I wanted to share my short story with our game and give some thoughts why its was not huge success with its enourmous potential.
And first i want to say i have HUGE respect to MercurySteam for keeping supporting this project , in my opinion most other studios just would abandon ship and start working on other projects. Our games history is endless struggle, with rise and falls. I want to say thank you MSE for keeping faith and continue improve this game.
This game means a lot for me, i have really strong love/hate relationship with it and i really want it to be in the best state as possible.
I met so many amazing people and some of them become my friends.
For first time in my life i falled in love with fictional character(HIVE is love).
It become very important part of my life , even if its sounds so silly and this is why my heart bleed to see it struggle so much.
I started playing in Raiders of Broken Planet times , around 2018 when Wardog campaign.
There was zero advertisement so it was pure luck i stumbled on it in Steam.
Instantly fall in love with characters,art style,lore,music. Gameplay feel unique and there still nothing on market what would be very similar to it.
Its unpolished gem , its have enormous potential.
But from start there was aspects was dragged everything down.
There was so many things what was it seems designed to frustrate player.
I always had feeling what game purposefully try to make me hate her.
Poor progression and economics, new player experience, balance, repetitiveness , technical problems and bugs ,etc.
Game always had roadblocks what artificially increase time for player to get things. I perfectly understand it,our game have lack of content so there must be something to increase play time. But honestly its only frustrate everyone ans drag down overall experience.Some things are understandable since this is first multiplayer game from MSE.
Best example how ping depended our game is , half of characters and CQC are designed in a way what they completely rely on ping to be effective. Its a death sentence to any competitive game or game mode.
Partial solution is just make most of the weapons to be hit-scan or very fast projectiles like Locals have.
Im going to say very controversial thing but i think if our game was pure/only co-op , it would be overall better for its state.
Simply because 4vs1 formula is EXTREMELY hard to make good and successful.
Most of games of this style have failed , Evolve is good example(DbD is different story).
It was very risky idea to implement something like this and i give props to MSE for that.
Antagonist divided player base: one hate it and second love it.
But it always was flawed and never was in "middle" state.
It always was: grunts are broken and wreck raiders or grunts are useless and raiders wreck antag.
There was never middle ground.
I just feel MSE was not having enough experience to implement something like this but took a gamble but in the end its just very flawed experience what not enjoyable for both sides.
Is game is better now? It depends from what view we judge.
From PVE player perspective game is overall just better and more enjoyable to play.
In terms of PVP it got worse for antagonist and better for raiders.
Another big problem was is lack of MSE touch with community. All people i know agree with me on this.
A lot of good and reasonable players given a ton of great suggestions and feedback but it seems it was ignored.
Many changes was not asked for , such as infinite ammo , aleph nades , wounded roll , grapple changes.
This changes are not purely bad but they aimed to make game more casual which is again not bad.
From my point of view MSE chooses to steer this ship in more casual waters and sacrifice its hardcore elements.
It depends is it good or bad , some seek more casual style game and other want more hardcore experience.
Spacelords always was in struggle , both in maintaining and finding new audience because how radical changes are from ROTBP to SL was.
I still want this game to succeed but after so many years of struggle and trying to find its path , its very hard to be optimistic.
Most of people i know already abandon this game but i will stay with it to the end. Or until HIVE get nerfed , then im done for real.
