The topic starter liftoff the right discussion. Good reviews nearly always push sales especially today where customers are being ripped off quite often so they even don't trust big names.
Bohemia most often fail to make a pretty good impression with their games to reviewers worldwide because of their buggy and unfinished products.
Of course, Bohemia is not the only company that suffer from this. But nearly all of their games have such a great potential (you can also read this in the reviews) and their games even always appeal to me (That's saying something, I should be one their best customers) but they have some talent to ruin their best brands... this makes me sooooo angry :rage: !
Well, it's ok if you have some minor bugs in your final product (like most games have) or when some features are missing that you may have announced in an early tech demo. You still get good critics, especially when your game fulfills the standards of its genre on a solid level.
But if you make a strategy game where you are not able to implement some reasonably good pathfinding algorithms (or find some developers who do it for you), then you are in the wrong business. And no, this is not the publisher's fault!
I myself am a software developer and I couldn't think of spending any development time in any other part of the game or even a console port when this fundamental feature for my strategy title is not working! How can you negotiate a deadline when this mission critical thingy is not ready in your early prototype long time ago? I would get a heart attack!! :mad:
Well, some people now may argue that after the release date there will be bug fixes and patches because they know they can count on you... they are so excited about your great long term community support and so on. Hey that's great! But it means nothing (from a commercial perspective) when you failed on the all-important date: the release of your product! Hey, do you wanna earn money? You need paying customers before you can even think about supporting the community, isn't it?
But look what you have done: An average metacritic score of 60% for the pc version and even only 50% for the xbox 360. This is a desaster!!!
All reviews that I have read so far criticize the horrible pathfinding implementation and in user comments below those reviews you can painfully often read sentencess like: "Well it's Bohemia, have you been expecting something else?" This is so embarrassing.
But I've already learnt from this so I tend to buy only Bohemia games when they are 75% off at Steam at least one year after the release.
Then most bugs are fixed, missing features implemented, gaming is fun and relaxing. Spending $20 for the CCGM Beta test was an exception.
Why I should care about bugs, game brakers, strange game design decisions, endless forum discussions, crazy mods, rude members and so on when I just have to wait a year or so to get a final game even for a better price afterwards? I don't need to be an early adopter for games.
Cu on some island when multiplayer is finished,
Robbson
