Yes, I'm (semi)ranting about Titans...

I've followed the development of PA for quite some time and I've put a lot of hours into playing the game with my friends and I feel that Uber has really failed to manage expectations with the release of Titans. And, yes, it's a bit sad that Titans release is the impetus for me actually posting something.

Let me start by saying, I don't really care that there is an expansion or that KS backers got the expansion for free. They took a gamble and it paid off. Kudos to them. I'm also fine with getting 66% off Titans, that's nice of Uber. Truth be told, I just haven't found PA fun to play the last couple of months mostly because terrain felt less like a tactical choice and more like fairly useless eye candy, orbital didn't have enough going to break a heavily defended planet or be fun to play, Air seemed really OP compared to AA options, and the unit selection was fairly basic. I can forgive the last but not the first three. In fact, my problem isn't really related to money. It's about how the entire Titans thing has been playing out.

I'll try to make an analogy here. Uber sold me a concept picture of a car and delivered a really solid frame and engine. They worked really hard too. I can drive around pretty well and everything like steering, brakes and headlights all work. It's a pretty smooth ride and I've even got a nice crate to sit on.

One day Uber sends me a message and says, hey, we've been working on a secret project for a bit now, we've finally finished the body for the car and added a really big spoiler... of course you'll have to pay for the body again because it took us a lot of time to get that spoiler on just right. We understand if you don't want to and your car still works great without it so we'll call it good and we'll even upgrade the rims and put a coat of paint on the frame for you.

That's a bit how I feel about Titans. I purchased PA expecting that Uber would eventually deliver a polished product and that just never happened. What's more frustrating, a good bit of the things PA needs are added in Titans. Especially things like a more polished orbital experience, and multi-level terrain.

Basically the feeling I have right now is Titans is the game I've been waiting for PA to become. PA has good bones, but it just never delivered on the polish. I got the frame and engine, but Uber never got around to finishing the body. Instead they chose to give me new rims and tune up the engine and now they want me to buy the body because they put a big spoiler on it I don't really need.

Where does that leave me? Well, I'd have much rather Uber had put the orbital and terrain changes into PA instead of Asteroids (i.e. new rims) and then made an announcement that future development would shift to an expansion. Or at the very least ask the community what they thought would make PA a polished product. But Uber didn't do that and it's pretty clear that support for PA is getting downgraded in favor of Titans. Which means I'll probably end up getting Titans and hope the car is finally finished. Regardless, I'll still have a bad taste in my mouth about the whole thing.

The important thing to remember here is that the stuff in Titans was never promised for vanilla.

as a matter of fact, they repeatedly said vanilla would never have them.

And they didn't have much choice really, they never would have been able to afford it otherwise.

Well let's stay positive and hope it'll be what you want it to be at least. Isn't it good you might get the game you wanted all along at least? The alternative would've been to simply not get it.

There is one thing in your analogy btw I think that isn't correctly translating: uber is not selling you the body again, they are selling you the new spoiler.

Nice to see calm critic. Hope you'll have fun playing titans once you end up getting it.

Outside of the Titans themselves and some of the extra units, I don't think things like solid orbital game play or tactically interesting terrain require explicit promises. If you have Orbital you should make it solid. If you have terrain it should be more functional than pre-built walls. Vanilla PA is pretty barren in both aspects.

Dunno. I'd rate being more forthright about the state of future updates and what was in the pipe more desirable than just getting what I want. I'd kind of like to see a free weekend at least before dropping money on the game to give it a test drive and see if it's what I'm expecting. Hopefully it will be.

I might not have been as clear as I thought. I rate most of the new units and the new titans, and new maps/biomes (I think there's new biomes) as the spoiler. Nice but I don't REALLY need it to call PA a polished game. Things like polished orbital and multi-level terrain I consider more the body that should be part of PA. They are things I expected to have in there to flesh out the frame and things that PA desperately needs to be more interesting.

Add everything except the Titans into vanilla PA and I think everyone will be happy.

and uber out of money soon

That would be icing on the cake!

I'm joking!!!!

People aren't doing this out of spite. Uber have managed the development of this game terribly. Just look at inxile with Wasteland 2 Director's Cut, that's how you do game development.

http://www.pcgamer.com/wasteland-2-directors-cut-is-coming-in-october-2/

Sad thing is alot of them are, some of these are the same people who when PA was on sale in the past, would jump into the forum, shout lies and misinformation never make any attempt to back that claim up, once the sale ended there'd disappear again, I've seen some of those people again, waging the same campaign.

Well, I think you can argue about orbital, which really feels a bit left alone in vanilla PA despite the fact that there were suggestions how to quick fix the situation with minimal effort.
On the other hand, as far as jables told us, the changes for path-finding to support the new terrain alone did cost one person three months. I can see why they are putting the new terrain in the PA:T expansion. The sneaky bit is that the improvements of the path-finding are now in PA as well. And as a side note I feel there are still some issues to fix until terrain will be really usable.
And to be honest, the forum here made it explicitly clear - several times in the past - that Uber is accountable for all the promises they gave. I'm sure there wasn't much resources left to do anything else that wasn't a promise, so maybe we are all a bit guilty why we have asteroids in vanilla PA and not - maybe better terrain.

Ask yourself "why are they doing this?" You seem to think they have no legitimate reasons. It's a free market, and inxile did things right, Uber not so much. You seem to think people have just randomly picked a game developer that they want to ruin. Not so.

Oh no matter how I look at it the people who really go over all borders on the steam forums don't do this for anything other than for their own disgusting enjoyment.

Yes there are people who are honestly a little angry and that's all. The OP looks like that. But people who make a petition "make the game free" or buy the game, make a bad review full of lies and then refund it..... no way they do this for anything but to satisfy some pretty dark emotional quirks they have.

So you are saying that Uber are just unlucky? They have been targeted unfairly? Get real man. They did a lot of things wrong. This isn't just some random act of hate with no reasoning behind it.

Mum all the kids are picking on me at school! Did you do anything to cause this dear? Nothing at all mum!

They did some mistakes, but nothing to deserve an angry mob hunting their games for all eternity. They tried out a new funding model for their game. Mistakes are bound to happen when you do that.

Angry mobs like this quite often have stupid small reasons they start with.

Just like the kid that's being picked on might have had the wrong colored school bag initially.

Planktum, come on. This happens EVERYWHERE in life. I've seen it happen at college, in high school (what limited experience I had of it), in church, work etc. You get someone who just wants to cause trouble and they get shut down real fast by regular folks who (purposely or not) get in their way. On the Internet, you can ignore those folks because they don't affect you personally.

Ya, many of them most certainly are.

Many others are doing it, because they feel entitled to get free stuff.

From one of the new negative reviews.

(Since when did it become mandatory for publishers to release free expansions? Oh, ya, since free-to-play games and $1 cell phone games became things..... ya, thanks for that.)

@mered4 Yeah you get people who just want to cause trouble, but you are saying that these people decided to focus their efforts on Uber because why? And they were able to muster up a huge following because why? Please explain to me why they chose Uber? Why not inxile?

You guys keep saying they have unfairly targeted Uber... Like it's just some random act.

Imo, because Uber's ability to communicate with their player base (other than a small group of players) has sucked and continues to not be good enough to make it so that player expectations are the same as what the developers intend. Clear up the communication from the beginning, and virtually all of the issues we see today wouldn't be here.

(Edit: Their previous community manager was horrible. He was egotistical and abrasive and must have pushed many people away.)

Yes so you agree that Uber aren't blameless. They caused this and only they can fix it.

I think it'd take a miracle to reconcile the angry, deaf masses with Uber at this point.

I mean, for Pete's sake, Uber just gave out free upgrades to PA:Titans to a huge group of people and have deep discounts for all previous owners, yet there are some KS backers giving negative reviews for the new game, because *they* feel like they've been mistreated.

Uber is very actively communicating with everybody who is not throwing insults at them.

Yep mindboggling.