have PC only gameplay review sessions. We'd have to hire about 15 plus people just for this, and in order to to that we'd need to prove out that this would be a good move financially, which would take time away from our PM team from actually handling and balancing the current game economy. As you can see, these things branch out and spread rapidly.
We work at a crazy rate of speed. One of the fastest in the industry, in fact, and we cant keep adding work to it because it will heavily compromise what we can do in the future (and we already fuck with it enough, its not like upping the poly limit on the characters was a small deal, to give you a very small example, I basically told my artist to do twice the work within the same timeframe). Hiring more people is not even a good solution most of the time, cause you have to add recruiting, training, oversight and management. Nothing is free in videogames, even the stuff that sounds trivial.
All that aside, I think the new PvE stuff we have in the works is exciting and exactly what the game needs. I'm heavily involved with it and I'm keeping the player experience as a high priority on it.
Let me know when you've done that. I kid, I kid! I get it, things are always simpler from the outside looking in. I just wish Bluestacks didn't suck so much. I can run the latest games at 1080p in high settings at 60fps, yet SWGoH runs at 20fps in a tiny window. C'est la vie!
Even more excited about the PvE stuff now. Keep up the good work!
Sorry for the late response, but I was on a work trip. We have 1 spot open. Send me a friend request (923-423-588) and we'll get you in. Or just apply—our Guild name is: Salacious B ResetEra
Just so y'all know, were all wfh now. Actually works pretty well for the art team since were a bunch of hermits anyway. I don't expect it to be disruptive, but its a new process for EA for sure
Hey all! First time posting on Era. Usually just lurk, but wanted to join the discussion about my favourite game.
Hope you and your family are keeping safe, mate! Just wanted to say that despite having some issues with the GL event, love the art direction taken for Kylo and the new backdrops. The transitions in the duel are sweet, too!
I'm close to meeting the reqs for Rey (only two left- rose and chewie) and I'll finally be rewarded for sticking with the resistance haha
Hope you and your family are keeping safe, mate! Just wanted to say that despite having some issues with the GL event, love the art direction taken for Kylo and the new backdrops. The transitions in the duel are sweet, too!
I'm close to meeting the reqs for Rey (only two left- rose and chewie) and I'll finally be rewarded for sticking with the resistance haha
Thanks bud, all the Rey feedback this week was very "well, Im not even gonna go there" LOL but I think her and Kylo came out very well, as well as all the backdrops we did. It was a crazy amount of work, super proud of the team.
Oh I can totally see there was a lot of work put in. Reddit needs to realise that it's an older game with a bunch of roadblocks/limitations of old code and such.
Just wanted to say that there is a very large but silent group of players that love the game and really appreciate the (thankless) work you guys put in :)
Yeah its all good, I appreciate all fans and reddit is definitely ... passionate. Notice that their excuse for wanting all of the artists shamed, fired and feathered is because I apparently bragged for 4 months about the amazing art when, really, all I did was:
- Answer art questions people sent. They sent five, I answered five. They're typically easy so they get posted first, unlike the more economy/gameplay based questions which take more time to answer properly.
- Said "were putting more details into our models", which we did, by about 2x. Its a good thing, we think the characters look better than they used to so we put a comparison.
- Showed progress of what we were working on, which, again, it should be fairly normal. We are developers and like to share our process.
Not to get defensive, but thats not bragging, thats just communicating what were up to and not ashamed of the hard work we put in. Hey if you hate it, no worries, thanks for spending the time and hope you can still stick around but damn lol people are in a hurry to make that first hyperbolic post over there. If there is one thing I've learned from reddit is that 99% of all conspiracy theories in the world are not true, because even if our game has so many of them, and they're all false, what does that say about the rest of the world
Nevertheless, well continue to do our thing and the next batch of characters should be pretty fun, I think you'll enjoy it
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I imagine that must be one of the most frustrating things about situations like this; so much misinformation or misconstrued statements going around in an echo chamber where it's impossible to answer them all. You're right, I didn't read it as bragging, just keeping the community in the loop with some sneak peaks at what's to come. It's not like you guys could lay the whole event out for all to see way in advance, what do people want? And all of this after putting so much work in, to boot.
Anyway you must be over talking about it right now, just wanted to say thanks for all the work you and the team do. I hope you guys get some positive feedback amongst all the toxicity!
Yeah Reddit is certainly not the place for reasonable discourse. Everything snaps the needle to min or max and there's very little space for nuanced discussion on anything.
The art you guys produce varies for me, though I can imagine you're working within the constraints of what is now a very old engine so I set my expectations appropriately. The 2D stuff you put out is generally amazing, it's always great to see the new event banners and such. Backgrounds are also generally really well done for a mobile game. Characters can be really hit or miss for me though; recently I thought RH Poe was outstandingly done, but then RH Finn and Rey aren't doing it for me at all. I'm sure there's some subjectivity in there though.
The GL events I'm feeling fairly "meh" about. After four months of hype it all seems underwhelming to be honest. It doesn't feel particularly different to a Heroes Journey event, but it seems to have taken most of the dev time for the past half year or so. I always look forward to title updates bringing new features and QoL and game modes, but these last two have been super underwhelming. The journey guide was cool, but I already had everything except GS unlocked so it wasn't really aimed at me - that's fine though, I get why it was needed and I think it was a great thing to do for the health of the game and for bringing on newer players (and therefore keeping the game alive!) This last title update appears to have just had the plumbing for the GL event tickets and not much else though, which is pretty disappointing for a quarter of a year's dev time. Hoping the seeming lack of meat on the bone is due to something larger in the pipeline and the next Road Ahead will have some interesting stuff on the horizon.
Just to end on a positive note as well, the best stuff added to the game recently for me has been the new Assault Battle tiers. It's been great working through each of them as they are dropped, often requiring a few upgrades, tinkering with mods, and theorycrafting different line ups. The rewards are solid and it's been really enjoyable - more of this kind of stuff, pretty please!
The art you guys produce varies for me, though I can imagine you're working within the constraints of what is now a very old engine so I set my expectations appropriately. The 2D stuff you put out is generally amazing, it's always great to see the new event banners and such. Backgrounds are also generally really well done for a mobile game. Characters can be really hit or miss for me though; recently I thought RH Poe was outstandingly done, but then RH Finn and Rey aren't doing it for me at all. I'm sure there's some subjectivity in there though.
The GL events I'm feeling fairly "meh" about. After four months of hype it all seems underwhelming to be honest. It doesn't feel particularly different to a Heroes Journey event, but it seems to have taken most of the dev time for the past half year or so. I always look forward to title updates bringing new features and QoL and game modes, but these last two have been super underwhelming. The journey guide was cool, but I already had everything except GS unlocked so it wasn't really aimed at me - that's fine though, I get why it was needed and I think it was a great thing to do for the health of the game and for bringing on newer players (and therefore keeping the game alive!) This last title update appears to have just had the plumbing for the GL event tickets and not much else though, which is pretty disappointing for a quarter of a year's dev time. Hoping the seeming lack of meat on the bone is due to something larger in the pipeline and the next Road Ahead will have some interesting stuff on the horizon.
Just to end on a positive note as well, the best stuff added to the game recently for me has been the new Assault Battle tiers. It's been great working through each of them as they are dropped, often requiring a few upgrades, tinkering with mods, and theorycrafting different line ups. The rewards are solid and it's been really enjoyable - more of this kind of stuff, pretty please!
Hard "not a hint" on that one. I know better.Wait a second... is that a hint there!?
Haha, shame... if you had meant it that would have been some subtle work right there.
Have you guys seen the Kylo solos of HSR? I mean I suppose you probably knew that was coming from your internal testing anyway, but HSR has become trivial pretty rapidly of late. It must be fun for you to see these things go out in the wild, see the initial reaction to Kylo and just be thinking "just wait until your sith raid resets, then you'll see".
Now that Im at my desk I can give you a better response.
Reactions are always a very "shrug" moment for me, people will react, make crazy theories, assume those theories are real and apply them to whatever else (latest example, the job openings videos). This happens for bad stuff as well as good stuff so, to be honest, validation from the community is not something I expect, Id much rather focus on the work we are doing and be happy with the strides we are making. The HSTR stuff is fun, we know what these characters are capable of so witnessing the reaction is something we are pretty used to by now.
That said, I'm happy to clear things out in a way that doesnt go into the weeds (because thats both private and confidential). The "4 months for this" comments are interesting because I wasnt aware that we worked on the GL Rey model for 4 months, reddit sure seems to think so? Like, the Raddus and the Finalizer came out in that time, as well as Finn and Poe. If you look at the event, regardless of your thoughts about how fun it is, we had to make 3 versions of Rey and 3 versions of Kylo (new models with old kits, duel versions with different anims and the player collectable versions) ... at the same time PLUS their ultimates, which you guys havent seen yet. If you add up all that work plus the cinematic (first ever battle cinematic in the game, not easy to make!) youre looking at literally 4x the frames of animation than any character weve ever made. This impacts all areas, sound, making character prefabs, vfx, tech risk ... on top of changes to the character kit on the design side and the other characters in the event like Lodent, Zorii, the new Snowtroopers, the FO Raider thats actually from the new Resistance show, first character from that series in our game, etc etc. Thats without even mentioning that GL's have all new UI on every single screen theyre in, thats also a significant amount of work art wise and engineering wise.
So yeah, just to say its a lot of work and its a lot of NEW work which makes it more difficult because it adds R&D time, it adds new bugs, etc unlike something like the Darth Revan event which was a continuation of work we had done before. Plus, no offense but people outside the industry have no place in saying whether "4 months" is too long or too short to make something, thats completely arbitrary. We work on a lot of different things at the same time and our team size has stayed about the same for a long time. Im not going to break down how exactly things take to make because its a) not a reliable metric and b) something people will completely take out of context at the earliest possible convenience
Regarding whether you think Finn and Rey are bad looking .. like you say, its subjective. I directed those models, as well as Kylo, Poe and the new Capital Ships and they are all made by the same character artist which has been the only character artist in the game for quite a number of years. Some critiques are correct (Finns idle pose is not very flattering) and some are not (old Finn looked better and/or more like Finn) or with Rey, I've seen several people say "why dont they use the Rey model from the promo video, that one looked good" ... um, we did, its the exact same model, the ingame texture is lower but thats expected. Remember, we make this game for a small screen on mobile phones, not for a youtuber playing on a 32 inch monitor on his PC who then zooms on a model till the pixels fill the screen then calls for us to get fired. This is exactly why I said in an old Q&A that I want to upgrade the lighting and rendering on an engine level, because thats what makes a substantive jump in quality. Comparing us to games like Marvel is just an unfair comparison, theyre a new game with 10+ poly models for their noname characters. GL Rey uses 2x the polys that any other characters and thats a big jump for us but still we are nowhere close to the Marvel numbers, that would just break the game if we started putting 10k+ poly models with 512 or 1024 textures. Thats why I was always careful to say we were raising our standard without bringing the competition up.
Hopefully this clears up some of the confusion for you. Always happy to talk about our process and thank you for the insight
I appreciate your responses man, it's really interesting to see things from your perspective. It's cool being able to connect here with you about the game, so yeah - thanks!
While I totally understand that much of the criticism is something you have to be pretty thick skinned with, surely there is (as there is for any creative person whose work is critiqued by the public) some necessity to ensure that what you think is good content is actually being, generally, well received? Like it's all very well to focus entirely on your own internal appraisal of things, but there needs to be some balance with how things are being received externally too, surely?
It's super interesting to me to hear just how much additional effort has gone into the GLs and their events, and it leaves me wondering why my own perception from the outside doesn't reflect that. From where I am it doesn't feel like much more content than if you'd simultaneously released two Heroes Journey characters, but perhaps this is compounded by the fact that I'm not even doing either of the events and have just seen some bits and pieces on YouTube. It feels bad to tell you it as it's obvious a lot of time and effort comes in from your end, but it's perhaps worth contemplating why all the extra work isn't obvious from the consumer side of things. I say all this as a developer who deals with not entirely dissimilar issues myself.
Regarding people outside the industry having no place in judging development timescales, I think at least some of the criticism is not about that, but rather just volume of released content over time. I forget where I saw it, but somebody posted some stats somewhere once showing your character/ships release volume over time, and it was definitely trending downwards. Ultimately how many people you have assigned to a character or how long they take to internally build doesn't matter at all, as as you say, it's arbitrary. How much fresh playable content ends up in peoples hands in any given period of time though surely must be open to feedback, whether you feel it is justified/achievable or not?
My own personal bugbear isn't really about character release cadence at all though, but rather the last two title updates having their big ticket features (Journey Guide and Galactic Legends) just not being for me (at least right now, in the case of the latter - I concede that of course they will be for me in a few months time.) A title update looming has historically been a time for exciting new modes and features for me... mods 2.0, fleet 2.0, GA, GAC, Geo TB, HSR etc all coincided with their appropriate quarterly title updates and so I'm just missing my quarterly "new stuff to do" I suppose. Simming nodes for the next two months while I prep for the GLs just isn't as exciting as a new game mode or feature etc.
I don't think they look bad, I just don't always think they communicate the characters they are meant to represent. It's hard to explain, and I'm by no means an artist so take it with a grain of salt, but some characters seem to end up looking like a cosplayer pretending to be the character, if that makes any sense? I'm absolutely sure that often comes down to the limitations of the tech you're working with, but when you say it's unfair to compare you against your competitors, can I ask why? Obviously you have an older codebase to deal with, but for a living game such as yours shouldn't the tech team be constantly upgrading the engine and giving the artists access to newer GPU features and the like? To take something like World of Warcraft as an example, the difference between vanilla and the most recent expansions is pretty night and day. If Marvel can push 10k poly models, then there's a pretty solid argument that you ought to be able to do the same thing on the same hardware, no? I know you guys have pruned some of the older phones off the compatible handset lists in the past, so surely you have at least some forward momentum on this?
Again, really appreciate the detailed response and insight, it's really interesting.
While I totally understand that much of the criticism is something you have to be pretty thick skinned with, surely there is (as there is for any creative person whose work is critiqued by the public) some necessity to ensure that what you think is good content is actually being, generally, well received? Like it's all very well to focus entirely on your own internal appraisal of things, but there needs to be some balance with how things are being received externally too, surely?
It's super interesting to me to hear just how much additional effort has gone into the GLs and their events, and it leaves me wondering why my own perception from the outside doesn't reflect that. From where I am it doesn't feel like much more content than if you'd simultaneously released two Heroes Journey characters, but perhaps this is compounded by the fact that I'm not even doing either of the events and have just seen some bits and pieces on YouTube. It feels bad to tell you it as it's obvious a lot of time and effort comes in from your end, but it's perhaps worth contemplating why all the extra work isn't obvious from the consumer side of things. I say all this as a developer who deals with not entirely dissimilar issues myself.
Regarding people outside the industry having no place in judging development timescales, I think at least some of the criticism is not about that, but rather just volume of released content over time. I forget where I saw it, but somebody posted some stats somewhere once showing your character/ships release volume over time, and it was definitely trending downwards. Ultimately how many people you have assigned to a character or how long they take to internally build doesn't matter at all, as as you say, it's arbitrary. How much fresh playable content ends up in peoples hands in any given period of time though surely must be open to feedback, whether you feel it is justified/achievable or not?
My own personal bugbear isn't really about character release cadence at all though, but rather the last two title updates having their big ticket features (Journey Guide and Galactic Legends) just not being for me (at least right now, in the case of the latter - I concede that of course they will be for me in a few months time.) A title update looming has historically been a time for exciting new modes and features for me... mods 2.0, fleet 2.0, GA, GAC, Geo TB, HSR etc all coincided with their appropriate quarterly title updates and so I'm just missing my quarterly "new stuff to do" I suppose. Simming nodes for the next two months while I prep for the GLs just isn't as exciting as a new game mode or feature etc.
I don't think they look bad, I just don't always think they communicate the characters they are meant to represent. It's hard to explain, and I'm by no means an artist so take it with a grain of salt, but some characters seem to end up looking like a cosplayer pretending to be the character, if that makes any sense? I'm absolutely sure that often comes down to the limitations of the tech you're working with, but when you say it's unfair to compare you against your competitors, can I ask why? Obviously you have an older codebase to deal with, but for a living game such as yours shouldn't the tech team be constantly upgrading the engine and giving the artists access to newer GPU features and the like? To take something like World of Warcraft as an example, the difference between vanilla and the most recent expansions is pretty night and day. If Marvel can push 10k poly models, then there's a pretty solid argument that you ought to be able to do the same thing on the same hardware, no? I know you guys have pruned some of the older phones off the compatible handset lists in the past, so surely you have at least some forward momentum on this?
Again, really appreciate the detailed response and insight, it's really interesting.
I can count with one hand the amount of times the community has brought up something we werent aware of already. We have a ton of checks and balances not just internally but with our partners as well. Some stuff will always slip, like Qui-Gonn's saber being blue that one time, but thats gamedev in general
Unfortunately, not at all. Sharing an engine doesn't equal sharing the code. We would have to completely start over, not to mention that even upgrading to a new version of Unity with new features can be extremely risky for an old game like ours. Going through all the permutations would veer into the confidential category, plus it would take forever.
Comparing us to a game like WoW is also not even in the same ballpark. They have infinite resources, their own engine, dont deal with external IP and their release cadence is way, way different. The time spent fixing things or upgrading things will directly take the time away from making things. We try to fix things when we can, older phones not being supported freed up some polygon budgets after all. When our cadence was Galaxy of Marquees, notice that we didnt have many Legendaries in that timeframe nor did we have new modes, ships, capital ships or new TB's. The "nothing is free" mantra is very applicable here. We finished Lightside Geo which was a crazy amount of work, then did new movie content in the middle of Xmas break, two new capital ships and two new characters that are way beyond the scope of a heroes journey. If we had done one at a time, I'm sure we would have made more unique content for the event but two new characters way above Legendary specs in simultaneous development? With the same team? Crazy amount of work.
At the end of the day, whether its visible or not, that comes and goes. People freaked out over Reys icon which is a tiny icon thats even tinier in game and that was enough for those folks to start making threads on reddit. That shows their passion and investment in the game and thats ultimately a good thing so I am not going to hate on them for that, but I wont overreact either.
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