Quote:
|
Originally Posted by AfterShock
I tell you whats really good for the development process:
Openly criticising FF development constantly, in an attempt to steer FF offcourse as much as possible, whilst wasting the developers time and generally demotivating anyone who even thought about doing any work on it, voluntarily, giving up their spare time so you can play a game for free then whine how after 4 years of work it's not good enough for you.
|
Another thing that's great for the dev process is to make big changes to the game that clearly weren't thought through, then undermine the gameplay patch after patch for years, so many people can actually point to how much better and fun the original version was and how NO new development would have been better overall than what's been done.
You talk about steering FF off course,
THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT'S BEEN HAPPENING. I want FF to get back ON COURSE. The direction FF has taken over the past TWO years, NOT four, is precisely the reason there's so much criticism. If I were to lie to you and praise change after change I consider awful, how would that help anything?
For what it's worth, on the cosmetic end of things, I think you guys have been doing a great job, but I consider that almost irrelevant against the deeper gameplay problems that have been added. I honestly feel bad for the devs who have poured their heart and soul developing this game and given it a lot of polish in things like models, textures, animation, mapping, etc. only to have absolutely horrid gameplay decisions ruin the mod, and thus they receive waves of negative feedback overall, even though it's not fault of their own personally. I believe people like Elmo might be in this category.
And don't misunderstand. I'm not whining that the game's not good enough after so many years of work. I realize how difficult some of this is. What I'm saying is on release it WAS "good enough", and gameplay-wise it has gotten WORSE and WORSE. I'm not opposed to change, I think FF could be even better than 1.0, but that's not what's happened and the direction the gameplay has gone since then has been awful. I'm attacking the judgment and decision making behind this mod, not the effort of the people that's gone into it.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Crazycarl
However, ideas in game design are a dime-a-dozen. They really mean nothing until they are implemented. In a volunteer system, the one who does the implementation is the one who gets to decide how to do it.
|
This kind of reinforces my point. Most of the changes I'm talking about HAVE been implemented in the past and WORKED and were only changed after the fact to what's broken now. And it's not just a simple matter of who implements things, otherwise parts of old codebase could be submitted and many gameplay problems could get fixed. It's more of a weird oligarchy in action that approves things haphazardly. I'm almost positive a rollback of old values for several classes would not be approved, even if I re-did the coding myself.