Where are we going?

Probably the most articulate, mature and serious thread I have ever seen in these forums, good stuff. I have many years in here and thousands of hours
invested in this software. I will continue to do so albeit on a slowly decreasing scale. My $20 paid for itself 5 minutes into the demo. I love it even if it is nothing more than a physics simulator. Yes, it has slowly gone beyond simple realtime deformation and into suspensions, drag, friction, pressure, aerodynamics, torque, gravity and many others. In this one arena it is progressing slowly and what is being built to this day is no doubt a topic
of discussion in many areas worldwide. In it's current state today, it is as far from the "game" that was envisioned 5+ years ago as it will be in another 5 years. That's just a fact, pure and simple.

 

The 'feeling' i have about BeamNG is that the devs knew that RoR was on to something good and wanted to see where it could lead, BeamNG is the product of that, a highly enjoyable one as we all probably agree with.
At the same time i think BNG is being treated as a design study. Testing ideas out, getting down and nerdy wherever they feel like doing so, which can be both good and bad. If this was a project at work id say that there really isnt a defined, common goal everyone is working towards? Theres no project leader keeping things from taking wide turns, in order to get a product for the masses, while keeping a set deadline?
I dont mind this although i ofcourse would like to see more focus on certain parts. The thing right now/so far with BNG isnt the experience of the game parts (career, graphics, UI - which needs polishing, aswell as the garage which imo needs/deserves more than a overhauled, user friendly UI) but the very technique and physics of BNG in action.
I sit down and play it and enjoy the interaction of the materials, when id also would like more actaul game contents. I do recall the devs saying that much of the game engine coding and so on is clsoing in on done and that they can focus more on the gaming experiences, could be wrong though.

EDIT:

What i do hope to see is something in the direction of Quick Play police chases, Quick Play destruction derby, Quick Play Racing track races, and of course Multiplayer.

 

Having the perspective from someone who purchased the game extremely early on is great to have, as I only bought the game two years ago. I completely understand your frustration, as you've been waiting for a finished product far longer than I have.

In regards to the Steam Greenlight trailer, they put a specific focus on an "Open World Career Mode" and the ability to "Buy and fix beat up used cars". Have we seen that? No. But the issue is that the game was specifically advertised along those lines.

Basically, what I want to say is, I'm fine with the developers constantly wanting to improve their engine and explore the other possibilities it has to offer in other industries, but a large portion of us paid money for a finished game, not to fund your research projects. I believe that there are some people that don't seem to understand that. It's a problem when the game we paid for might soon arrive on the list of games with the longest development times, not because of an extremely large scope, but because the focus is all over the place and some things aren't done right the first time.

 

I would rather wait longer and have more + better even on areas not originally thought than have just something to fullfill open world career mode.

What are the facts you base on your claim of focus being all over the place instead of being large?

Single post by claimed previous employee is not really much to base on. As Nadeox pointed out visible is very small compared to invisible.

Early Access, there is even warning that game may not get anything more than it is, such is nature of early access, one supports development, but there is chance one never gets any more or that it takes longer than excepted to develop. I think there are expectations that are not quite in line of what can be read from disclaimer.

 

yeah but what is that "invisible"

 

In regards to focus:
0.12 decided to focus on the new bus far too much, giving it a campaign was enough, but giving it a gamemode that takes up a spot on the main menu is excessive. Many people didn't use that mode as it gets extremely repetitive far too quickly, and now there are bus stops on maps that would never have them (Gridmap bus stops :| )

0.13 focused mainly on the Automation Collaboration. This required input from both the programming teams and the level design team. Inter-Game collaborations are great, but the fact that this took priority over other things such as previously promised content and the fact that the entire update basically revolved around it wasn't the best decision.

0.14 focused on the track builder. Although a rework of the track builder was a welcome addition, the amount of content related to it was extreme. First of all, they created a new level, entitled "Glow City", designed solely for the track builder. Then they added the "Light Runner" game mode too, which was just a reskinned time trial mode.

Over the past few updates, the developers seem to be changing the focus of various parts of the game almost randomly, while various bugs remain unfixed and large amounts of in game content are never improved/updated.

Also, the reference to the post by the former employee is just one part of the many factors that I am basing my posts off of. That's the only argument that you bring. The only reason that I brought that to the table is because it summed up my prior thoughts perfectly. You seem to think that post is my only argument, in that regard you are sadly mistaken.

 

Well I do agree that the bus gameplay mode is kinda useless and just takes up space on the main menu, but yeah...

 

For me it appears developers wish to communicate about that better, of course nothing happens instantly, but as you can read they will do their best to fix that.

Estama wrote about some of what is invisible, to get torsion bars to work, they needed to learn how to create well working model for them, that is research, probably also few prototypes needed to be crafted and tested, such takes time.

For some other game, if it somehow moves that is ok, they don't care about accuracy, that makes BeamNG unique and not just a game.

If one does not want such to happen, then one can have fun physics like Wreckfest and with all that comes with it, but BeamNG aims for accuracy, not to compete with average game market, but to create something new, very key point that separates game from other ones that at least for me is why I like BeamNG so much, they try their best to get things right.

Same with career mode, they could easily make simple career mode that you would play and move on to next game, but that is not BeamNG way, they want to offer more, on most areas more and better than ever have been seen, they also want to make sure it is done right, so that for years to come you can build whatever you want, I don't know other game where one can make realistic weighting paper boat or giant space ship from Star Trek and physics engine delivers, thanks to that research and way they do things, but yes it takes time, yes there will be iterations because of pioneering just works that way.

To put those to perspective, you need to know how much time and personnel those aspect did tie.

For example Automation track and game features were very largely done by Automation team and did not resulted much extra work for BeamNG team members, based on what could be read from writeups of staff members and video interview of both companies during time of Automation collaboration release.

Adding one button to interface is not very huge task, I would guess that those game modes did not tie many team members at all, again those are visible things just a tip of an iceberg, on background much more work were done that is not visible from game menus as was indicated by Nadeox and Estama.

You have one crucial misconception, that is that team would focus on one thing only, it is not so, bringing track builder to game is not causing all people of company to work on that, I don't know how many people did work on that, but I would guess 1 or 2 out of over 30.

This misconception is giving you illusion of random focus, when in reality that what is not visible is the main focus where most work is done, invisible is what you can see and experience in future and that is what developers wish to communicate better according to post by Nadeox.

At this moment though, all we can is wait which is kinda hard when you have frustrated feeling already, "like wait more" I can imagine how such must feel to you, but rest assured they did promise better communications so I would except they will tell some news about that in a near future.

Also new senior manager was told to be introducing himself in near future, perhaps with that they tell more about plan or something.

 

Just because a feature is useless to you, doesn't mean other people don't like

 

Yeah, but most people don't use it as it just gets too repetitive and I think the game is probably better without it IMO, because giving the bus its own campaign was enough and you can literally do the same exact bus mode thing by just stopping at a bus stop and pretending you're picking up nonexistant passengers, which just renders the bus mode pointless.
please don't kill me devs it was just my opinion

 

This is not an argument over whether people like a piece of content or not, rather the use of development time for said content.

 

Sadly we both miss the facts about how much development time that took, my understanding is that it was not very much, but I don't have facts, you probably have impression that it was more than what I think it was, but neither you have facts about that, which makes discussion bit challenging.

Perhaps developers could give some rough hint about what kind of workload it was to create bus mode or track builder, seeing things in perspective usually is much better than trying to argue blindfolded.

Still I do like bus driving thing, also I think that it is just a start, like track builder has evolved a lot, probably they have some surprises for that too, but there is not knowing of course.

Way I think is that as developers have been smart enough to create this kind of game, they probably have smarts about these things more than I or most members do have. Naturally no one knows everything and always users might know some bits that help to improve game in future, but they do have smarts, a lots, they would never put for example half of the development time of the update to bus routes mode.

Just if updated brings something new does not mean that focus of update was fully on that, it can be that time spend on new delivered thing would be so small it would not bring much of any change to something like career mode and how we could know if career mode would use said feature in some form?

My point here is that assumption can be very misleading, reality can be quite far from what is assumed/presumed here.

 

exactly so why did the devs even bother putting that in the game, its almost like their putting stuff for 5 year old kids to play with, and not focusing on whats more important. Which is exactly why Forza Motorsport (a different racing game made by Turn 10 studious and Microsoft) is dying (not because of the 5 year old thing, but because of what the devs are doing with the game)

 

It was a proof of concept. Like many other smart features implemented in the past few years.

Well... Sometimes the game feels like a large collection of fascinating proofs of concept that ultimately lack cohesion though...

 

totally agreed with you, thanks for posting this, the dev need to see this!

 

Couldn't have worded it better.

 

If this game doesn't leave early access by 2020, tbh I think we can officially call this a failure.

 

Ugh... I think some people here don't understand the devs & how this game works

Do you know why BeamNG is still in Alpha state? It's not because the devs have no idea what to do, or because it's their will to keep it forever in that state, no. The reason is that BeamNG is NOT like the other games. It actually tries to be as close to real life in terms of ALL the simulated physics, that there's a ton of research that needs to be done to make it work properly. Researching things is not just looking at something & making it magically appear ingame. They have to gather information from probably more than one source to see how the thing they want to implement into the game works, then need to write the code to make it work, which involves A LOT of trial & error, then they need to test if it doesn't conflict with other stuff & if it does, it needs to be solved, which also takes a long time. The other thing is that BeamNG is probably their first complex simulation (theoretically RoR wasn't theirs at the start, as tdev supposedly bought it from the creator (or so I had it told)), so it also takes a lot of thinking & figuring out how to have the stuff implemented into the game, without fully knowing the game engine & how it handles simulations of certain parts, like the suspension, traction control etc. BeamNG is NOT an easy game to maintain like GTA V, Forza series & so on. It actually requires a lot of information gathering to make all the parts of it be as realistic as possible & make them work like such without having crappy arcade-like physics. The dev team consists of ~40 people where probably only half of them (or less) is actually working on the game code, while other typical game studios have 200-300 people.

I, for one am actually happy that BeamNG is still going strong with regular content updates even if it's in Alpha. Just because a car or a map doesn't get added each update, doesn't mean it's not interesting or not worth playing & testing out the added/changed stuff to see how the game improves each update.

Hopefully my post conveyed what I wanted to say & you'll understand what I mean, as I have trouble remembering the formed sentences I'm thinking of in my head due to suffering from short & longterm memory loss + lack of concentration.associated with that, thus my posts are often written in a very simple & short way

 

I don't think that the game definitely has a chance, but we got a hell of a lot more content a few years back, really makes me wonder.

 

Hot take: the devs never intended for the Automation collab to happen, but, instead, it mainly was a way to help out Camshaft and pick up some sales along the way.

It was more intended as something that fulfilled the Automation devs’ impossible dream. Improving Beam was an afterthought.

I’m not mad at the collab: in fact, I quite like it. But this is just something we must admit to.