I can't remember the past was some kind of software heaven. I'll instead remember waiting months to get a patch, a new driver, fighting hours with config.sys and autoexec.bat to get enough memory to launch games, having hardware compatibility issues with games and so on ...

I've played 110hours of ES2. 50% in EA. With the release version I only get one bug. It's a breaking game bug, I hope It will be not a breaking savegame too but what I saw his far from what I read here or on steam's forum.

Again, reporting issues, complaining for not beeing able to play is legit. But when I read some message I really think that some people want the dev team commit seppuku for a mistake they made. And that all I want to denounce, the tone and the fierceness of some talkative people, no more, no less.

Xmass wrote:

Bugs happen. The problem is when companies act in bad faith or do nothing about the bugs. And here Amplitude can't be accused of bad faith or inaction.

Bad review is the same thing, it's not a problem if it's explained and reviewed if things went better.

And for people complaining is the same thing. You've a problem, you report it and if nothing change stop buying from this company and move on.

But no, people made a bad review, downvote other review, made bad comments on good review, create multiple indignant reaction post on steam, here, in every place they found, react on every post they found with more indignation... if they had spend 1% of the half of the third of the energy spent for this in a useful cause instead, the world will be much better :D

But no, they must wait two more weeks to get full benefice of the 40 bucks they spent, so they are indignant.

If I need to wait 2 weeks to play game why do I have to pay the full price? I find it acting in bad faith releasing a game filled with bugs, when those bugs apparently existed since the EA. Do you expect me to believe that QA couldn't find those so-called rare bugs when there is a thread about a game-breaking bug just 2 hours after a new patch is released. Either we are all professional bug finders, at which point hire us, or that their QA sucks, or they very well knew they are releasing a bugged game.

I am burnt by this game. It was one of the first games that I bought at release but damm me if I ever come near Amplitude until 2 months after a game's release.  My notion isn't set into stone, but it will take a lot to repair and I assume such is the case for many players who aren't longtime fans.

 officially reached "mixed" on steam. in 1 week less than 60% here we go

Making SEGA the culprit may be speculation, but we all know it's the root problem. Publishers always push studios to release *no matter what* because it's all about getting the money in. This time it's backfired horribly.

Amplitude simply wouldn't exist if Endless Space or Endless Legend had gone this badly. Neither game was perfect on release by any means, but people were prepared to wait for balance, gameplay and content tweaks. They'd wait for that for Endless Space 2. The bugs we're seeing are in a different league, and people are rightfully angry. Reading the dev posts it doesn't exactly sound like they fully understand the code base - if extending the scope of the game can so easily unleash armageddon, it's going to be a rough ride.

All I know is that I constantly need to keep telling myself that the Endless Universe will survive this temporary hiccup.... 

It will, right?

Witchi wrote:

If I need to wait 2 weeks to play game why do I have to pay the full price? I find it acting in bad faith releasing a game filled with bugs, when those bugs apparently existed since the EA. Do you expect me to believe that QA couldn't find those so-called rare bugs when there is a thread about a game-breaking bug just 2 hours after a new patch is released. Either we are all professional bug finders, at which point hire us, or that their QA sucks, or they very well knew they are releasing a bugged game.

I am burnt by this game. It was one of the first games that I bought at release but damm me if I ever come near Amplitude until 2 months after a game's release.  My notion isn't set into stone, but it will take a lot to repair and I assume such is the case for many players who aren't longtime fans.

I've no evidence about why this happen. Complaining is justified. Loosing faith into Amplitude is justified. Denigration campaign is not, as it's the first real mistake Amplitude made in his history.

They know that release a game with a breaking bug is a madness. We know that there is a chance that a game could be released with a breaking bug. I'm aware, I know that spending my money on a game on day one is tied to a risk of not being able to use it for days, or weeks. It's a known issue in the gaming industry for at least 15 years now (when the online economic model overrun the old shop shipping model). So I know the risk, I made a choice to take that risk, I'm not going to indignant myself afterwards. I've reported the issue, notice that Amplitude is now on my "watch carefuly before buying list" until further information and I move on on other stuff (like defend Amplitude against what I think is an overreaction, but feel free to think it's justified)

When the game really has game breaking bugs. It deserves all the negative review. Seriously, it's acceptable for early access, but this is release version and it still has turn pending bug? It's 2017 already FFS. Games in 2000s must have better coding than this game. 

I just ran into both a "turn pending" and a zoom-in bug during the tutorial campaign map (which is always the same, as far as I can tell). If people can't even get through the tutorial map, there's definitely a problem. This was rushed out the door; there is no way they didn't find some of these bugs during QA (assuming there was any). It's pretty unacceptable to have game-breaking bugs that are this common in a release version. Not to mention that Amplitude is a rather small studio still and has to compete with the other myriad of 4x strategy games on the market, so they can't afford many mistakes like this.

It needs to be fixed and soon, or else the Steam reviews will stick and this release will tank, hard, which is an especially bad situation to be in when you just joined a big-name publisher, since now the shareholders will start asking if it was a good idea to license the company. Under-performing now is very bad for Amplitude's autonomy in the long run, since it potentially means more publisher involvement in the development of their games.

Xmass wrote:

Witchi wrote:

If I need to wait 2 weeks to play game why do I have to pay the full price? I find it acting in bad faith releasing a game filled with bugs, when those bugs apparently existed since the EA. Do you expect me to believe that QA couldn't find those so-called rare bugs when there is a thread about a game-breaking bug just 2 hours after a new patch is released. Either we are all professional bug finders, at which point hire us, or that their QA sucks, or they very well knew they are releasing a bugged game.

I am burnt by this game. It was one of the first games that I bought at release but damm me if I ever come near Amplitude until 2 months after a game's release.  My notion isn't set into stone, but it will take a lot to repair and I assume such is the case for many players who aren't longtime fans.

I've no evidence about why this happen. Complaining is justified. Loosing faith into Amplitude is justified. Denigration campaign is not, as it's the first real mistake Amplitude made in his history.

They know that release a game with a breaking bug is a madness. We know that there is a chance that a game could be released with a breaking bug. I'm aware, I know that spending my money on a game on day one is tied to a risk of not being able to use it for days, or weeks. It's a known issue in the gaming industry for at least 15 years now (when the online economic model overrun the old shop shipping model). So I know the risk, I made a choice to take that risk, I'm not going to indignant myself afterwards. I've reported the issue, notice that Amplitude is now on my "watch carefuly before buying list" until further information and I move on on other stuff (like defend Amplitude against what I think is an overreaction, but feel free to think it's justified)

Now remember the last Arkham game? Where the game ran into optimization problems on PC and had mass refunds? That killed the game on PC. ES2 could be the worst game I've ever seen on a release when there are MULTIPLE gamebreaking bugs. I wasn't born yesterday and studios do the 'release first, fix later' shenanigan all the time. But this time they can't fix it.  And I don't like throwing my money into non-functional games, you might want but I don't. Studios have crumbled under less and I have my doubts Amplitude will be able to survive this. Only thing that is going for them is that none of the reviews mention the game-breaking bugs (which surfaced with 1.0.3) so people who read reviews will continue to buy that, but if any major gaming website does a story on ES2's current state, it will be torn apart. I expected a fix by now, they should've stayed overtime and fixed this broken game. 

Making SEGA the culprit is just speculation.

Maybe they the have been a bit over-confident / ambitious in release. Maybe is hard to delay a release date these days, maybe they didn't spend enough resources in testing/QA. Maybe they didn't spend enough resources in the dev team all-together...

Whatever is the reason really doesn't matter that much, they released a game where once you enter about 100 you have an increasing possibility of a total game-breaking bug that will stop your several hours/days experience and you can't reload even even going back some turns earlier to undo it. Happened me once back on update 3, also helps I usually end the game session between turns 100-140. Yesterday took a look on reviews out of curiosity, the trend is about 3/4 of reviews are negatives solely to this bug (or group of bugs that end in the same result). Some of them will be changed back to positive once the game is fixed, but at least the same amount will be left as is, because wont be updated by the review owners.

Many people didn't show any aggresiveness in their negative reviews (sure helps the average profile of this kind of games is usually more mature) and some of them believe in Amplitude and are confident they will get back on trak with an incredible game in all department (they have earned a reputation after all), but also I feel the may have lost an opportunity to rise as one of the 4x gaming references world-wide.

How are people finding all these "game breaking" bugs? I've played three games to victory since release, each lasting 114, 135 and 148 turns, and I've been able to play smoothly and save/load my games throughout. Only bug I encountered was the minor faction academy quest counter (which has seemingly been fixed as people are getting achievements for the final academy quest now) and some broken tooltips. Is it a hardware issue?

SirBagel wrote:

How are people finding all these "game breaking" bugs? I've played three games to victory since release, each lasting 114, 135 and 148 turns, and I've been able to play smoothly and save/load my games throughout. Only bug I encountered was the minor faction academy quest counter (which has seemingly been fixed as people are getting achievements for the final academy quest now) and some broken tooltips. Is it a hardware issue?

There is hardware issue, linked to AMD GC afaik, that prevent game from launching. And there's a bug that prevent the next turn action. So basically, when that happen, you cannot play anymore your game. And loading a save game before that point don't change anything, you'll always end bugged and cannot end your turn. I played 50 hours since release before this bug strike. Probably linked to the 1.0.5 version, but some report it before that version. As usual, people are not equal facing bugs. Also depend on which faction you start with. Or which options you choose with main quest (UE main quest seems bugged, and fortunatly I choose all the working options and had no issues).

Another example some people report huge framerate drop, lag, freeze with top of the top hardware, and me with my old not so top computer I didn't get all that issues ...

SirBagel wrote:

How are people finding all these "game breaking" bugs?

Probably the current biggest game breaking bug plaguing both 1.0.5 and 1.0.6: the one I'm getting and many others seem to get and the one that the devs consider the biggest issue as well according to their apology post, is the one that randomly starts around later early or around mid-game (the exact turn varies game by game). 

What basically happens is that all future combat encounters become unsolvable, apparently because of the AI looping and not committing to a strategy or something, meaning the game gets permanently stuck since you can't advance to next turn due to unsolved combat encounters. Many other bugs involved with turn getting stuck that I encountered in earlier versions were solved by loading an autosave from same or several turns earlier, but this one doesn't and your sole option is starting a fresh new game and praying that the bug doesn't appear again in that, because as of now there is no real workaround or fix since it doesn't seem to be caused by certain actions, but just by playing the game normally. 

Unless you avoid combat altogether (both defensive and offensive) I guess.

Well it looks like the hotfix has staunched the bleeding. Excellent. 

The fix worked for me. I've been playing and enjoying myself again since the hotfix dropped, so I've also edited my review back to "Recommended" as promised.

Happy to report that the patched has worked for my saved games as well. Hopefully the reviews will revert now.

But now happiness bonuses are screwy and the endless research park doesn't work.

Such a sad situation. There was a beta/VIP build out there before release but they didn't want the early access riff-raff to get their grubby hands on it. If we had, even for just a few days, we would have found many of the problems. Hearing them say they are surprised at the bugs, or they never found any, is a bit hollow when the reality is they shut out the majority of their play testers.

Despite this I still defend them on Steam, I am now apparently "paid by Amplitude" for my sins, well that would be nice but no. Just another fan boy I guess, wading through the Steamy swamp.

I believe they are already working on the fixes, the problems will occur if said fixes won't be implemented quick enough, however.

As of right now, the game-breaking bugs(involving big trees and vodiyani) have been fixed mostly.

Marchallmo wrote:

I believe they are already working on the fixes, the problems will occur if said fixes won't be implemented quick enough, however.

As of right now, the game-breaking bugs(involving big trees and vodiyani) have been fixed mostly.

The biggest bug of turn pending persists.

I really can't understand these people who put negative review for a game that they love just because of the bug. I mean amplitude are working to fix since the launch why they just can't wait and see or give a positive review and then add a point about bugs :/ all of these reviews aren't representative of the game :/ and if you like the game and not the bug don't kill the game appreciation :/

phanemy wrote:

I really can't understand these people who put negative review for a game that they love just because of the bug. I mean amplitude are working to fix since the launch why they just can't wait and see or give a positive review and then add a point about bugs :/ all of these reviews aren't representative of the game :/ and if you like the game and not the bug don't kill the game appreciation :/

I'm fine with it, and I also gave a negative review. I knew the risk going in and early-adopting. Early adopting games these days is increasingly becoming an exercise in frustration, and while I'm not unsympathetic to the technical challenges, I'm not going to lie to a potential buyer and say 'hey, it's great' when it's more of a case that 'it's a great game with some potentially show-ending bugs, so best hold your money if you don't want to deal with them'. 

phanemy wrote:

I really can't understand these people who put negative review for a game that they love just because of the bug. I mean amplitude are working to fix since the launch why they just can't wait and see or give a positive review and then add a point about bugs :/ all of these reviews aren't representative of the game :/ and if you like the game and not the bug don't kill the game appreciation :/

Game absolutely doesn't function right now. I also gave a negative review, saying 'At least wait 2 weeks before buying this game, game is unplayable to the point that either your save games get broken by game-breaking bugs, or a new patch breaks them'. Even though I like the concept, I right now feel cheated out of money. I've paid the full price at launch for a game to be largely unplayable for at least 10 days (Devs mentioned a patch on Tuesday) despite many patches.

phanemy wrote:

I really can't understand these people who put negative review for a game that they love just because of the bug. I mean amplitude are working to fix since the launch why they just can't wait and see or give a positive review and then add a point about bugs :/ all of these reviews aren't representative of the game :/ and if you like the game and not the bug don't kill the game appreciation :/

I think negative reviews are only fair as people buying the game on release are not the same people buying the game in Early Access. The expectations (despite what some more forgiving folk might think) are different. It's not like there weren't threads here and on Steam warning of early release and the negative reception to follow.

MidnightSun wrote:

Such a sad situation. There was a beta/VIP build out there before release but they didn't want the early access riff-raff to get their grubby hands on it. If we had, even for just a few days, we would have found many of the problems. Hearing them say they are surprised at the bugs, or they never found any, is a bit hollow when the reality is they shut out the majority of their play testers.

Despite this I still defend them on Steam, I am now apparently "paid by Amplitude" for my sins, well that would be nice but no. Just another fan boy I guess, wading through the Steamy swamp.

They very well knew they were releasing a bugged version. This is just damage control.

Honestly I think they should have done at least two week of public beta between the early access and the release to iron out the last bugs.

I get that financially it might be more lucrative to release a bugged game than to spend 2 more weeks in beta but still for the reputation sake it would have been better to wait a bit more. If the current phase was still officially a beta, player would have tolerated the bugs and the ones who don t would just have waited a bit. And as far as I know there are no other 4X or big strategy game coming out soon so I don't think this was a "get a good lauch windows" stuff

its another company i dont buy games anymore. 

im tired of that bs release unfinish games.

Overall review rating is now down to "Mostly positive", and it's surely not long before it reaches "Mixed" because the game is broken for most players. That is fair enough if they cannot or will not suspend sales or go back to Early Access. Spare a thought for the individuals paying for the game today who run into this wall - helped by a handful of people who are downvoting legit Steam reviews complaining that the game is fatally broken as of patch 1.0.5.

Reputation is only ever as good as the latest release, and compared to Endless Legend - sorry, but this totally sucks. Seems getting a big publisher is bad for your game's health.

Bugs happen. The problem is when companies act in bad faith or do nothing about the bugs. And here Amplitude can't be accused of bad faith or inaction.

Bad review is the same thing, it's not a problem if it's explained and reviewed if things went better.

And for people complaining is the same thing. You've a problem, you report it and if nothing change stop buying from this company and move on.

But no, people made a bad review, downvote other review, made bad comments on good review, create multiple indignant reaction post on steam, here, in every place they found, react on every post they found with more indignation... if they had spend 1% of the half of the third of the energy spent for this in a useful cause instead, the world will be much better :D

But no, they must wait two more weeks to get full benefice of the 40 bucks they spent, so they are indignant.

People are rightfully upset about a non-functioning product, as they're customers first and foremost. 

While it's very much appreciated to know the devs are aware of the current situation, good intent and honeyed words alone don't fix games, they need to be backed up by quick actions. If talking about "bad faith" or "inaction", you could also rightfully blame Amplitude / SEGA for releasing the game in the state it's currently in: major bugs on release and subsequent patches fixing old bugs while simultaneously creating new, in this case even worse bugs that render the latter parts of the game outright unplayable. Like the devs themselves said in their apology post, this kind of stuff should've been ironed out during early access and not after release. 

In many cases much of the game's sales are made in first few weeks, and if newcomers are finding the game unplayable a lot of them aren't going to be recommending it, and for a valid reason. Considering the bug starts appearing after the refund period is over (especially if they're beginners who are taking it slow) they're going to be even more angry. A working adult's long awaited weekend plans of 4X goodness could've been ruined.

Also, while some people may consider spreading the word "a waste of time better put to more productive matters", making a lot of noise on various forums, even review bombing is a good way for the devs to notice that it's a case that's affecting a very notable number of players, and not just a handful of fringe cases. This makes the devs take note that it's a serious issue that needs to be handled with utmost haste. While I myself haven't been arsed to post a negative review and aren't contemplating a refund (even if I could), I couldn't really recommend the game in good faith either as long as the current issues persist. 

I'm very confident Amplitude will come through and manage to fix the game sooner or later, but inaction on part of both them and the community of fans will just hurt them much more in the long run and no one will be happy. Dedicated players are complaining because they love the game or would like to love it if not for its numerous issues, and want it to be better.

phanemy wrote:

I really can't understand these people who put negative review for a game that they love just because of the bug. I mean amplitude are working to fix since the launch why they just can't wait and see or give a positive review and then add a point about bugs :/ all of these reviews aren't representative of the game :/ and if you like the game and not the bug don't kill the game appreciation :/

They are complaining about game-breaking bugs like not being able to finish a game because of something. They have every right to rate it negatively, the fault is with SEGA pushing for an early release.

It's sad that this may kill the game in the long run but SEGA gambled and lost.