Well obviously the major news this week was launching the game into Early Access, and I’d say it’s been a big success so far.
Now that the game is in Early Access, I plan to post weekly updates on the game’s development in the forum and blog.
With a lot of new players (both Nexus veterans and players discovering Starcom for the first time), there’s a lot of feedback. Just prior to launch I started working with Connor, who has been helping with build QA and is now also now helping me organize your feedback by category, priority, etc.
Overall, players seem to love the game. But you are also finding plenty of things that could be improved, fixed, or you want more of. Since launch I’ve received nearly 600 suggestions via the F8 tool, plus lots of comments in the discussion forum. I try to read every comment, and reply if it’s not already answered by the time I see it, but because of launch, I haven’t been able to get to them all.
Some issues reported by multiple players:
- There appears to be one mission point that players are frequently missing the trigger for. (See the Known Issues post if you think this is you). While there is some content that requires puzzle solving, I don’t want players to get “stuck” on during the main storyline, so I consider this a bug.
- On some older systems, particularly if installed to an HDD, the game locks up during initial load and Windows stops it.
- Requests for more opportunities for combat.
- Pitch of some of the UI elements is too high.
That’s just a partial list, but those are some of the early items that I’ve heard from at least a few different players.
In celebration of launch week, I decided to treat myself with doing something I love: working on new content for the game. I had some concern that launch would uncover a serious issue that would require immediate patching that would derail my flow and require a porting the patch, but fortunately that doesn’t seem to have been the case (thank you closed beta testers!)
So my plan for the very short term is to continue working on new stuff, and then when I reach a good stopping point, revisiting the consolidated feedback and see what items seem the highest priority for the next content update.
Until next week!