FabriceCPR wrote:

DNLH wrote:

SpikedWallMan wrote:
The biggest mistake was for Amplitude to pitch Humankind as a "Civ killer" right from the start.

They never really did that, though, they purposefully avoided civ comparisons, even. It was the community that took the 'civ-killer' tag and ran with it.

It was magazines and news sites that talked about successor to Civilization, or even Civ-killer.

These are the people who generously rated Humankind long before its commercial release. These same folks who, for some, won't let you post unfavorable reviews about the game.

So when you see that a game is on the cover, is rated well, and there is publicity being placed, you don't have to be naive.

Not necessarily under the pressure of the studio, but most certainly under that of the publisher.

The community only relayed the information.

AOM wrote:

People don't buy games to enjoy someone else's vision of what fun is. People buy games to have fun. No one is gonna pay money for a game their friends told them is awful. If you didn't notice, the topic of this thread is "HUMANKIND NOW SITS ON 69% POSITIVE REVIEW RATING " The question was "what went wrong." Hence, my post. If you are that sheep that buys something and then tries to appreciate it if you don't like it, lol, well, you are "special." That really isn't how life works.

Probably a big part of what went wrong is all the bugs. But, I wouldn't discount this weird ass community where so many people are like  zombies saying "just appreciate the game" at the same time they're saying "I don't care if the dev can sell their game." It is really one of the most bizarre game communities I personally have ever seen. All I can do after reading your post is roll my eyes and think how strangely sycophantic you are for someone who doesn't seem to care if the dev can sell their game. Reading posts like yours in this forum is like watching the Revenge of the Stepford Wives. Strangely passive aggressive.

Except that is exactly what buying a game is all about. Or can you give me the design docs for your version of Humankind that the developers used. Every time you purchase a game, you are buying into the vision of the developer. That vision may be colored by the publisher and influenced heavily by the players depending on how far they want to take the concept of player input...and Amplitude does take it very far based on player feedback...but in the end make no mistake...you are playing a creation of theirs.

Slashman wrote: Except that is exactly what buying a game is all about. Or can you give me the design docs for your version of Humankind that the developers used. Every time you purchase a game, you are buying into the vision of the developer. That vision may be colored by the publisher and influenced heavily by the players depending on how far they want to take the concept of player input...and Amplitude does take it very far based on player feedback...but in the end make no mistake...you are playing a creation of theirs.

This is a rather deliberate "missing the point." The point is, if someone doesn't find the game fun, telling them they're playing it wrong and they suck isn't going to make them all the sudden like it. People buy games to have fun. If the game isn't fun, the person will stop playing it. They may also leave a bad review or tell all their friends how bad the game is. Almost certainly they won't buy the DLC that I am sure this dev is hoping to sell further down the road.

People buy games to have fun, not to learn how to appreciate the developer's vision as if the game is holy material being handed down from a mountain top.

In the case of HK, the developer made some questionable "design" decisions. While a single one of these choices may only drive away a sub-set of players, the cumulative effect seems to be driving away an important number of players. For example, the "design" choice to not provide customizable features that are standard in other historical 4X games will drive some people away from this game. When those people speak up saying "please let us turn the IPs off" or "please let us turn pollution off" they are roundly scolded and treated to lectures about how they're playing wrong if they don't like these features. But, the fact is, there's a reason CIV VI and Old World allow people to turn off barbarians and city states (their equivalent of IPs). There's a reason, that CIV VI pollution was a toggleable feature from the start. The reason is not everyone likes minor AI characters like IPs, barbarians, and city states, not everyone wants to deal with pollution. It isn't a "vision" to deny people this typical toggle feature option, it's shortsightedness. Can HK recover? Of course. But, to continue the example, that recovery will almost certainly involve listening to players who are saying "I'm not buying your vision" of a game with no customizable features because it isn't fun for me, and I'm going to tell my friends not to bother with it too.

swissyciv wrote:

Kamino72 wrote:

The game needs 1 more year of debug, polish and balance.

It actually needs only 3 months with a dedicated quality assurance team. Unfortunately most publishers have done away with that and go with customer pays to be a  beta tester. Biggest and most destructive scam in the gaming industry..

It's not just QA, it's whole game systems that need overhaul. The future will tell us if 3 months, 1 year or more is needed to reach greatness.

Mausklickmoerder wrote:

I fear the truth of the matter is that Humankind is.. not a very good game. Not only because of the obvious issues (balance, broken mp), but because it built on a foundation of sand. There isn't really much variance in gameplay. With 60 different cultures and 6(?) culture types, you'd think that wouldn't be an issue, but on the contrary, every playthrough feels more or less the same. In the end, it all boils down to small changes in the numbers and maybe one or two buttons with powers that essentially just further tweak those numbers a bit.

This. The core feature of the game doesn't deliver. There is no sense of uniqueness.

YichenZhu wrote:

What went wrong? There are lots of detailed problems, but if I must highlight the most important part for me, the game contains too many personal opinions of the developers, or maybe propaganda or ideology if one which to make it more serious, since in many cases what the game discourages is what one wants to do; as a result one must pretend to follow the game's rules while using lots of special tactics (or exploits) to achieve one's desires.

And this.

I have read a lot of comments here and share the opinions regarding the limited possibilities to adapt the game to your own player character, as is possible in Civilization, for example.
But also consider how long it took the developers of Civilization to make their game playable as it is now in CIV6. And Civilization was the first game of its kind back then, if I remember.
Of course, for economic reasons, it is important that a game sells well, that players like it and recommend it. The human child with his new concept has not immediately become the big hit, but should not be deterred. The developers will have to make an effort and follow the players' instructions (which I hope) or give up the game (which I don't think is so great). The near future will tell! Patience guys, patience!

DragonGaming wrote:

AOM wrote:

Slashman wrote: Except that is exactly what buying a game is all about. Or can you give me the design docs for your version of Humankind that the developers used. Every time you purchase a game, you are buying into the vision of the developer. That vision may be colored by the publisher and influenced heavily by the players depending on how far they want to take the concept of player input...and Amplitude does take it very far based on player feedback...but in the end make no mistake...you are playing a creation of theirs.

This is a rather deliberate "missing the point." The point is, if someone doesn't find the game fun, telling them they're playing it wrong and they suck isn't going to make them all the sudden like it. People buy games to have fun. If the game isn't fun, the person will stop playing it. They may also leave a bad review or tell all their friends how bad the game is. Almost certainly they won't buy the DLC that I am sure this dev is hoping to sell further down the road.

People buy games to have fun, not to learn how to appreciate the developer's vision as if the game is holy material being handed down from a mountain top.

In the case of HK, the developer made some questionable "design" decisions. While a single one of these choices may only drive away a sub-set of players, the cumulative effect seems to be driving away an important number of players. For example, the "design" choice to not provide customizable features that are standard in other historical 4X games will drive some people away from this game. When those people speak up saying "please let us turn the IPs off" or "please let us turn pollution off" they are roundly scolded and treated to lectures about how they're playing wrong if they don't like these features. But, the fact is, there's a reason CIV VI and Old World allow people to turn off barbarians and city states (their equivalent of IPs). There's a reason, that CIV VI pollution was a toggleable feature from the start. The reason is not everyone likes minor AI characters like IPs, barbarians, and city states, not everyone wants to deal with pollution. It isn't a "vision" to deny people this typical toggle feature option, it's shortsightedness. Can HK recover? Of course. But, to continue the example, that recovery will almost certainly involve listening to players who are saying "I'm not buying your vision" of a game with no customizable features because it isn't fun for me, and I'm going to tell my friends not to bother with it too.

Another questionable design choices was having only 1 victory condition, while things like the space race or last civ standing would count as victories in other games are only end conditions in Humankind. Previous games were able to satisfy all sides by being able to turn off and on multiple victory conditions, dont like score or wonder victory, simply turn them off, want just a science victory, leave it as the only victory turned on. By having only 1 victory condition which is in essence a glorified score victory which also happens to necessitates the use of a turn limit, Humankind only satisfies 1 side.

There are a lot of games, which purely work with victory points as a winning measure and (maybe) have several game end conditions. Granted, those can mostly only be found at board games, but still. Having some more fine tuning about end conditions would be nice though and beef up the point generation (give unique objectives or more one-time deeds). And actually, changing the end conditions to plain victory, will change nothing. Absolutely nothing. On the contrary, you will probably finish even sooner then currently, because you could care less about your points.

What went wrong for me was that I only can use good quality level on graphics with my GTX 1060 6GB, if I use anything above good my computer bluescreen.

The worst dealbreaker is stuck turn pending in progress, I have so far clocked 29 hours on the game and cant bother to play it anymore until turn pending in progress is fixed.

If they take to long time to patch game breaking bugs like turn pending I think many people will probably move on and let the game collect dust in the game library.

I hate to say it, but I think the "This game was too ambitious" argument is sort of overly generous. Many of this game's feature sets are underdeveloped to the point that calling this release anything other then an early beta is a bit disingenuous.

Mausklickmoerder wrote:

I fear the truth of the matter is that Humankind is.. not a very good game. Not only because of the obvious issues (balance, broken mp), but because it built on a foundation of sand. There isn't really much variance in gameplay. With 60 different cultures and 6(?) culture types, you'd think that wouldn't be an issue, but on the contrary, every playthrough feels more or less the same. In the end, it all boils down to small changes in the numbers and maybe one or two buttons with powers that essentially just further tweak those numbers a bit. Its like Amplitude actively went out of their way to unlearn all the great things they did with the Endless series. Those games actively pushed the genre forward with asymmetric balance, while Humankind seems to try and reinvent all the parts on the Civilization cart while moving back on the achievements of its predecessors.

To be fair to Amplitude, a 4X game based on human history has built-in limitations in that respect. You can't create wildly different factions like they did for EL and ES because human cultures just don't vary that much. One thing about the Civ series that always bothered me was that different leader choices had some mild differences, but because every faction used exactly the same tech tree it would smooth out differences over time. You aren't forced to learn an entirely different strategy with each faction, like you are with previous Amplitude games. And you use that same focus throughout the rest of the game. They gave that up here with HK. Maybe further tweaking or mods can improve this aspect of the game.

For me that's not the heaviest complaint though, it's the way they're using a PDX-style warfare system without enough limits on the game slapping the player's hand and saying "no you can't do that!" It feels like we can't actually direct the outcome of a war the way a country's leader would. 

I know it's to prevent steamrolling, but other games have managed to mitigate that without forcing arbitrary and illogical-seeming limits on the player. I'm not sure they can fix this, but I'm willing to wait and see how it goes. I expect this will be a focus for modders, but if it just results in an automatic "I win" button for players and the AI can't handle it, that won't be fun either.

Anyway, I haven't pulled the plug on HK yet, because the game has potential if the rough edges can be sanded off. I do think some of the mechanics are interesting, and as with all Amplitude games the artwork and UI are easy on the eyes. 

Zenicetus wrote: 

For me that's not the heaviest complaint though, it's the way they're using a PDX-style warfare system without enough limits on the game slapping the player's hand and saying "no you can't do that!" It feels like we can't actually direct the outcome of a war the way a country's leader would. 

I know it's to prevent steamrolling, but other games have managed to mitigate that without forcing arbitrary and illogical-seeming limits on the player. 

Not only is the warfare system arbitrary and illogical-seeming, but it doesn't actually prevent steamrolling. It's easy to get around it. If anything, it encourages a scorched earth approach to battle. This is exacerbated by the fact that there is zero diplomacy in the game, and alliances are basically meaningless even between two human players. The game has no concept of teams, and the AI is a mindlessly aggressive idiot.

People already giving the game up for dead, ahahah god, sometimes we really are a bit too pretentious, aren't we?

This is not the yearly acclaimed FPS that needs people playing 24/7.

The game could have been more polish, we can say the same for literally any game on the market.

With this kind of games it's a journey, it will eventually start to fall in place but it might take some time and extra work, I remember that both civ 5 and civ 6 at launch were really flat for me and not the good games that became afterwards.

The game has it's problems, but it's far from being a failure, in a couple of updates we might be discussing about how incredibly good HK has recovered and bla bla bla...

Remember it's totally fine to also not like the game and don't share the ideas behind the gameplay, but claiming that the game is bad or a disaster because it's not of your likings well that's different.

I would not worry too much. If a new IP is not perfect it usually has a very hard time review wise with the players. A lot of people are more forgiving for sequels if they do not change much. So here we have several thing that come together:

- previous installments of Amplitude games had differences in playstyles between empires/races <-- people complain this is missing in Humankind. But seriously, to make the cultures fundamentally different like in endless space is just not possible

- it is similar to Civ, so a lot of people want maybe something new in that direction and are then disappointed if it is not close enough to Civ or have overblown expectations. That magazines and website make always those cliack-bait declaration like "x-killer" are not helping either. Some MMOs has also been exclaimed as WoW Killer. But always from review sites, never from the devs themselves. Youtubers are no better in this regard. Though, I believe they started later than others with this.

- players are always master in finding stuff/exploits which people never seem to think about previously. Which, depending on it's severity, usually shines a bad light on the game. But you do not need to use them. You can still play fine (and win) without relying on them.

I usually only look at the reviews to find if there is something really wrong with the game. Otherwise I rely on my intuition about games and in my over 20 years gaming I only had about 10 really bad buy decisions. The game has mostly balance issues, and I believe some unwanted bugs which skews the game balance in a bad position.

I like the feel, I like the look, I like the gameplay, I like the employed mechanics, though some need for tuning to make them more enjoyable. I do have some grievances with the so very slow notification system. But for me there is nothing which breaks the game for me. 

A player who has tried the game a few hours after its release does not have the right to criticize it.

On the other hand, the magazines and websites which played there so much and long before us on an unfinished version, they have the right to say good things.