My personnal take on recently released DLCs
Hi, i'll start by precising that i love this game, i've sunk about 900H into it since the second day of its release in early access, so while i have some critics to make in this thread i still support your work 100%.
I've recently plunged again into SE and was surprised by these new blocks that i saw greyed out in my block list menue, but i was even more so when i saw that they were a paid DLC content. These are the kind of block addition that i've been expecting to see since 2013, i figured "they'll add these later, for now the practical side is more important", but i never would have thought you'd ask us to pay extra for it. The frustrating part about that is that there's still a lot of block variants that are missing (or feel like they are) from the vanilla game, like 1x1x1 small merge blocks which would be incredibly usefull on small grids, or 2x2x1 corner and inv. corner variants for light and heavy armor (i mean you can't do the 2x1 slope without making the 2x2 corners for when you place them at 90° of each other, it feels unfinished). So the feeling you get as an early backer kind of goes like:
"well, i paid waiting for these sort of blocks to be added, and they used my investment to develop them, but now they're trying to make me pay for them a second time. Meanwhile with less than a tenth of the modeling time that was used for this DLC, parctical blocks that i've been waiting for during years could have been done."
On top of that you get the whole "out of early access" case, i mean again i love this game, but it's nowhere near finished, there's tons of collision issues, network bugs, all sorts of clanging that still persist, and while Good AI made us promises we're stuck with its evil twin, Bad AI, that seems to be blastin' that UK jungle music "never backward, always forward" constantly. It's a good beta, but it's not what we've been told we'd have as a finished product, nor what we expected.
That being said, it's all rough feelings, without entering details i know that developement is a lot more complicated than that, and i'm confident that you'll keep on improving space engineers, it's more of a "be carefull which way you go with your PR" sort of warning and feedback on how people can recieve all of this. These things can damage your reputation, and it's hard to get back up from that.
I like this feedback
At the end of the day people need to be paid for their work, someone designed these new blocks and it just doesn't work out as economical for games to keep adding content for free. People who brought the game, potentially in a much simpler state are getting weeks or more of work for free. They continue to improve the base game, they aren't falling back on paid DLC. It's always optional extras for the game. I understand your frustrations but as someone who has struggled with game development before it's just not really reasonable to expect years of supported, high quality updates for nothing, from a game that isn't that expensive to begin with considering the quality and amount of content.
At the end of the day people need to be paid for their work, someone designed these new blocks and it just doesn't work out as economical for games to keep adding content for free. People who brought the game, potentially in a much simpler state are getting weeks or more of work for free. They continue to improve the base game, they aren't falling back on paid DLC. It's always optional extras for the game. I understand your frustrations but as someone who has struggled with game development before it's just not really reasonable to expect years of supported, high quality updates for nothing, from a game that isn't that expensive to begin with considering the quality and amount of content.
You have to keep in mind that all the DLCs have previously implemented block functions. Keen's art team just comes up with a cool design, so someone takes existing functionality and quickly puts it on the block. They don't have to fire half the design team, Space Engineers looks cooler in general, and Keen gets more funding. Wins across the board.
You have to keep in mind that all the DLCs have previously implemented block functions. Keen's art team just comes up with a cool design, so someone takes existing functionality and quickly puts it on the block. They don't have to fire half the design team, Space Engineers looks cooler in general, and Keen gets more funding. Wins across the board.
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