I appreciate the work they spent modding the game for six years, but in my honest opinion, the game is just not ready for release or for even Beta Testing. Like literally not ready. They mentioned that it has bugs but not as many as i expected it to have. It would have been better if it was a Alpha or *closed beta* to search for bugs with minimum players.
Basically, the game is not ready for public testing. It has constant crashes every now and then. Unstable when it comes to pvp combat.
(04-13-2014, 02:26 PM)Scumbag Wrote: I'm constantly asking, what, where, who, wtf, how and why? I posted on their forums too, i don't think the mod is ready for beta testing, it should still be in alpha testing, and i think i'm being generous when i say that.
I have to agree with this comment. I have no idea what you are supposed to do? You start in a fighter (depending on the faction you pick) and you don't have enough money to buy a better ship. You have almost no cargo space, so what are you supposed to do? I have not figured out how to get anywhere with the Hyperdrive and systems are huge.
I understand that its beta but ???, I assume that the starts are still going to be the same or similar as they are now. Is there mining in the game? If so how do you mine, you don't have enough to get something to mine with and the restarts are not like Disco. Without some detailed guide, you kinda have to figure everything out for yourself, and its nothing like freelancer, or Disco.
Also, one start gave me the falcon, the ship has (how do I put this) like no physics to it (if that makes any sense) its like a static ship, and where you move your mouse, the ship points, there's no.. I don't know, ship movement when you turn? I know I'm not explaining this correctly, but someone else that has played can explain it better. It just feels weird?
Anyway I hope they figure all of this out cause It seems like it could be a great game if they can get stuff to work right and give some sort of guide on what you are supposed to do.
EDIT: One more point, I get this is beta, and it literally is only available so others can help bug hunt, I'm ok with that its fine. But there are SO many bugs that I can't believe they didn't see allot of them when they were still in a closed dev team only setting. I think they should have picked say 5 people ONLY, and just let them have it to test around in, believe me the bugs are not hidden or hard to find, they would have found the two hard crashes I got right away (1. delete the FL game folder or crash. 2. without adjusting your settings in the ini config file, which are set to MAX graphics, it will cause your graphics drivers to crash and stop responding if you don't have a really good graphics card) little things like that.
Bottom line, DISCO is still light years ahead of Freeworlds.
(04-13-2014, 03:47 PM)evanz Wrote: angry much Reidft ? lets see now, a team of devs are trying to make a mod for a game thats 10 years old, they work on their own time to develop something that they really dont have to, takes them 6 years, on free time
and you say it sucks
well done,
can you do better?
if so , then where is it
oops wait, nope,
if you had 6 years then i guess you would be on every dev team for all games
erm, ok not
So if somebody spends time on it, nobody is allowed to criticize it at all ever
First of all, thanks to all of you who took the time to download the mod and give it a go, even if it wasn't to your liking. Just by logging on to the server and having a snoop around you've been extremely helpful.
I thought I'd take the time to reply on what appears to be the most contentious issue for you all here, namely the state of the mod and our reasons for releasing it in such a state.
As most of you are no doubt aware, Freeworlds:Tides of War has been in development for six years. It's name comes from two other mods, Freeworlds, and Tides of War (crazy right?) both of which were Star Wars mods, but they approached the topic is very different manners. In 2008, members from both development teams decided to join forces to create a new mod, with the best of both worlds. Over the course of the six years since, the mod has gone through total overhauls at least three times, the latest of which being after Sushi stepped down as development lead due to personal commitments, and Sizer took control. This was early 2013.
What this means, in essence, is that while a lot of the assets have carried over from this past versions, many other things were built from scratch. Combat and the systems themselves are two of the things that have been completely revamped since then, as well as the development of new mechanics and development tools. The mod overall is six years in development, but the current iteration has been in development barely a year. It should be noted that the current active development team numbers less than ten, most of whom have been the mod at least four years. We choose to release the mod now, as without the buzz that a public release brings, we were under threat of our devs losing motivation.
Until now, FWTOW has not yet had a stress test for the features it brings. We released a demo in 2012, but that was a severely stripped down build of the game, with many feature that you see today taken out (or in many cases, not even built yet). We could not have hoped to uncover the large amount of issues we've found since release yesterday with only our dev and testing teams.
Despite how many (larger, usually paid) groups and companies define it, we follow more of a dictionary definition of 'beta test'. The mod is basically feature-complete; but it needs those third parties (you) to run amok and find all the bugs we couldn't find with a small team alpha testing.
Perhaps our little teaser trailer raised expectations a little, perhaps a general misunderstanding of 'six years in development' did too, but the crux of the matter is this: The open beta is a bug hunt. A stress test for our mechanics and systems, things that Freelancer was never intended to do. Will that come with problems? Yes. It already has; the server is unstable, and many of our plugins have had to be disabled to maintain a minimum level of stability. Sure, we would have liked everything to just work with no problems, but we knew that wasn't going to happen. In the end, if you choose to log onto the server during the beta period, you should be there to help us make the mod and server more stable. Getting a taste of the mod before it's stable is just a bonus.
Rest assured, we are watching for feedback (even outside our own forums and services) and acting on it, but I hope you'll all give FWTOW some time to mature before you seal your opinion on it.