docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_K3ziSxT9zcUUGCddS4sF1uNJTWHSbOwB1CQX2Rx4Uo - THE LIST Don't buy this game, or anything else they make unless it's completed properly.
Mando, if you read this, my friend is one of the two developers on Sonic: Utopia, a fan made 3D momentum-based platformer. Its being hailed as "The best best-feeling 3D sonic game ever made," and even in its demo state, it lives to the hype. If you have the time, please take a look, I'd love to hear your thoughts!
I'm one of the devs they let go, so weird to see my name in a you-tube video. As the teams "Rigger" at the time I can't tell you how upsetting it was for me to be promised to make something new but then being given "assets" to plot into the game.
@Eddie Turbine > buys game in the first month of release > is surprised that he got duped What's better is bitching to someone who was tied to the project, when they had nothing to do with project management or the released end product. Kinda like bitching at a cashier because the store doesn't sell your favorite brand of preparation H. Tl;dr suck it up, your weakness & stupidity is showing
The flack that Unity gets is often frustrating to me. Unity isn't the problem and there are a lot of good games made in it. The problem is talentless developers using it poorly. Here are list of great games: Pillars of Eternity, Shadow Run, Endless Space, Endless Legend, Thomas Was Alone, The Sexy Brutale, Ori and the Blind Forest, Kerbal Space Program, Oxenfree, Hollow Knight...and what they have in common is they were all done in Unity. They are good games that enjoyed both critical and commercial success, good things can be done with Unity. That wasn't even a complete list either, just games that I have played personally and that I know used Unity.
Endless Space can be buggy AF. Like planets no longer being clickable, UI elements lingering around when they should no longer be displayed, that kinda stuff.
Juno here. Interesting to see the game getting some coverage lately. It was a pretty big disaster. There was a lot of potential there which is why I signed on. Just a lot of people who didn't look at the big picture, and ran it into the ground.
Sorry you had to go through that shit. Lack of communication in a job is terrible to deal with, and you signed up with the best of intentions for a small studio. I hope you're in a better environment now!
For sure, I appreciate the reply. Things are a lot better, and StarForge is what propelled me on my career in PR and games. While it was a big flop, I definitely learned a lot from the experience; it's definitely the best teacher. I am working at a much better place now and more opportunities just keep opening up!
Oh noes, wall of text inbound: Oh hi Juno, I remember you from the old forums. I think we also briefly spoke on reddit via PM or in some thread ages ago, but some time after the community in StarForge went downhill as the forums were locked. Seems like a hazy distant memory these days. What a wild story it was, though, regardless of the anger people (including me) felt it's kinda amusing to look back now. I mean we can't get our money and time back so one might as well chuckle at it rather than think of punching the wall, I suppose. I still remember Sorin or Soren or something (was that one of the devs names? Maybe I'm also mixing up names now) posting pictures of the two (I think they were two initially, maybe 3) in some living-room-looking place where they turned to smile into the camera while wearing white socks. It wasn't really professional looking. Not at all. But it kinda gave them that indie / average (IT) guy look, you know? Almost charming again for other folks, representing the opposite of the "greedy" mainstream publisher people in suits just trying to milk the customer with streamlined games. It only really went up for a while. I remember them later posting pictures of their "new offices" and them mentioning they had gems on the dev team including former Bioware people. And then, it somehow seemed to go downhill and that fast in a short amount of time. Despite some tears or veins popping due to anger, I think StarForge is one of the necessary corpses on the way to perfected or great sandbox games. A natural process where many try, and in the end and with better technology, more refined products make it. There's nowadays many interesting or upcoming games with lots of potential. *Shameless Ad* My next bet for a comparable game (but on the next level) would be "Dual Universe" (DU), currently in development. It combines classic building experience people know from Minecraft and the likes with a single shard and emergent gameplay people know from EvE Online - but you control a character, not a ship most of the time. First person, basically. The development team based in France also seems "coherent" so far. To give an example: Unlike the old team from StarForge that "happily" planned and developed away until they ran out of funds somewhere, the DU team is publicly present on gaming related events such as E3 or Gamescom where you can see and speak to them. They also invited people into their offices last year and stand behind the vision that they also so far think they can reach with the technology they work on. I dunno how much money the StarForge team got back in the day, but DU so far managed to obtain roundabout a 750.000 $ or so (maybe a bit less or more) from the kickstarter campaign and then additionally over a million or up to 3 to 4 from investors. I'd wager that is more than StarForge could get together. In short: so far I am very optimistic and the community is, too. There were a few Pre-Alpha tests so far and things seem to progress. We might see a regular release late 2018 or 2019 perhaps, if all goes well. I have no idea where you are now, Juno, or what you do and whether your new place might put you in opposition to being engaged in other games on a deeper level (professional or private). But I really suggest you check out Dual Universe if you have not already - if not as professional place then maybe simply for gaming in the future, as a hobby. And if you find it interesting enough to sign up on the community forums, let me know here and I'll gladly give you pointers or maybe a player group to work with, should your interest go that far. Take care, until next time.
Incompetence, with a side of arrogance and self entitlement. I am friends with one of the artists that they sacked, we attended the same school for digital media. In fact, it was during our hiring expo that my class was approached by the two original developers. They were incredibly unprofessional, dressed like they just rolled out of bed, and the conversation was very unpleasant. At first I thought they were just underclassmen with a chip on their shoulders coming around to checkout/make fun of our work. It wasn't until they dropped a card on my table that I figured out they were representing a company. I knew right then something was very wrong, and did not follow up on the request for contact. I feel bad for my friend however, his tough position lead him to signing on with them... and throughout his stay with the company it was one giant red flag after another. It was a situation you see jokingly around the internet. Step 1: Have idea Step 2: Hire people Step 3: ??? Step 4: Profit Step three should have been hard work, dedication, and maintaining a line of communication with their backers... but you all got, well you know.... nothing.
Thank you for mentioning that this wasn't Unity's fault. As a developer using Unity it worries me that some people just don't even pay attention to games when they run on Unity.
im surprised then that you wouldnt have mentioned something about the part where he said "unity is for non programmers" then goes on to say cuz they just buy pre made assets but what he was actually referring to are asset flippers. unreal engine is designed for non programmers cuz of the blueprint system but unity, for anyone that isnt an asset flipper, is programming intensive especially if you want it to look and feel like anything more than just "good enough". even with pro grade pre made assets a game will run like crap if you lack in the programming department.
Except Starbound is a steaming pile of space garbage. Once you've played for an hour, you've seen the entire game. No manner of infinite star systems will fix that.
@@InternetHydra In the end, No Man's Sky came on top compared to the other two. The game was once a laughing stock at launch, but now has surpassed both of them.
OK seriously I heard so many people saying bad things to the channel why so? What really happened? Wjy are people not enjoying the critic and some of his.. "things?" Did he do something wrong? And more important why is he bald now?!
@@MineSlimeTV THe easiest to answer is his baldness, i believe since last year NC has shown signs of baldness, i dont think its anything serious he just so happen to be getting bald early, i know plenty of people who has that. So the channel awesome fiasgo... its a long story but tldr they mistreated several emplyees of the channel, there are rape claims on that other guy who owns channel awesome (Mike something), covering up the Jewario thing and a bunch of other stuff, its a nightmare. I recoomend the videos on it by Quinton, The Right Opinion and Thegamerfrommars th-cam.com/video/FvedKSaHCBQ/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/fpcSLjBYYjs/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/8NcI-2ih-84/w-d-xo.html On top of looking up the whole Document thing with several alegations on what Channel Awesome did, its horrible.
@@WTFooLL its a rather messy and convoluted subject, guess some people just dont bother, others dont really wanna talk about it for personal reasons, some dont care. Some of it is pretty fucked up like the whole Jewario thing. Its just a mess.
7 ปีที่แล้ว +184
StarForge was your typical garbage open world early access crafting survival game that got hyped up because the trend of garbage open world early access crafting survival games didn't exist at the time. So I guess you could say that this game was a trend-setter? I would however like to point out that using store bought assets isn't automatically a bad thing. Empyrion for example uses a ton of assets from the Unity store and it's actually an amazing game.
Yeah, pretty sure I recognized Alien Bug 104 from it, in fact. But yeah, I really like Empyrion. Even in its current EA state, it's actually, y'know, a game. And the dev team is really involved and clearly cares about the project. I joined during Alpha 6 and since then I've had so much fun in Empyrion. :)
The overlain soundbyte of the scream as the creature is falling at 3:34 is one of the best feats of comedic genius I've seen online. You're my fucking hero, dude
Despite being one of those burned by StarForge (I bought it when it hit steam) I'm glad it happened. You couldn't be more right when you said 'it's a monument for early access abuse" - I think a game like this was bound to happen, something too hyped up, with extreme feature creep and abusive developers just everything that could go wrong all in one game. It's games like StarForge that encouraged steam to stop inflows of cheap and terrible games littering their store. The consumer market is now far more cautious with early access games. Developers both genuine and dickish can learn from this game and see what went wrong - it'll teach good developers to not feature creep; while at the same time it teaches developers after a quick buck that the market for cheating/scamming a community isn't a successful one. A StarForged was always doomed to happen. I'm glad it happened relatively early (even if it's only within the last few years we've truly seen its total fallout) so that hopefully we'll never see anything quite on the same scale of fuckery in the early access games industry again.
Steam still has an inflow of cheap, terrible games on their store. Plenty of expensive, terrible games too. Steam doesn't give a shit either way. They get their paychecks even if the customers are the ones who get fucked in the end.
@@Malikyte13 in fact the only difference between then and now is that the cheap, terrible games are usually pornography. Because while most gamers are aware of how easily an EA game can be a scam, far too many of them are willing to think with their smaller heads.
I think that part of the problem with this game is that the devs couldn't figure out what a minimum shippable product would look like that they could build on top of. They let their imaginations run wild with what features they wanted to include, many of which were too complex or counterproductive and it all wound up as an incoherent mess
@@troodon1096 star citizen and no mans sky have both proven not to be the case. Its just impacient people like you dont know things take time, as both are nowadays very good games.
It's funny coming back to old videos that take shots at No Man's Sky... It absolutely earned the hate but just yesterday they dropped *another* massive free content expansion. Helluva redemption arc.
It wasn't borderline fraud. It was outright fraud. None of the content in their original promotional video on Steam was in the purchasable version of the game at any point, and all of it was from an earlier build.
I remember how excited I was for this after seeing the initial tech demo trailer and watching the Yogscast play it. I was so naive back then, it's amazing the sheer amount of games that have come along since this that have exploited early access. So glad I took the advice of a friend and never got suckered in.
Could you do a DoW 3 episode? It's a baffling display of the developers taking everything good the two prior installments made, then throwing it away for absolutely no reason
They threw it away because of terrible decisions made in upper management to hop on genre bandwagons. You know, there is already plenty of MOBA games out there, and these publishers wanna make their own MOBA-ish game by taking an IP everyone loved and ruining it by turning it into a name for their crappy bandwagon attempt.
When I was a high school senior with practically no money, I donated $100 to the indie-gogo campaign both for the interesting rewards (which were never made good on) and because I had made a lot of friends and felt at home in the community and we all believed that there would be an enormous pay-off. Dystopia unfolded dramatically. I do believe once things began to be deleted, a particular forum member did archive the remains, but to excavate that could only be depressing and shed no new light. As Juno said, the Devs were absent on the forums. Eventually they did bring in a team member who was oriented toward the community affairs ("Right Click"?) who, I recall, did a number of bannings of popular forum members who were disgruntled and openly critical of Code Hatch. Confusing, traumatic - strange memories.
Great review. This is a textbook example of what Jim Sterling and others referred to as "asset-flipping". On a sidenote, I love the fact you frequently use SWAT 4 background music in your reviews. ;-) And Stronghold music too. Very good choices.
Oh, no, asset flipping is very different. Asset flipping is literally buying a demo for a game and selling it as if it were a complete game. Because people did that. The one thing they'd actually develop for the games were trading cards - because they could scrape additional revenue from them as well.
One game that might not have been recommended yet is Pathologic. It's somewhat in the same vein as EYE, but made by Russians instead of the French, as in it's a foreign made genre-mix that plays around with abstract and esoteric ideas that's given an odd mystique by it's wonky translation. And it also has a total remake on the horizon.
I'd also recommend their other game The Void/Tugor which shares alot of the mystique and atmosphere as it, although the gameplay and story are different. And there's an HD version for Pathologic that fixes alot of bugs and translation errors out btw. But he should definitely check out Ice Pick Lodge and their games.
Thank you! I've been looking for that Expedition book for like 25 years. I thought it was The great Expedition no wonder I couldn't find it and nobody new what I was talking about.
I actually have StarForge in my Steam Library for some reason - I don't even remember how I got it! I'm tempted to actually try downloading it and booting it up, more out of morbid curiosity than anything logical.
the damn plot twist at about 11:10. I've never heard of starforge but throughout the video, certain ui parts seemed to look familiar to me. It finally made sense when you said they also made Reign of Kings, on which I have 40 hours.
@@Fragenzeichenplatte it may haven’t really aged well,but it was funny for it’s time. I have nothing wrong with this comment,I just wanted to say that-
I know I'm late to the party, but it speaks leagues about Steam's Early Access when of the twelve original games lined up: three are completely removed from the store (StarForge, Patterns, Under The Ocean); three are still in, or removed the tag but are in similar states as early access (123 Kick It, Drunken Robot Pornography, Kinetic Void); one is a dead F2P title (Gear Up); only 5 are "completed" (Arma 3, Gnomoria, Kenshi, Kerbal Space Program, Prison Architect).
I wish you have mentioned what starforge used to be... Before the cursed runes, before it was survival with crafting. They have somehow regressed from a game that was unfinished but fun into this monstrosity. I am of course talking about a game where you build a base with traps and defend it from waves of increasingly more enemies with procedurally generated weapons. Don't get me wrong it was still bad, but in that more focused form they could have actually pulled of and finished.
The sad thing is that they actually had ores spawning randomly underground in some of their earlier alpha builds before they started stripping out features.
The digging immediately strikes me. I'm pretty sure I saw an identical system implemented into a little Blitz3D demo centered around not Mario wandering around a sandbox world. That was about 20 years ago.
Funny that I get this again in my recommended feed, I had such high hopes for this game but alas the devs fucked it up, although I did make some friends through that journey on the game's old steam group chat. Cheers everyone.
As a software developer I really don't think there was any maliciousness here. It's a common problem with overconfident developers to overpromise and miss-manage expectations. At this point you either swallow your ego; admit your in too deep; cut back on features and carve out a smaller but functional game or double down and hack together a broken, unmaintainable mess.
It's pretty ironic some of the No Man's Sky comparisons made in this video, given how that game has been continuously worked on by the developer to make it actually live up to the expectations once put on it, while this game was long abandoned and never came back into use. To be fair to No Man's Sky when comparing this to what it was like on it's initial release though, at least it was functional amd had some kind of base game. It might have gotten boring pretty quick and lacked many expected features, but at least you could notice some effort was used in putting it together.
hell yeah. the cheats were pretty fun in Shogo as well. you add another dimension to the game by cheating to play as a guy in the mobile suit levels and vice versa. You could also play multiplayer as either a mobile suit or infantry.
Thank you for this review and wrap up. I'm actually getting a bit emotional here because I really believed in the project back when it was in early development. I bragged about it to friends and spent real money on it.. I can't help but to sigh as I sit here typing this. Such a brutal disappointment from Code Hatch. Thank you sir for letting us have some closure on this matter.
I remember playing this game before they added loads of the crap content. It was fun, just building a base, surviving waves of worms, progressively getting bigger and opening chests to get weirder and weirder guns. This is a shame.
2:29 Actually Unreal Engine has out of the box visual programming language, while Unity doesn't. So currently Unreal Engine is far more suitable for non programmers compared to Unity. Unreal Engine also has it's own asset store, there's just nos as much stuff compared to Unity asset store.
Am I the only one hearing a track from AoE 2 in the background at 02:03 (it is longer than that but I just noticed it at that point in time :D)? Cool review btw. :)
Watching this 4 years later and it's funny how badly this compares now to No Man's Sky which was a bigger critical disaster but has just released it's, like, seventeenth? major content update and is now considered a success story. Also the physics based movement system makes me think that this is the second ever Strand-type game after trespasser?
alksdjf;alsdjf *calls them* "Hello, this is Visa customer service, how can I help you?" "Yeah, hi, I want to get a chargeback from something I bought and I really didn't like..." "Sure, what was It?" "A game purchase" "Okay! And when did you buy it?" "Three years ago." "..." *click* "Hello?" *tone*
idk if you will see this, Mandalore, but you mentioned one of Wayne Barlowe's works (Expedition). I don't know how familiar you are with some of his other stuff, but he has some of the most interesting interpretations of Hell/Demonkind with his artbooks "Barlowe's Inferno" and "Brushfire", and then he actually wrote a novel set in his interpretation of Hell which is rather good (God's Demon). Very much recommend if you liked his scifi/alien artwork.
They released another game this year called Heat. Please look at it if you have the time. I don't know why I'm actually asking you to suffer through that. Ignore my request. Love your videos, and what you do. Keep up the good work.
Hey, I made the guns (fire, obv the models are assets) glad to have them not get shit on in a video, but layerd under piles of performance and design issues I understand them being overlooked
Oh god, the nostalgia. It was one of those games I had really high hopes for. It's sad to look back on a game so awesome and to remember how bad it flopped. My friends and I used to create Hitachi servers just to play this game and Minecraft on the school computers. Good times.
There’s another unity survival game called Empyrion: Galactic Survival that seems very similar to StarForge, but it actually works and is a lot of fun.
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_K3ziSxT9zcUUGCddS4sF1uNJTWHSbOwB1CQX2Rx4Uo - THE LIST
Don't buy this game, or anything else they make unless it's completed properly.
I would love to see you do a Dwarf Fortress review. Stellaris would be cool to see you do one as well.
Gothic, Fallout New Vegas, Elite: Dangerous, Binary Domain and STALKER? Well shit, can't wait. I wish you'd also put The Witcher 3 on the list.
Ever heard of Angels Fall First?
Mando, if you read this, my friend is one of the two developers on Sonic: Utopia, a fan made 3D momentum-based platformer. Its being hailed as "The best best-feeling 3D sonic game ever made," and even in its demo state, it lives to the hype. If you have the time, please take a look, I'd love to hear your thoughts!
I'd love it if you did a Medieval Engineers review. Would love to see your thoughts on it. =3
I'm one of the devs they let go, so weird to see my name in a you-tube video. As the teams "Rigger" at the time I can't tell you how upsetting it was for me to be promised to make something new but then being given "assets" to plot into the game.
What do you mean premade animations?
@@nictanghe98 It's exactly as it sounds?
gg
@Eddie Turbine sucks when you don't know how to research a product huh?
@Eddie Turbine > buys game in the first month of release
> is surprised that he got duped
What's better is bitching to someone who was tied to the project, when they had nothing to do with project management or the released end product.
Kinda like bitching at a cashier because the store doesn't sell your favorite brand of preparation H.
Tl;dr suck it up, your weakness & stupidity is showing
Remove the sound, break the grass.
Remove the grass, break the sound.
This means something.
It means you can appreciate music more when you're high.
It means the grass [likely the animations] are tied to the sound. Honestly the whole things likely tied to the frame rate.
Put your grasses on.
@@joperamod5760 Nothing will be wong.
Nothing means nothing
"...so let's try going to space, well take the helicopter..." this gets me every time i watch this
Yeah I know. You'd obviously use a hot air balloon in this situation.
So you watch the same analysis / review multiple times? seems odd to me..
@@FloAkaGott people watch hours of girls clicking their fingernails against plastic lids.
@@FloAkaGott I dont really care about the games being reviewed its more for the humor
@@syn592 aw OK (:
oh my god i just found out from this that this game was MADE IN MY HOME TOWN.
THE GUY THAT REFUSED MY REFUND AND YELLED AT ME LIVES HERE.
Scream
Lie or truth ?
Justifiable Homicide
Go protest under his house and film it
Go punch that bastard in the face
Go oldschool. Like *REAL* oldschool.
Show up round his house with a piece of dog shite on a stick. We'll see who's giving out refunds then.
I own StarForge and Reign of kings. Had I known Reign of Kings was made by them I would never have bought it.
It's not your fault. They worked hard so people wouldn't know the StarForge connection.
Mr_StephenB I actually boucut Reign of Kings because I found out it was the same,fraudsters
What a wholesome reply
Yeah, probably the only thing they did well was hide it.
How does it feel to have financially supported a known criminal organization?
The flack that Unity gets is often frustrating to me. Unity isn't the problem and there are a lot of good games made in it. The problem is talentless developers using it poorly. Here are list of great games: Pillars of Eternity, Shadow Run, Endless Space, Endless Legend, Thomas Was Alone, The Sexy Brutale, Ori and the Blind Forest, Kerbal Space Program, Oxenfree, Hollow Knight...and what they have in common is they were all done in Unity. They are good games that enjoyed both critical and commercial success, good things can be done with Unity. That wasn't even a complete list either, just games that I have played personally and that I know used Unity.
Endless Space can be buggy AF. Like planets no longer being clickable, UI elements lingering around when they should no longer be displayed, that kinda stuff.
@@horstherbert35 Endless Space buggy af?
I haven't personally experienced any of these
@@kaurkangur Me neither, and I have 100+ hours in the game.
@Slavic do you play good games?
Slavic How?
Juno here.
Interesting to see the game getting some coverage lately. It was a pretty big disaster. There was a lot of potential there which is why I signed on. Just a lot of people who didn't look at the big picture, and ran it into the ground.
Sorry you had to go through that shit. Lack of communication in a job is terrible to deal with, and you signed up with the best of intentions for a small studio. I hope you're in a better environment now!
For sure, I appreciate the reply. Things are a lot better, and StarForge is what propelled me on my career in PR and games. While it was a big flop, I definitely learned a lot from the experience; it's definitely the best teacher. I am working at a much better place now and more opportunities just keep opening up!
Oh noes, wall of text inbound:
Oh hi Juno, I remember you from the old forums. I think we also briefly spoke on reddit via PM or in some thread ages ago, but some time after the community in StarForge went downhill as the forums were locked.
Seems like a hazy distant memory these days. What a wild story it was, though, regardless of the anger people (including me) felt it's kinda amusing to look back now. I mean we can't get our money and time back so one might as well chuckle at it rather than think of punching the wall, I suppose.
I still remember Sorin or Soren or something (was that one of the devs names? Maybe I'm also mixing up names now) posting pictures of the two (I think they were two initially, maybe 3) in some living-room-looking place where they turned to smile into the camera while wearing white socks.
It wasn't really professional looking. Not at all. But it kinda gave them that indie / average (IT) guy look, you know? Almost charming again for other folks, representing the opposite of the "greedy" mainstream publisher people in suits just trying to milk the customer with streamlined games.
It only really went up for a while. I remember them later posting pictures of their "new offices" and them mentioning they had gems on the dev team including former Bioware people.
And then, it somehow seemed to go downhill and that fast in a short amount of time.
Despite some tears or veins popping due to anger, I think StarForge is one of the necessary corpses on the way to perfected or great sandbox games. A natural process where many try, and in the end and with better technology, more refined products make it.
There's nowadays many interesting or upcoming games with lots of potential.
*Shameless Ad*
My next bet for a comparable game (but on the next level) would be "Dual Universe" (DU), currently in development.
It combines classic building experience people know from Minecraft and the likes with a single shard and emergent gameplay people know from EvE Online - but you control a character, not a ship most of the time. First person, basically.
The development team based in France also seems "coherent" so far. To give an example: Unlike the old team from StarForge that "happily" planned and developed away until they ran out of funds somewhere, the DU team is publicly present on gaming related events such as E3 or Gamescom where you can see and speak to them. They also invited people into their offices last year and stand behind the vision that they also so far think they can reach with the technology they work on. I dunno how much money the StarForge team got back in the day, but DU so far managed to obtain roundabout a 750.000 $ or so (maybe a bit less or more) from the kickstarter campaign and then additionally over a million or up to 3 to 4 from investors. I'd wager that is more than StarForge could get together.
In short: so far I am very optimistic and the community is, too. There were a few Pre-Alpha tests so far and things seem to progress. We might see a regular release late 2018 or 2019 perhaps, if all goes well.
I have no idea where you are now, Juno, or what you do and whether your new place might put you in opposition to being engaged in other games on a deeper level (professional or private).
But I really suggest you check out Dual Universe if you have not already - if not as professional place then maybe simply for gaming in the future, as a hobby. And if you find it interesting enough to sign up on the community forums, let me know here and I'll gladly give you pointers or maybe a player group to work with, should your interest go that far.
Take care, until next time.
SO would you say Starforge died because of incompetence or malicious intent?
Incompetence, with a side of arrogance and self entitlement.
I am friends with one of the artists that they sacked, we attended the same school for digital media. In fact, it was during our hiring expo that my class was approached by the two original developers. They were incredibly unprofessional, dressed like they just rolled out of bed, and the conversation was very unpleasant. At first I thought they were just underclassmen with a chip on their shoulders coming around to checkout/make fun of our work. It wasn't until they dropped a card on my table that I figured out they were representing a company.
I knew right then something was very wrong, and did not follow up on the request for contact. I feel bad for my friend however, his tough position lead him to signing on with them... and throughout his stay with the company it was one giant red flag after another.
It was a situation you see jokingly around the internet.
Step 1: Have idea
Step 2: Hire people
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit
Step three should have been hard work, dedication, and maintaining a line of communication with their backers... but you all got, well you know.... nothing.
"I'm in a Land o Lakes but my framerate isn't buttery smooth, in fact it's a bit more than magarinely shit"
😁😁😁
Classic line.
Had to pause the video for that one haha
Mando doesn't always go hard on the jokes, but when he does...
@@jabendeacon The key is always the delivery. It doesn't matter how gutbustingly funny your joke is in your head if you can't get it out right.
*TODAY*
*TODAY MANDALORE REMINDED US*
Press [s] to spit on anthem?
@@ominousonion7197 s
3:32 Six-plus years later, that dry "Goodbye. I love you." lives rent-free in my head
Thank you for mentioning that this wasn't Unity's fault. As a developer using Unity it worries me that some people just don't even pay attention to games when they run on Unity.
What game are you developing using Unity?
im surprised then that you wouldnt have mentioned something about the part where he said "unity is for non programmers" then goes on to say cuz they just buy pre made assets but what he was actually referring to are asset flippers. unreal engine is designed for non programmers cuz of the blueprint system but unity, for anyone that isnt an asset flipper, is programming intensive especially if you want it to look and feel like anything more than just "good enough". even with pro grade pre made assets a game will run like crap if you lack in the programming department.
@z lariviere20 my thoughts exactly. This comment should be pinned on top
Hellion uses Unity, that's about as far from a lazy asset-flippy game as you can get.
I know unity is a good engine, but simply the fact that 99% of bad games use unity is enough to put me off buying anything.
Giving this a thumbs up for the Age of Empires 2 OST
I KNEW I recognized that somewhat somber song from somewhere. Thanks for the reminder and your great videos lol
I thought it was Age of Mythology, silly me
nostalgia :)
came to comments for the mention of this and the Unreal song
Man, I remember the early Starforge hype. It was like early Starbound hype, except at least Starbound somewhat turned it around later.
are on all mandalores videos??
Except Starbound is a steaming pile of space garbage. Once you've played for an hour, you've seen the entire game. No manner of infinite star systems will fix that.
And now No Man’s Sky has exceeded both in content and customer relations. Hilarious.
@@InternetHydra In the end, No Man's Sky came on top compared to the other two. The game was once a laughing stock at launch, but now has surpassed both of them.
"miss management, conversations through skype, firing employees for no reason"
*Channel Aswesome flashbacks*
HELLO I’M THE NOSTALGIA CRITIC I REMEMBER IT SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO
OK seriously I heard so many people saying bad things to the channel why so? What really happened?
Wjy are people not enjoying the critic and some of his.. "things?"
Did he do something wrong?
And more important why is he bald now?!
@@MineSlimeTV THe easiest to answer is his baldness, i believe since last year NC has shown signs of baldness, i dont think its anything serious he just so happen to be getting bald early, i know plenty of people who has that.
So the channel awesome fiasgo... its a long story but tldr they mistreated several emplyees of the channel, there are rape claims on that other guy who owns channel awesome (Mike something), covering up the Jewario thing and a bunch of other stuff, its a nightmare.
I recoomend the videos on it by Quinton, The Right Opinion and Thegamerfrommars
th-cam.com/video/FvedKSaHCBQ/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/fpcSLjBYYjs/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/8NcI-2ih-84/w-d-xo.html
On top of looking up the whole Document thing with several alegations on what Channel Awesome did, its horrible.
@@krausercruz2780 Why is nobody ever mentioning this. You're one of the few people I see who dare explain the reality.
@@WTFooLL its a rather messy and convoluted subject, guess some people just dont bother, others dont really wanna talk about it for personal reasons, some dont care.
Some of it is pretty fucked up like the whole Jewario thing. Its just a mess.
StarForge was your typical garbage open world early access crafting survival game that got hyped up because the trend of garbage open world early access crafting survival games didn't exist at the time. So I guess you could say that this game was a trend-setter? I would however like to point out that using store bought assets isn't automatically a bad thing. Empyrion for example uses a ton of assets from the Unity store and it's actually an amazing game.
Yeah, pretty sure I recognized Alien Bug 104 from it, in fact. But yeah, I really like Empyrion. Even in its current EA state, it's actually, y'know, a game. And the dev team is really involved and clearly cares about the project. I joined during Alpha 6 and since then I've had so much fun in Empyrion. :)
The overlain soundbyte of the scream as the creature is falling at 3:34 is one of the best feats of comedic genius I've seen online. You're my fucking hero, dude
7:42 who knew a game featuring fidget spinners this early would have been unpopular even in 2017?
So what you're saying is this game was ahead of it's time?
Nah, they're not fidget spinners. They don't have three prongs.
Despite being one of those burned by StarForge (I bought it when it hit steam) I'm glad it happened.
You couldn't be more right when you said 'it's a monument for early access abuse" - I think a game like this was bound to happen, something too hyped up, with extreme feature creep and abusive developers just everything that could go wrong all in one game.
It's games like StarForge that encouraged steam to stop inflows of cheap and terrible games littering their store.
The consumer market is now far more cautious with early access games.
Developers both genuine and dickish can learn from this game and see what went wrong - it'll teach good developers to not feature creep; while at the same time it teaches developers after a quick buck that the market for cheating/scamming a community isn't a successful one.
A StarForged was always doomed to happen. I'm glad it happened relatively early (even if it's only within the last few years we've truly seen its total fallout) so that hopefully we'll never see anything quite on the same scale of fuckery in the early access games industry again.
Steam still has an inflow of cheap, terrible games on their store.
Plenty of expensive, terrible games too.
Steam doesn't give a shit either way. They get their paychecks even if the customers are the ones who get fucked in the end.
You're gonna have a treat when/if Star Citizen hits
@@Malikyte13 in fact the only difference between then and now is that the cheap, terrible games are usually pornography. Because while most gamers are aware of how easily an EA game can be a scam, far too many of them are willing to think with their smaller heads.
this aged like milk lmfao
@@Malikyte13 as long as they are cheap; nothing worse than expensive AND terrible
I think that part of the problem with this game is that the devs couldn't figure out what a minimum shippable product would look like that they could build on top of. They let their imaginations run wild with what features they wanted to include, many of which were too complex or counterproductive and it all wound up as an incoherent mess
Sounds way too familiar.
No Man's Sky.
Star Citizen.
Need I go on?
Funny thing is i liked the game as it was when it launched FAR more than what it became.
Troodon at least with no mans sky the devs didn’t run off with the money and memory hole the game.
@@troodon1096 star citizen and no mans sky have both proven not to be the case. Its just impacient people like you dont know things take time, as both are nowadays very good games.
@@tobymdev Yeah, I actually recently bought SC after seeing that it's still alive and moving along in development.
So this is where Kojima got his inspiration for the Death Stranding movement system.
I mean, at least Kojima is making *functionnal* games
I hear that Age of Enpires 2 theme.... PLEASE DO A VIDEO ON THAT MASTERPIECE.
Dat Bowie I love the AOE 2 soundtrack so much, I've been playing AOE 2 a lot with friends.
Dat Bowie I have aoe2 on my recomendation list all the time from all the aoe videos I watch
Reminded me of spirit of the law lol
What about AOE 3 or AOM ?
Yes!! I wasn't going crazy!
It's funny coming back to old videos that take shots at No Man's Sky... It absolutely earned the hate but just yesterday they dropped *another* massive free content expansion. Helluva redemption arc.
Instantly clicked on this video. Love your content
Nathan Fernandez two guys who disliked this video for some reason
Probably the developers
Jason Huang "16"
Imhotep sucking 20 bucks out of my wallet was a visual I didn't know I didn't want.
AWW SHIT WE GOT AN EPISODE OUT OF MANDALORE!!!
"there is a good game in there" yeah, its called "Empyrion: Galactic Survival" check it out sometime.
Also Space Engineers
it was borderline fraud. I could be talked into a collective lawsuit against them to be honest! and yeah I MEAN that
It wasn't borderline fraud. It was outright fraud.
None of the content in their original promotional video on Steam was in the purchasable version of the game at any point, and all of it was from an earlier build.
I remember how excited I was for this after seeing the initial tech demo trailer and watching the Yogscast play it. I was so naive back then, it's amazing the sheer amount of games that have come along since this that have exploited early access. So glad I took the advice of a friend and never got suckered in.
Could you do a DoW 3 episode?
It's a baffling display of the developers taking everything good the two prior installments made, then throwing it away for absolutely no reason
They threw it away because of terrible decisions made in upper management to hop on genre bandwagons. You know, there is already plenty of MOBA games out there, and these publishers wanna make their own MOBA-ish game by taking an IP everyone loved and ruining it by turning it into a name for their crappy bandwagon attempt.
When I was a high school senior with practically no money, I donated $100 to the indie-gogo campaign both for the interesting rewards (which were never made good on) and because I had made a lot of friends and felt at home in the community and we all believed that there would be an enormous pay-off. Dystopia unfolded dramatically. I do believe once things began to be deleted, a particular forum member did archive the remains, but to excavate that could only be depressing and shed no new light. As Juno said, the Devs were absent on the forums. Eventually they did bring in a team member who was oriented toward the community affairs ("Right Click"?) who, I recall, did a number of bannings of popular forum members who were disgruntled and openly critical of Code Hatch. Confusing, traumatic - strange memories.
I literally laughed out loud with the land o lakes reference, love the content my dude
Great review. This is a textbook example of what Jim Sterling and others referred to as "asset-flipping".
On a sidenote, I love the fact you frequently use SWAT 4 background music in your reviews. ;-) And Stronghold music too. Very good choices.
Oh, no, asset flipping is very different. Asset flipping is literally buying a demo for a game and selling it as if it were a complete game.
Because people did that. The one thing they'd actually develop for the games were trading cards - because they could scrape additional revenue from them as well.
One game that might not have been recommended yet is Pathologic.
It's somewhat in the same vein as EYE, but made by Russians instead of the French, as in it's a foreign made genre-mix that plays around with abstract and esoteric ideas that's given an odd mystique by it's wonky translation.
And it also has a total remake on the horizon.
I'd also recommend their other game The Void/Tugor which shares alot of the mystique and atmosphere as it, although the gameplay and story are different. And there's an HD version for Pathologic that fixes alot of bugs and translation errors out btw. But he should definitely check out Ice Pick Lodge and their games.
This comment has not aged well...
Audioworm Or it has aged well, since he did make a review of both pathologic and pathologic 2
@@lonestarlibrarian1853 That's exactly why it hasn't aged well
Thank you! I've been looking for that Expedition book for like 25 years. I thought it was The great Expedition no wonder I couldn't find it and nobody new what I was talking about.
Empyrion: Galactic Survival is a CURSE but one that may actually turn into a game. You should checkit out!
It's like what Star Forge claimed it was going to be.
I love Ark 2.0
I love Empyrion so much, but the playerbase is too small to play it
Damn I bought it, and then redeemed bc it was bad...
It may look bad but it is pretty fun. There is a lot to do, and you can make space stations and space fleets.
I actually have StarForge in my Steam Library for some reason - I don't even remember how I got it! I'm tempted to actually try downloading it and booting it up, more out of morbid curiosity than anything logical.
Oh my god...that shooting into the ground flying hack had me in stitches...I fucking did not expect that.
This was the game that ultimately destroyed my trust in early access game.
the damn plot twist at about 11:10. I've never heard of starforge but throughout the video, certain ui parts seemed to look familiar to me. It finally made sense when you said they also made Reign of Kings, on which I have 40 hours.
Man I love it when you upload :D
I love your review style and your deadpan humor. How did I not find out about your channel sooner!??!? ;)
"If Sean Murray was the lead designer for subnautica"
You made my day,sir.
One of those jokes that didn't age like wine.
@@Fragenzeichenplatte it may haven’t really aged well,but it was funny for it’s time. I have nothing wrong with this comment,I just wanted to say that-
Sean Murray has the greatest redemption arc in gaming history
9:17 YTP helicopters, now with extra JOJ and SUS!
Bought it. Regret. Noticed they copied Space Engineer devs. They even followed their medieval project with "their own" project.
Space Engineers is newer by almost two years.
ZechsMerquise73 If counting public alpha releases, true. (SF still came out a year later officially). Doesn't excuse me for being wrong however.
I bought it too and regretted it. On the plus side, we got space engineers and planet explorers instead, which are both really good.
@@rocksteady2263 Empyrion is good too
@@abyssstrider2547 Haven't heard of that one, will give it a look. Thanks for that.
I know I'm late to the party, but it speaks leagues about Steam's Early Access when of the twelve original games lined up:
three are completely removed from the store (StarForge, Patterns, Under The Ocean);
three are still in, or removed the tag but are in similar states as early access (123 Kick It, Drunken Robot Pornography, Kinetic Void);
one is a dead F2P title (Gear Up);
only 5 are "completed" (Arma 3, Gnomoria, Kenshi, Kerbal Space Program, Prison Architect).
1:12 lmao, kevin. A.K.A Soundcore left hate messages on my steam profile once.
I wish you have mentioned what starforge used to be... Before the cursed runes, before it was survival with crafting. They have somehow regressed from a game that was unfinished but fun into this monstrosity. I am of course talking about a game where you build a base with traps and defend it from waves of increasingly more enemies with procedurally generated weapons. Don't get me wrong it was still bad, but in that more focused form they could have actually pulled of and finished.
dwerf fertress bois
Urist McComment likes this
It's inevitable!
Ian Hill hey hey people
I really adore your choice of background music for your videos.
I like to refer to these types of games as a "Seacow"
Survival
Early
Access
Crafting
Open
World
2:22 Now I have the mental image of the Kickstarter backers chanting "Imhotep, Imhotep, Imhotep" and it's entirely your fault.
The sad thing is that they actually had ores spawning randomly underground in some of their earlier alpha builds before they started stripping out features.
The digging immediately strikes me. I'm pretty sure I saw an identical system implemented into a little Blitz3D demo centered around not Mario wandering around a sandbox world. That was about 20 years ago.
"Starforge is made in the Unity engine, which has gotten a bad reputation for the wrong reasons"
History repeats itself, huh?
4:01
That thing is quite litteraly a kwama forager. How did they not get sued by betheseda over this?
S’WIT
Ah, StarForge, the game everyone hated
Looks like it's going to be a nice review, instalike!
1:30 Whoa, warn a guy before you go throwing puns like that!
Almost took my bloody head off...
Funny that I get this again in my recommended feed, I had such high hopes for this game but alas the devs fucked it up, although I did make some friends through that journey on the game's old steam group chat.
Cheers everyone.
I love the exploding (what I assume to be a) monsuno near the end. 11:52
Have you played Gothic 2 + Addon ?
If not, play it. This is a forgotten foreign open world action rpg gem from 2002.
3:58 kind of nice boi for 20 bucks, I'd pick him instead of my repeatedly ungrateful cat.
As a software developer I really don't think there was any maliciousness here. It's a common problem with overconfident developers to overpromise and miss-manage expectations. At this point you either swallow your ego; admit your in too deep; cut back on features and carve out a smaller but functional game or double down and hack together a broken, unmaintainable mess.
It's pretty ironic some of the No Man's Sky comparisons made in this video, given how that game has been continuously worked on by the developer to make it actually live up to the expectations once put on it, while this game was long abandoned and never came back into use.
To be fair to No Man's Sky when comparing this to what it was like on it's initial release though, at least it was functional amd had some kind of base game. It might have gotten boring pretty quick and lacked many expected features, but at least you could notice some effort was used in putting it together.
When's Shogo: Mobile Armor Division?
Pathetic dot theory I'm cool with this.
RIP the era of shooters with models that rippled like water when they moved
I can't wait to see his reaction to the theme song!
No problem Chief
hell yeah. the cheats were pretty fun in Shogo as well. you add another dimension to the game by cheating to play as a guy in the mobile suit levels and vice versa. You could also play multiplayer as either a mobile suit or infantry.
dogboy0912 wait really? why ever play infantry?
That's why I subscribed, because you simply seem to never forget. I like that. 0:36 😅
Thank you for this review and wrap up. I'm actually getting a bit emotional here because I really believed in the project back when it was in early development. I bragged about it to friends and spent real money on it.. I can't help but to sigh as I sit here typing this. Such a brutal disappointment from Code Hatch.
Thank you sir for letting us have some closure on this matter.
“Well, so far it’s like if Sean Murray was the lead developer for Subnautica.”
BrOOtal.
I remember playing this game before they added loads of the crap content. It was fun, just building a base, surviving waves of worms, progressively getting bigger and opening chests to get weirder and weirder guns. This is a shame.
Nice you have the Cleopatra music going at one point. Now that game is a great city builder.
I would definitely check out Empyrion Galactic Survival. I’ve been loving it. It’s rough but has a dedicated development team.
Five years later, and the game's still being (somewhat) improved. I guess, congratulations are in order, you've bet on a good horse.
Came for the review, stayed for the butter/margarine puns. All one of them
2:29 Actually Unreal Engine has out of the box visual programming language, while Unity doesn't. So currently Unreal Engine is far more suitable for non programmers compared to Unity. Unreal Engine also has it's own asset store, there's just nos as much stuff compared to Unity asset store.
Fluffy You're forgetting that non-programmers shouldn't be developing games.
I don't see why not. Modern visual programming tools are very powerful. I've build whole career making games using visual scripting tools.
Am I the only one hearing a track from AoE 2 in the background at 02:03 (it is longer than that but I just noticed it at that point in time :D)?
Cool review btw. :)
"Minecraft was in a popularity golden age" a little update on that is needed
Watching this 4 years later and it's funny how badly this compares now to No Man's Sky which was a bigger critical disaster but has just released it's, like, seventeenth? major content update and is now considered a success story.
Also the physics based movement system makes me think that this is the second ever Strand-type game after trespasser?
Is 3 years too long for Visa to do a charge-back?
alksdjf;alsdjf *calls them*
"Hello, this is Visa customer service, how can I help you?"
"Yeah, hi, I want to get a chargeback from something I bought and I really didn't like..."
"Sure, what was It?"
"A game purchase"
"Okay! And when did you buy it?"
"Three years ago."
"..."
*click*
"Hello?"
*tone*
Loving the vids man, especially enjoyed the cheeky Age of Empires 2 soundtrack in the background 👍
I want to see a review of Judge Dredd: Dredd Vs Death and The Chronicles of Riddick:
Escape from Butcher Bay
Both brilliant games that I used to play the shit out of back on the original Xbox. would kill to see a review of either of these.
4:10 That Fantasy Worm sounds an awful a lot like terraria's Eye of Chuthulu boss, especially during it's enraged dashes
"star citizen is out" oof
idk if you will see this, Mandalore, but you mentioned one of Wayne Barlowe's works (Expedition). I don't know how familiar you are with some of his other stuff, but he has some of the most interesting interpretations of Hell/Demonkind with his artbooks "Barlowe's Inferno" and "Brushfire", and then he actually wrote a novel set in his interpretation of Hell which is rather good (God's Demon). Very much recommend if you liked his scifi/alien artwork.
They released another game this year called Heat. Please look at it if you have the time. I don't know why I'm actually asking you to suffer through that. Ignore my request. Love your videos, and what you do. Keep up the good work.
I love that you put the age of empires sound track. I've been loving your video, keep it up
the AoE2 music makes me dance but the fingers make me feel weird. thanks for the vid!
I love that in each of your videos you have music from other videogames! I got so happily surprised here with the AoE music
Star Forge?
FOR THE REPUBLIC
Nice music choice at 1:40
the weapons in it look amazing and look like they feel great. I love the weapon design in it
Hey, I made the guns (fire, obv the models are assets) glad to have them not get shit on in a video, but layerd under piles of performance and design issues I understand them being overlooked
Oh god, the nostalgia. It was one of those games I had really high hopes for. It's sad to look back on a game so awesome and to remember how bad it flopped. My friends and I used to create Hitachi servers just to play this game and Minecraft on the school computers. Good times.
Stars End is the next one they are trying to Sell in Early Access on Steam. Almost the exact same game.
Just came across your channel randomly, no idea why TH-cam Algorithm never suggested it before..................well time to binge :v
"Equivalent of Imotep sucking $20 out of your wallet." gets me every time. I just experienced deja vu, so i probably posted this before. IDGAF
I backed this game on IGG. I'd personally, like to thank you for your coverage and spreading word.
2:47 So it's skyrim.
Great choice of music! :)
"Star Citizen is done"
LOL
There’s another unity survival game called Empyrion: Galactic Survival that seems very similar to StarForge, but it actually works and is a lot of fun.
Larry Bundy Jr. / Slopes just released a video about this game. But it's not as good or informative as this one.
I downloaded this remembering the old alpha footage and how awesome it looked. I can confirm it’s nothing like how it used to be!