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Old March 26th, 2011, 05:34 PM

Uncle_Joe Uncle_Joe is offline
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Default Re: Customer relations - part 2

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It's sad to see what road Malfador has taken. But after the Space Empires 5 fiasco (still plenty of bugs, terrible AI, and no more patches), this is no surprise. Malfador's time has ended.
I dont know all of the specifics on SE5, but my understanding was that the lack of continued support for it was not Aaron/Malfador's fault. I believe it was the company he sold SE5's rights to (Strategy First IIRC). They stopped him from continuing to support the game and I believe (although this could have been speculation) that he is/was under contract not to produce another space-themed 4x game for some period of time as well.

I didnt particularly care for SE5 either (it became far too clunky and unbalanced) but I thought that it had the potential to be better than SE4 and it just never really got there.

I feel the same way about World Supremacy. I think it has a lot of the right elements to make a fast, easy, and fun game. It just needs to have the bugs ironed out and some serious help for the AI. I know AI coding is extremely difficult so I had, at one point, posted a series of changes that could have been made to the game rules to help keep the AI on a more equal footing (which would have been a LOT easier IMO than actually trying to code the AI to better make use of those elements).

At this point, I haven't touched WS since maybe the first week of January? It's just not worth the bother as is. But I have bought plenty of games over the years that I have played a few times and never really gotten into (SE5 is actually in that category...I REALLY wanted to like it, but it just never drew me in). So while I'm not happy about the state the game was released in (and the failure to correct the core issues in a timely manner), I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.

What I *will* do however is wait before purchasing other products from 'indi' devs and publishers until there is more feedback that the game is finished and polished enough to be worth the money. I bought WS essentially based on my prior good experiences with SE3/SE4 from Malfador and the SP series from Shrapnel. After my experience with WS, both are back in the 'wait and see' category, which is a shame. As a small business, it's very hard to build up a good reputation, but it sure is easy to lose. :/
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