Where are we going?

Apologies if you it seems like I'm trying to pull that card, I'll try not to do that as often as you've pointed it out.

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Can't wait to see BeamNG in another 5 years.

 

I love this game a lot, I care for it. I classified this game as my favorite game ever made. I want the absolute best for it, I would just hate for it to go away because of reasons listed above. Please just hear me about here.

 

This is one of the threads where I actually read through all the posts, figured this was a thread to do it on, though. I am a little removed from all of this seeing as I unfortunately don’t own the game, although I do keep an eye on it. @Fera, you certainly make good points, as do many others, but it seems almost like you’ve phrased it as “BeamNG started as a car sim and now has turned into a bus roleplay game”. Maybe I’m misinterpreting this, but even if it’s slower, the game is still getting worked on, and even if this game never leaves alpha, I expect and believe that the devs will be able to get it somewhere.

 

Where is the talk about 'focusing on actually getting out of Early Access' in this thread. That's what I got from the OP post....that shouldn't be 4 pages back already...

 

You're probably misinterpreting it. One of my issues is that the game's focus seems to be all over the place as of late.

 

Fera is absolutely right on this, he made extremely valid arguments. I highly suggest that the higher ups at BeamNG listen to him.

 

I honestly think that we might not see 1.0 by the end of my senior year of college, at least not at this rate. I might be overreacting, but my point still stands.

 

Okay, I’m glad I am. I think Beam might be trying to expand their horizons a little bit, they’ve spent so long being strictly the physics simulator, I don’t think it’s really a bad thing for them to expand to things like light runner, even if it is just a reskinned time trial. They’re going somewhere, and in the end are still expanding things, even if there isn’t one clear focus.

 

Passionate people have strong emotions going, it is then hard to remain calm, it of course affects everyone.

I would rather like to understand better issues people are having and their wishes rather than point out their flaws or something one thinks being their flaw here.


Now I think that here might be some misdirected frustration.

Based on what I have read here, it might be really three things at play.
-Many mods have been made or works that are imports from other games.
-There has been additions to game that have not been within preferences of group of members
-There is no frequently updated roadmap

All this has probably made impression that game is not moving forward and that nothing 'new' comes to game.

Also there always is room for improvement too, no matter who or what does something there is always room for improvement, but I think some points brought up might be impressions where some of the facts have not been easily seen.

Oh yes, I can see your point of view as originally BeamNG was going to be banger crashing game, but then has become more of general vehicle simulator with crashing abilities, so it is quite understandable how you feel.

Surely BeamNG is now different and maybe future is different too, maybe there is also something in future that brings more such crashing game qualities to it, so make sure to check it out and remember to enjoy, that is why games are made for

 

This.

Some sort of a roadmap for development would be nice, sure it doesn't have to be super detailed (how else are we gonna have sneaky devs?), but a way for the community to see progress moving along.

 

A Over the Horizon 2 would be appreciated, especially since it’s referenced by the moderators once in awhile to answer questions

 

There are devblog posts and also development microblogs, but perhaps community members would feel in a way 'safer' or more confident to devs if devs would publish some rough areas for next 3-4 months after publishing update, it would give impression of target which often reassures that there is a lead.

I'm not sure how practical it would be though, but observing frequently surfacing discussions among these same or similar subjects, I think that could be helpful.

I see it this way, as in teaching students, they were much better orientated when they knew subjects of the week before hand, sometimes there were subjects that altered coming days subjects and students were always bit restless then.

It's psychological thing, kinda interesting and partly amusing how human mind works, but that might be something to try if not tested before, just my view of course and I don't really know much.

 

What I meant by roadmap was a way of knowing how much more needs to get done to reach the end goal, which is career mode iirc.

 

To me beam just seems to be going in areas that most people don't want or knew they din't want. I don't mind maps or new vehicles taking a long time to make. But the small things, the things that are missing from the game. ECUSA is missing many things from the map compared to WCUSA. Where's the firehouse, police station or mulity use building? WCUSA has a fire house, police station and hospital that are clearly marked but not ECUSA. Where is the american fire truck (not the Roamer), where is the generic American police skin for the sunburst, where is the Italian bolide police configuration, where are the configurations that are missing from the base game that would take way less time then light runner would? I know mods exist but they have a 50% chance of breaking after every update.

What I want for me that could keep the community together better would be smaller but more frequent updates that added proper car skins and configurations that are clearly missing and I read almost weekly from the forums and steam discussions (the mess they can be).

Side note: Took me longer to write this so I may be misplaced in the comments. Also I missed a few things but my brain is mush right now.

 

That might be harder to accomplish I think, as they probably want to have internal prototype working well before they will publish what it will be as if internal prototype does not work, they might need to revise plans and if they announce something which can't happen, that is going to be really bad.

They probably don't want to go Atari way, that wanted to push game out even it is really broken mess, but surely deadline was met. Kinda thinking it's better that end goal moves further compared to that horror.

 

I guess both of us have different ideas of what the roadmap would be.

Let me explain what I was trying to say. Some sort of a way of knowing what the main goals in development are, eventually leading to career mode at the end. It would be a way of knowing what major obstacles sit in the way of the finished game, and would give us a tangible way to see progress getting done in regards to the final game. As of now, all we know is that career mode is being worked on, that's it.

 

I was hoping the roadmap would be more predictable as mentioned earlier (cars, graphics, maps, scenarios). Then Light Runner got released. Imo it's a pain to look at with current BeamNG graphics and provided me with 5 minutes of entertainment before I decided to never try it out again. We still don't have online leaderboards, which would provide at least some way for players to interact with each other.

Many things have changed for the better since BeamNG went on sale 5 years ago, but the fact that there are still many things that I recognize in the current version compared with said first release makes me feel bummed out.

 

Also link I posted earlier mentioned that they are doing scripted AI for testing career mode, so from that we can tell they are working on tools to test career mode.

I did read quite some time about development of Just Cause 3, there was mentioning how developing tools took more time that making actual content, BeamNG is pioneering in many areas, so even larger percentage of their time might go to developing those tools.

Main obstacles and goals might be interesting to see, but not sure what they can share. I mean tdev wrote in update speculation topic that they want to have traffic, but they can't yet promise that.

I think that in development there is a lot of work that goes to test about things, especially when pioneering new like they are, creating their first game, so for example that traffic, it is a lot of work, lot of testing, lot of learning and redoing, new inventions, I wonder how such could be put to roadmap when that is not guaranteed to happen at all, but as you can imagine, such could affect to how career mode works for example.

So while those could be kinda main things, they are not really something they could write up, easier would be putting short term goal posts.

Then again I really don't know much at all, basing this on what I have read from update speculation topic and earlier this kind of topics and what I have read about game development projects of other developers, it can be bit more challenging that one imagines.

 

I think a lot of these game modes are to tide the players over before career mode is released as it will take a while to finish. The lack of focus will probably improve now that they have a senior producer to help them keep on track.