Troy Goodfellow

Three Moves Ahead Episode 167 - Naval War: Arctic Circle

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I get a sense that the developer is not very serious about his game. When asked about patching in a saving capability, the developer rambles on about how hard his team has been working and how they are all taking some vacation time this summer. Are u serious? We are still in May and the developer has not indicated a date as to when something as basic and essential as saving in-game would be patched in. Instead, he simply says that eventually they will implement this “feature.” I cannot help it but think that maybe because they r a business software company primarily, they are not necessarily concerned or rely on the financial success of this game. I have many doubts about post-release support months from now.

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New, fertile posting ground! Kind of a repeat on what I posted on Flash of Steel...

I want to avoid being perceived as ignorant. I know it takes a ton of man-hours just to put out a decent game. But the tone of the podcast seemed one of, "Well, we gave it our best shot. We'll try to get some patches in when we can, but this is the product, so we hope you like it."

Fair enough. And if you want to charge a price for game consumers to experience the game, that's fair enough also. But ultimately, the customer votes with his dollars/pounds/euros, whatevers. I'm not sure I'm ready to shell out the $20 that it's listed for on Amazon just yet. I'm still reading/hearing too much online that this game has issues that need fixing, comments about poor AI, non functionality, crashing issues, etc..etc..

Hope the designers have a nice summer vacation; I will check back at the end of the year, and maybe a more polished product will be available; the price point will have gone downhill by then. No problem in my book, but I think the whole thing is a missed opportunity for the game maker.

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This is a very strange interview. The LD way of approaching the topics presented by Rob sounded more like that of an expert gamer than of a designer : every time Rob went fishing for explanations on why systems were designed a certain way (e.g. the different in pace between the submarine warfare loop and the aircraft warfare loop) Haugland only gave further details about how those worked, instead of providing info about the intent behind those caracteristics or the history of iteration. Weird.

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Yeah, maybe it's due to their professional background, but there was very little acknowledgement of designer intentionality by Haugland. The game is what it is, I guess.

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