sar·casm | \ ˈsär-ˌka-zəm \
1: a sharp and often satirical or ironic utterance designed to cut or give pain
2a: a mode of satirical wit depending for its effect on bitter, caustic, and often ironic language that is usually directed against an individual
b: the use or language of sarcasm
sigh
... its like talking in circles over and ober and over and over again
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Naila Hadjas: The game is an unusual combination of handcrafted story and side encounters located in procedural areas
...
What started as a hardcore survival roguelike game meant to be replayed over and over in three or four hour playthroughs is now a fully story-driven action adventure game with survival-inspired elements.
We always had a story, but we decided to expand on it since this is what the community seemed more interested in. The game is no longer a survival game but it still has survival elements to it. Thematically, that is relevant to the story we are trying to tell.
Review day PSA! I'm seeing across a lot of reviews comments about survival mechanics - that's cool, but remember they can be turned off The easy setting removes them, and you can customize medium/hard to do so too.
So I have been watching this game since it came out in Early Access. It seemed to be picking up good talk and people seemed excited about it. As the months went by it was really picking up notice? So its finally released and it is getting torn to shreds by reviews??? My question is....WTF happened???? Hahahaha
Now after saying all that I see the Polygon review???
We Happy Few is uncomfortable, uncanny and brilliant.....how can reviews be so hot and cold????
*pops a faulty Joy Pill* Oh darn it constable, I see eyes everywhere! This is a problem, innit?
I was really curious to see if the right alchemy could finally be achieved now that the game includes a story so I grabbed the iso and followed the LSD tides. The atmosphere is unique, it has sparks of brilliance and the bizarre characters living in the trippy world are intriguing, but there was one problem: the further I progressed in the game, the worse it got. The first couple of hours: "This is gonna be good! - Four hours in: "Well, there are definitely annoyances but the pros still outweigh the cons." - Eight hours in: "I can't wait for it to end"
The concept of an open world survival-ish game entirely based on stealth, melee, crafting and set in such an odd place is a good one on paper, sadly though the result feels consolish/simplistic and fails in my opinion both when it comes to level design and implementation of the core mechanics.
The stealth itself is barebones with unreliable AI regardless of the settings (virtual folks sport magical jeebus-like omnipresence alongside the memory of a goldfish), the combat is basic (bash and parry, no combos) as well as the survival bits, but all this wouldn't be too much of an issue for me if there was a rewarding sense of exploration. Unfortunately, most of the locations look same-y (also in terms of loot) and there's little room for experimentations (the quests are of the static type ->get item X, sirwalkalot, take it to guy Y, next). The inconsistent visuals, inner roughness and wonky performance don't help the cause, either.
All that's left is the main story involving the three protagonists, which didn't quite grab me as much as I hoped but I can definitely see others loving its personal approach. Ultimately it's the type of game that tries to be many things but..it kinda gets lost in a glass of water, the Happy men in here are waay too few and far in-between. *Pops another Joy Pill*
Sopretty much same deal as contrast, great idea, nice story but mediocre executuon, wonder whats next fir the under Microsoft wings... With this one i guess i will wait fir few patches and probably turn the survival nonsence to minimal setting possible
I don't know about the console versions, but the PC one is definitely just as rough as it was during the early access phase. The approximative collision system and patterns coupled with the faulty AI make citizens act like complete maniacs (more than they should be ), and as per tradition the whole experience doesn't play like a finished product, let alone a sixty dollars one.
The only difference is that now there is a main "quest" to follow (no major problems for me there at least), which however feels rather disconnected from what the game really wanted to be. One can tell that different visions colluded with each other forming a Frankenstein babby.
@ixi: hmm nothing unfixable , given time , but this is Gbx and pretty small indie team so who the fuck knows , other than that pretty much the usual wait and see shit these days
Its been a while since i played actually finished bigger game on launch, but i guess i am going to try current state of this , just for science to see if its as fuked up as you guys are saying or if its the usual outrage youtuber overreaction
Overall FUCKi hate where this stupid industry is going , how shit the jurnous are and even people stopped thinking for themselfes and just parrot random ass annoying YTers ....
Maybe, just maybe it should all burn in grand and glorious fire .... humanity is screwed anyway
They changed direction way too late. Should have kept it smaller and worked with what they could do with the existing skill and within the set time since meeting deadline was so critical for them. Then, expanding the game through dlcs perhaps. Acquiring a publishing deal with Gearbox in the end didn't help either. And making it $60 dollars at launch was downright suicidal.
wait what? I am just curious if its as bad as people say , nothing more nothing less
the rant part was mostly just sigh about overall state of industry not really about this game => its just been little too much shit recently
but good for you if you trust the reviews / YTers and the concesus ..... for me the ixis impression said much more than any video from Jim Derpling ever could
Roach_666 wrote:
They changed direction way too late..
i am still not entirely sure they changed direction , story mode was always supposed to be only in v1.0 and EA was just a test for sandbox mode .... but i guess they shouldnt go overboard with the expansion if original plans when GBX came in
Roach_666 wrote:
Acquiring a publishing deal with Gearbox in the end didn't help either. And making it $60 dollars at launch was downright suicidal.
I honestly get sad when I see indie teams fail like this. Only indie teams bother trying out totally new things gameplay-wise even with restricted-budget unlike their AAA counterparts.
Th standard tale of indie team having bigger ideas they are able to deliver and then getting fucked by bad publishing deal
Read few more reviews and regular non outrageyoutuber footage on this and basically its great story and atmosphere hidden inside messy product ( kinda same thing Contrast was). So i wouldnt say its entirely fail , the parts that matter to me are fine , it just need severe patchjob
A fair amount - well beyond a small indie budget, but nowhere near a AAA budget. I can't add specifics unfortunately.
We had funding from various funds as well as early access sales and sales from our previous game.
About releassing before its ready
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I think you're overestimating independent teams' resources, and assuming that we're all the same.
In our case, I don't think this game is a "buggy broken product". The console versions are not at the framerate that we wanted, which causes a lot of the visible issues that you see... but that's not really a lot of bugs. Really just consequences of lower framerate. The game itself has almost no progression blockers, except for one issue that we had never seen before on release (the issue with keys randomly not spawning where they are supposed to).
We released because we had to. If we could have delayed the console versions we might have, but it wasn't an option. You can sum it up as "we thought we could optimize in the time we had and we got 95% of the way there". Unfortunately that 5% caused the issues that people are seeing on PS4.
About bugs
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AI: That depends on what they're talking about. The combat AI is basic but functions reasonably well most of the time, although sometimes it can seem like they're not working properly because they're deprioritized (we can't have a million AI running everywhere so we slow down the ones that aren't critical). I suspect the bigger issues about AI are all related to how people view that, but I don't know - people haven't been very specific about that, surprisingly.
Texture and graphical inconsistencies are actually about streaming - CPU and hard drive. Basically, Wellington Wells is too big to keep all of it in memory, and impossible to render all at once. We use a variety of techniques to solve this, but the two big ones are LODs and streaming.
In order to change all of these things, we created a streaming system to pull things in/out of memory. This basically reads the data on the hard drive (disk IO), pushes it into memory, which is then drawn by the gpu. So as you move down a street, the things behind you stream out and the other things stream in.
What people are seeing with this is the mesh or texture streamer struggling to keep up with the load. So you can be next to a door that has a hyper low resolution, and that's because the streamer itself just couldn't bring everything in properly so it had to make some concessions.
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the two major issues we want to fix are the key missing bug (preventing some players from continuing) and the save corruption issue on PS4. Those are being tested, but we still need to go through certification once we have that build. So I don't have an eta for you, unfortunately.
The first post-launch binary patch for We Happy Few addresses progression blockers, limited performance issues and crashes. A larger content update will be available soon, addressing performance optimization and other issues.
Once we launched the game, the programming team stayed on the main game to polish it and release updates while the rest of the team went into small groups to work on the DLCs. The team has been hard at work on them for the past few months, which is why we have been quiet about it, but we won’t remain quiet forever. Maybe even Weekly Journals might make a return, like we used to.
We do have some remaining Kickstarter promises to fulfil. These include sandbox mode, and Mac and Linux versions. We currently have a running Linux version that will be available for testing in the new year. We are also looking for development partners for the Mac version, as we are not Mac specialists. We understand this is taking longer than anticipated and we appreciate the patience with this; having a more solid core game (particularly on the optimization side) was critical before getting to work on these two versions. Sandbox is coming to the end of its development, and we’ll be sharing what this is soon.
We are also super excited about the coming Season Pass content, as this is an opportunity for the team to have fun and run wild with crazy ideas, while also celebrating some of the fan’s favorite characters from the main game.
Sandbox is coming soon-ish and probably first DLC aswell
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Sandbox is in the final stages of tweaking and QA, and will be the next major patch after 1.6 (1.7, probably). We’ll be talking about these game modes shortly, as they will provide different experiences to what you currently see in Wellington Wells.
They Came From Below is mostly content complete, and we’re currently reviewing/polishing up what we’ve built in production.
Streatchgoal modes out
More details :http://compulsiongames.com/en/news/189/arcade-mode-and-update-17-now-live!
This patch contains Arcade Mode, including three separate new ways to playWe Happy Few. It also includes infrastructure to handle the upcoming DLC, and general performance optimizations, crash fixes, fixes for progression blockers, fixes for gameplay bugs, and localization fixes.
Arcade Mode
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Arcade Mode is a free game update for We Happy Few which contains three new modes that will showcase a different part of the We Happy Few experience: Survival, Night’s Watch, and Sandbox.
Survival
Survival is a return to the Early Access survival experience, designed for those of you who enjoyed the survival experience in the past. You will need to hunt for food, water and shelter, and you’ll need to use all of the stealth, crafting, and combat skills at your disposal to last as long as you can in Wellington Wells.
Night’s Watch (previously known as Wellie mode)
Night’s Watch brings to life one of the most requested characters by the community, allowing you to play as the most notorious Bobby, Constable Constable. As a constable, and a man of high duty, you’ll need to keep all the filthy Downers out of town through fast paced combat while making sure you do not run out of Joy.
Sandbox
Sandbox is a non-narrative / non-goal based game mode, which allows you to experiment with world generation systems and gameplay options. This isn’t a skill based mode rather than a calmer experience, designed for players who want the freedom to create their own version Wellington Wells.
Finally, we have just about fulfilled the last of our Kickstarter requirements. With Arcade Mode coming out, we’ve completed all our project stretch goals! We’re just about finished with the final physical rewards, including the final parts of the collector’s box. Thank you all for your patience.
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The easy setting removes them, and you can customize medium/hard to do so too.
), and as per tradition the whole experience doesn't play like a finished product, let alone a sixty dollars one.
