1. The game itself is very rough and needs ALOT of work from a design and technical perspective. 2. The game only shines if there is a community willing to participate.
I know developers and players alike are thinking its going to be like SWG or whatever but people have changed. I don't think there is going to be a enough critical mass of players for some systems to actually work in practice. (ie low pop for sieges or no-one wanting to role play in the pub).
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
Unfortunately the combat is a tab-target first person shooter hybrid mess. It needs to be revamped and streamlined. The devs have no intension of doing so. Also the crafting is a bit of a convoluted mess, but it is detailed.
The game needs some work and it has a huge old school feeling. But if you want thar old school SWG feeling and have $20 to burn, by all means pick up a copy.
I always loved swg but this is just not the same as swg. The games looks very boring in my eyes but I thught it might be worth a look so I was feeling enthusiastic and got gold.
I really wanted to like this game and I know it's in alpha but man just look at these starter cities, they are so bland and lacking of any life or meaning.
I know it is supposed to look like some sort of expedition but the cites still don't makes alot of sense. They are just horrible and they are just put together with various diy boxes and walls it's quite uninspiring.
The combat is kinda hard and the crafting is so boring compared to swg. The hero engine and the steering of your character is somewhat bad, kinda like guildwars.
To put it mildly the graphics are just outright bland and the character creation just wanna make me quit before I'm even started, specially the starting armors looks RIDICULOUS all of them.
The players base is so low and I have the feeling that most are just oldtimers who wan'ts to play solo like so many other MMO's these days or a two buddies trying to find their swg fix.
I just don't relax when playing this game it's stressfull and the background music doesn't uplift this game like even old games can(EQ,WoW and AOC).
Well I know this is an indie game and I'm going to play the game and I know that your character can look quite cool in the armor you can get and it has it's moments, it's just that they should really try to optimize the engine - some places you can run it in great details, other times it starts to stutter. Heck even guildwars 2 looks better.
I'm not trying to make people avoid the game It's just my impressions from having played the game a couple of sessions.
If for some reasons your gonna try repop go for silver you can always upgrade lateron and ofc I'm quite sure the game get's better as more patches are applied and hopefully when one get's deeper into the game.
Seriously, some people can give it cash to support something like this and still acknowledge its faults. You don't want to play, don't. You don't want to support the game, don't. You want to cry because this particular iteration of a game doesn't suit you, don't play...
I love how all of you are coming out of the woodwork to bash this game NOW due to the recent announcement....
I seen this disaster years ago.....You'd have to be a fool not to see it....Yet so many of you didnt and gave up cash...
Amazing
Where is the bashing? Many people have stated that the game is rough, but I didn't see a lot of people puking all over the game. They are correct btw, it is still rough, but it is getting better.
I bought it at the beginning of 2015 because I liked what they were offering. I knew it was in alpha, so I wasn't surprised by what I got for my money. I played for a bit, then put it aside to let it cook some more. I go back every couple of months, and each time I drop back in I see a better game than the last time I played.
I don't feel cheated for spending $20 on this game since I knew what I was getting, and if I really wanted to I could play day after day with all the rough edges, but I don't want to do that. I consider my $20 well spent to support the devs, and hopefully eventually I will have a good game to play.
I check in every once in awhile to look at improvements then log after about an hour.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
What happens if you take all the space combat action, offline skill progression and beautiful graphics out of EVE, but kept the spread-sheet format skill system and redundant skills, while adding clunky animations, then basing the whole thing in the ground with humans and creatures instead of space ships?
You get this game.
I've signed up and purchased the game already. I've logged a total of about 6 hours in the "game". I use that term loosely since it feels more like I'm analyzing data at work, then playing a game. When I want to take a break from the data analyzing, i go out and try to kill things. The only thing I can do, really, is try. They spawn under rocks, inside the terrain, consecutively etc. as well as not having enough combat skills or animations to really tell what the hell is going on in the combat.
It would not be a wise move to "make this your next MMO" at this point. Actually, it would be an impossible move, because no new accounts can be created currently.
The game is built on Hero Engine, and the developers of Hero Engine (Idea Fabrik) have hit some serious financial difficulties. Until those difficulties are resolved, no new accounts can be created for Repop, so sales are currently suspended.
The mess over at Idea Fabrik will have some serious consequences for Repop. If the Hero developers cannot raise any finance, their company will shut down, leaving Repop with a dead engine. Even if Idea Fabrik manage to raise new investors, it will probably mean the free server hosting and back-end services (Hero Cloud) they were previously providing will be curtailed or discontinued.
Repop is also the most promising game currently being developed on Hero Engine, so if the company survives the funding crisis, there will be considerable pressure on the Repop devs to launch as soon as possible. Given that Repop probably needs another 6-8 months of development and testing, that pressure may have a less than optimal outcome.
At worst, Repop will have to be recoded on an entirely new engine. That will probably mean a year or more before launch, and several months of no game access at all.
Either way, Repop will most likely be facing a sudden and unplanned rise in operating expenses. Server hosting and account management (back-end services) will most probably no longer be free in the very near future. This will no doubt put additional pressure on the Repop devs to launch sooner rather than later.
This game is just one in a long line of games that demonstrate everything that is wrong with "Early Access" "Paid Alpha".
Yes, the people that buy into the game know that the game is buggy, because it's early access. However, the vast majority of people won't actively play the game in this state. This is a bad thing, especially for an MMO. People that "check in" from time to time see empty worlds, with no activity, and a very small but rabid community. This tends to give the impression that the game isn't really ready or improving, which is exactly the opposite of what the developers would like.
By the time the game is actually in a "people playing this game every day" kind of state, the vast majority of people that might be those daily players will likely have already moved on to other games. There really isn't any hype buildup around the game launch, because you really could already have been playing for months, if you were really a fan.
In the meantime, the term "Early Access" is questionable anyway. Anyone can buy in whenever they choose, which means you aren't really accessing the content any "earlier" than anyone else who really cares. And "Paid Alpha" isn't really the right term either, since real Alpha Testers are people hired by the company whose job is to break the game so the developer can fix it. People buying into an alpha phase don't have an incentive to purposely search for bugs, and in many cases have an incentive to not tell the developer of potential bugs that have been found.
Basically, these are just industry buzz words that software developers have coined over the last few years to convince people to buy an unfinished product. And there isn't really even any incentive for the developer to EVER complete the project, since they have already received the money.
Not to mention, in most cases, these "indie" developers are not professional software developers. They don't have a track record or a history of managing large scale projects. They typically over-promise, and under-deliver. They almost always have too few people working on the project, and the people working on the project have too many responsibilities. The loss of one developer could set back the project by months. In the case of the Repopulation, reliance upon a 3rd party engine for the core game systems has left them unable to do anything except wait and hope the 3rd party can recover or start essentially from scratch.
Bottom line, "Early Access" is a cancer, but it won't get better as long as there are people willing to support these fly by night prospects.
I make the same comments on forums like Steam, but most people are too excited about a potential game to hear about it. I even bought into Archeage which was a fully released game in Beta for localization issues, and still saw the same trend.
There are a couple exceptions and those seem to be the games/devs that realize they're in early access and ask a fraction of the actual price. Minecraft did it and did it well. Mount & Blade has also done it. Recently, a small indie, Dig or Die has also done a good job of delivering. The thing these all had in common though - not MMOs.
MMOs are a different beast and I feel the devs bite off more than they can chew.
The game has only concepts going for it. It needs more of a clear direction. It has promise (as it has for years,) but still nothing has developed from it. The hero engine issue being a major hurdle for them right now in moving the game forward.
The worst business decision that Idea Fabrik ever made was selling it's completely unfinished shell of an engine to BioWare for SWTOR and then allowing them to state that they were using "Hero Engine".
The backlash of critical rage over the failings of the "Hero Engine" were enormous after BioWare's complete incompetence in turning the shell of an engine into a playable game. Even to this day PVP and other activities in SWTOR are severely limited by incompetent programming.
I realize that at the time this was an opportunity for Idea Fabrik to make some quick money and continue developing their engine. Hindsight is 20/20 and all of that. Unfortunately, I don't think a lot of other games are willing to go near this engine due to the fact that it has SWTOR written all over it. Whereas other engines like CryEngine are used heavily because it released to high critical praise and side by side with one of the most graphically intense games in history.
In fact, I was shocked when repop told us that they had picked this engine. A relatively unknown game, based around fairly niche concepts and compounding that with one of the most reviled engines in history was probably not the best move.
The worst business decision that Idea Fabrik ever made was selling it's completely unfinished shell of an engine to BioWare for SWTOR and then allowing them to state that they were using "Hero Engine".
The backlash of critical rage over the failings of the "Hero Engine" were enormous after BioWare's complete incompetence in turning the shell of an engine into a playable game. Even to this day PVP and other activities in SWTOR are severely limited by incompetent programming.
I realize that at the time this was an opportunity for Idea Fabrik to make some quick money and continue developing their engine. Hindsight is 20/20 and all of that. Unfortunately, I don't think a lot of other games are willing to go near this engine due to the fact that it has SWTOR written all over it. Whereas other engines like CryEngine are used heavily because it released to high critical praise and side by side with one of the most graphically intense games in history.
In fact, I was shocked when repop told us that they had picked this engine. A relatively unknown game, based around fairly niche concepts and compounding that with one of the most reviled engines in history was probably not the best move.
Simutronics Corporation owned Hero Engine at the time when Bioware/EA purchased the full source license. It was very barebones at the time.
Hero Engine has been extensively updated since Idea Fabrik took over. But not so much that Zenimax Online Studios developed ESO on it completely but rather, prototype and tested using it.
Somewhere JC has mentioned that HE was a very promising engine and the most affordable one at the time they started.
A lot of talk I see about Hero Engine (also probably for other engines too) is self-perpetuated from people that don't know what they are talking about.
I think it will definitely be a game worth playing at release. Especially for fans of SWG.
I never understood the appeal of playing games until after the last character wipe so I usually just check to see if the game is worth playing and never look at it again or wait until release if I think it has what I am looking for.
I can't play any game for an overly long period, like three weeks to a couple months maybe if I really like it. I'm more of a rotation person that is always looking for a new diversion.
Wow sounds like grim news for Repop, which sucks because I wanted to play it when they stop wiping. I think the game itself is very good and hits that old school note pretty well. It's not galaxies though, as it does not have the grit in world objects and abject freedom that SWG had.
I still think it has enough merit to keep me playing for a long time after launch.
MMORPG players are often like Hobbits: They don't like Adventures
Comments
1. The game itself is very rough and needs ALOT of work from a design and technical perspective.
2. The game only shines if there is a community willing to participate.
I know developers and players alike are thinking its going to be like SWG or whatever but people have changed. I don't think there is going to be a enough critical mass of players for some systems to actually work in practice. (ie low pop for sieges or no-one wanting to role play in the pub).
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
The game needs some work and it has a huge old school feeling. But if you want thar old school SWG feeling and have $20 to burn, by all means pick up a copy.
I really wanted to like this game and I know it's in alpha but man just look at these starter cities, they are so bland and lacking of any life or meaning.
I know it is supposed to look like some sort of expedition but the cites still don't makes alot of sense. They are just horrible and they are just put together with various diy boxes and walls it's quite uninspiring.
The combat is kinda hard and the crafting is so boring compared to swg. The hero engine and the steering of your character is somewhat bad, kinda like guildwars.
To put it mildly the graphics are just outright bland and the character creation just wanna make me quit before I'm even started, specially the starting armors looks RIDICULOUS all of them.
The players base is so low and I have the feeling that most are just oldtimers who wan'ts to play solo like so many other MMO's these days or a two buddies trying to find their swg fix.
I just don't relax when playing this game it's stressfull and the background music doesn't uplift this game like even old games can(EQ,WoW and AOC).
Well I know this is an indie game and I'm going to play the game and I know that your character can look quite cool in the armor you can get and it has it's moments, it's just that they should really try to optimize the engine - some places you can run it in great details, other times it starts to stutter. Heck even guildwars 2 looks better.
I'm not trying to make people avoid the game It's just my impressions from having played the game a couple of sessions.
If for some reasons your gonna try repop go for silver you can always upgrade lateron and ofc I'm quite sure the game get's better as more patches are applied and hopefully when one get's deeper into the game.
I seen this disaster years ago.....You'd have to be a fool not to see it....Yet so many of you didnt and gave up cash...
Amazing
I bought it at the beginning of 2015 because I liked what they were offering. I knew it was in alpha, so I wasn't surprised by what I got for my money. I played for a bit, then put it aside to let it cook some more. I go back every couple of months, and each time I drop back in I see a better game than the last time I played.
I don't feel cheated for spending $20 on this game since I knew what I was getting, and if I really wanted to I could play day after day with all the rough edges, but I don't want to do that. I consider my $20 well spent to support the devs, and hopefully eventually I will have a good game to play.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
You get this game.
I've signed up and purchased the game already. I've logged a total of about 6 hours in the "game". I use that term loosely since it feels more like I'm analyzing data at work, then playing a game. When I want to take a break from the data analyzing, i go out and try to kill things. The only thing I can do, really, is try. They spawn under rocks, inside the terrain, consecutively etc. as well as not having enough combat skills or animations to really tell what the hell is going on in the combat.
The game is built on Hero Engine, and the developers of Hero Engine (Idea Fabrik) have hit some serious financial difficulties. Until those difficulties are resolved, no new accounts can be created for Repop, so sales are currently suspended.
The mess over at Idea Fabrik will have some serious consequences for Repop. If the Hero developers cannot raise any finance, their company will shut down, leaving Repop with a dead engine. Even if Idea Fabrik manage to raise new investors, it will probably mean the free server hosting and back-end services (Hero Cloud) they were previously providing will be curtailed or discontinued.
Repop is also the most promising game currently being developed on Hero Engine, so if the company survives the funding crisis, there will be considerable pressure on the Repop devs to launch as soon as possible. Given that Repop probably needs another 6-8 months of development and testing, that pressure may have a less than optimal outcome.
At worst, Repop will have to be recoded on an entirely new engine. That will probably mean a year or more before launch, and several months of no game access at all.
Either way, Repop will most likely be facing a sudden and unplanned rise in operating expenses. Server hosting and account management (back-end services) will most probably no longer be free in the very near future. This will no doubt put additional pressure on the Repop devs to launch sooner rather than later.
This game is just one in a long line of games that demonstrate everything that is wrong with "Early Access" "Paid Alpha".
Yes, the people that buy into the game know that the game is buggy, because it's early access. However, the vast majority of people won't actively play the game in this state. This is a bad thing, especially for an MMO. People that "check in" from time to time see empty worlds, with no activity, and a very small but rabid community. This tends to give the impression that the game isn't really ready or improving, which is exactly the opposite of what the developers would like.
By the time the game is actually in a "people playing this game every day" kind of state, the vast majority of people that might be those daily players will likely have already moved on to other games. There really isn't any hype buildup around the game launch, because you really could already have been playing for months, if you were really a fan.
In the meantime, the term "Early Access" is questionable anyway. Anyone can buy in whenever they choose, which means you aren't really accessing the content any "earlier" than anyone else who really cares. And "Paid Alpha" isn't really the right term either, since real Alpha Testers are people hired by the company whose job is to break the game so the developer can fix it. People buying into an alpha phase don't have an incentive to purposely search for bugs, and in many cases have an incentive to not tell the developer of potential bugs that have been found.
Basically, these are just industry buzz words that software developers have coined over the last few years to convince people to buy an unfinished product. And there isn't really even any incentive for the developer to EVER complete the project, since they have already received the money.
Not to mention, in most cases, these "indie" developers are not professional software developers. They don't have a track record or a history of managing large scale projects. They typically over-promise, and under-deliver. They almost always have too few people working on the project, and the people working on the project have too many responsibilities. The loss of one developer could set back the project by months. In the case of the Repopulation, reliance upon a 3rd party engine for the core game systems has left them unable to do anything except wait and hope the 3rd party can recover or start essentially from scratch.
Bottom line, "Early Access" is a cancer, but it won't get better as long as there are people willing to support these fly by night prospects.
I make the same comments on forums like Steam, but most people are too excited about a potential game to hear about it. I even bought into Archeage which was a fully released game in Beta for localization issues, and still saw the same trend.
There are a couple exceptions and those seem to be the games/devs that realize they're in early access and ask a fraction of the actual price. Minecraft did it and did it well. Mount & Blade has also done it. Recently, a small indie, Dig or Die has also done a good job of delivering. The thing these all had in common though - not MMOs.
MMOs are a different beast and I feel the devs bite off more than they can chew.
The backlash of critical rage over the failings of the "Hero Engine" were enormous after BioWare's complete incompetence in turning the shell of an engine into a playable game. Even to this day PVP and other activities in SWTOR are severely limited by incompetent programming.
I realize that at the time this was an opportunity for Idea Fabrik to make some quick money and continue developing their engine. Hindsight is 20/20 and all of that. Unfortunately, I don't think a lot of other games are willing to go near this engine due to the fact that it has SWTOR written all over it. Whereas other engines like CryEngine are used heavily because it released to high critical praise and side by side with one of the most graphically intense games in history.
In fact, I was shocked when repop told us that they had picked this engine. A relatively unknown game, based around fairly niche concepts and compounding that with one of the most reviled engines in history was probably not the best move.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeroEngine
Simutronics Corporation owned Hero Engine at the time when Bioware/EA purchased the full source license. It was very barebones at the time.
Hero Engine has been extensively updated since Idea Fabrik took over. But not so much that Zenimax Online Studios developed ESO on it completely but rather, prototype and tested using it.
Somewhere JC has mentioned that HE was a very promising engine and the most affordable one at the time they started.
A lot of talk I see about Hero Engine (also probably for other engines too) is self-perpetuated from people that don't know what they are talking about.
I think it will definitely be a game worth playing at release. Especially for fans of SWG.
I never understood the appeal of playing games until after the last character wipe so I usually just check to see if the game is worth playing and never look at it again or wait until release if I think it has what I am looking for.
I can't play any game for an overly long period, like three weeks to a couple months maybe if I really like it. I'm more of a rotation person that is always looking for a new diversion.
MurderHerd
I still think it has enough merit to keep me playing for a long time after launch.