Thank you for the transparency. I feel this has been missing for a little while. Now we’re not in the dark.
Foa looks great so far. Another year hurts, but that’s life. After a certain age, you become well aware that another year may not come for you and you might miss out.
thanks for not letting this awesome game down
the comparison isnt ridiculous at all, its about bloat, and needing someone to put the breaks and release the dang thing, the comparison is perfectly apt
Great post. I have seen what happens when devs get rushed, so good to see that Crate’s philosophy of “It’s ready when it’s ready” remains unchanged. Looking forward to the other misadventures.
And I will be sure to kill it.
Good. Waiting is fine. There are still many dozens of builds to theorycraft. Taking your time to deliver quality is what garners the support of a strong playerbase. Carry on good sirs!
Как же хочется покорить Вознесенный режим.
Great post. I love you and your team’s work, passion, dedication and constant upkeep on the game. Of course we want everything now but I am more than willing to wait 6 months to 18 months for a finished product. I will pay any price you come up for xpack because it will be thousands of hours of entertainment.
If it was not for being a manager and having limited time I would have logged many more hours. Currently played 1700 hours. Games like this have helped me deal with all kinds of mental trauma and life’s stresses.
Keep up the fantastic work. I look forward to reading Grim adventures since your first one.
Yours Truly
Aaron Minty
I just signed up to the forums to say thank you for all the work, passion and honesty you guys show. I’ve been playing the game intermittently for years and everytime I come back is better. Thanks for everything.
For it to be a good product, Crate have to enjoy making it. For them to enjoy it, they need the time to make it without undue pressure. I hope Crate are enjoying squeezing new things out of the crusty old engine and we get rewarded with cool things we didn’t know GD could provide.
I’m happy to wait because I know Crate are using extra time to make things better for us, and MOAR of them. I honestly am quite pleasantly surprised by the breadth of the new expansion, I never expected anything even close to as large as AoM, especially with adding Ascendant mode and all the other new mechanical coolness (potions, upgradeable epics, affix re-rolling, etc).
Does make it harder to wait though 
I think it’s safe to say after viewing all the replies in this thread and in this one…
…that you are almost certainly part of a very small club that would hold those views. And I maintain that a Star Citizen / GD Expac development comparison is ridiculous. But you know what… do your thang. Set your timer and check back here with us in 10 years. I’ll wait for ya, aight?
You should try re-reading the OP tho…
As you can see - it is very clearly not ready to be released right now. My gut says that would be a bad move to release it incomplete. I even asked Magic 8-ball about it…
…and everybody knows Magic 8-ball is always on point.
I hope this add-on will remove the game’s main problem - replaying the same locations three times in a circle on different difficulties. The system that allows this, still forces you to return to the starting difficulty level to pump up your character, which is very tedious and boring.
My annoyance with the release date is that two years ago you told us about all these cool mechanics and QoL that will be coming to the game. Those with the streamer client can even try them out. But the rest of us will be waiting for another year.
Maybe you could release the altar thing in a patch. But then that makes the expansion less feature-full when it does come out. It’s not an easy tradeoff to make.
What streamer clients? The only streamer who’s had access to the Berserker mastery is RektbyProtoss and that was only because he is a Praetorian (closed beta tester) and did it with Zantai.
Expansion would have been done by now if Zantai left his yacht more often.
honestly zantai soothed me completely with a teaser dropped in the gd community discord modding section ~10 days ago. now i can rest assured fangs will have the one thing missing in gd so far and it will be perfect, thx to rekt for spreading the word. then again the teaser had no context and might have a different effect for other people. (it’s basically a new spell template.)
what do you mean, crate devs visit each other on their respective yachts regularly.
Thank you for being so transparent with your development process and so honest with your community. It’s what sets you apart from other game development companies.
Take all the time you need to make a great and polished product. No one wants a half-assed buggy release like basically every AAA one these days. We’ll wait, and we’ll still be here when you finally release the thing.
There isn’t a Streamer client. There is the Praetorian, internal testing version of the game. There was a Praetorian recruitment session for FoA testing some time ago, as there is with most major content production:
Praets have been given permission to stream certain things in the past, now including the Berzerker mastery.
That which any Praetorian is streaming can safely be considered WIP content and is not indicative of the final product, nor do Praetorians have permission to stream everything currently in testing.
And any non-Praetorian somehow streaming Berzerker content should definitely get a hard looking-at.
Speaking of testers (Praetorians), I wish I had the time for that. Between work, school stuff (FINALLY getting a degree!) and house chores, I barely have time for fun, let alone properly play test something and give feedback.
Too bad, because that could be nice - specially because I could provide insight on what Wine wrappers work and don’t work (currently using LG Proton 9.27, and it’s working WAY BETTER than any GE Proton).
I’m thankful that an expansion is being made. Make no mistake about that… but… I am of the opinion that the announcement should have waited. Here’s the issue, and it’s an industry-wide plague now. Games are taking way, way, WAY too long to make and develop now. I’ve been a gamer for 4 decades now. I’m old. Games didn’t always take 10-20 years to come out and another 5-7 after that to “fix”.
It would be better for us fans if this news was either A) announced just prior to it’s release by about a month or 2 at most or B) completely shadow dropped by saying “HEY! Guess what’s out tomorrow, guys!” This helps us AND you out as Crate devs.
Announcing super early like this and us having to wait a year or more after announcement gives time for anticipation to build, peak and die down (not out, just down as people now know and are slooooooowwwwwly waiting for yet another game update that’s gonna take forever to release. People forget about it, then when it comes out it’s “oh, yeah, that expansion that we were told about eons ago. Sweet.”
Imagine if this was done different. Let’s say somewhere in the middle between total next day shadow drop (maybe not enough time for people to be prepared for it) and 2 months out (the longest I think we should hear about it)
Lets say 3 weeks before you are completely finished with FoA, you all of a sudden drop a trailer for the new expansion. We have no clue GD has anything coming. Then at the end of the trailer it says “Coming XXXX” which is 3 weeks from today’s date. The internet explodes. Every site and every Youtuber have ample time to create their “OMG what is even happening blogs and videos”. Hype doesn’t even have time to die down before the release and everyone and their mother’s dog is playing the game on release.
We don’t have to wait months/ years anticipating yet another game we may die before playing. You don’t have to hear over and over “when are you gonna finish the game, when is it coming out???” and more importantly for the game, Hype and word of Mal-mouth are at a sky-high, fevered pitch because no one expected to be playing a new GD expansion 3 weeks from whenever you posted your announcement.
Maybe I have no clue what I’m talking about and this is all nonsense. But, I can assure you, I personally would have MUCH rather experienced the above than another 1-2 year wait for a game I want to play. My great grandkids are gonna enjoy the hell out of Elder Scrolls 6, I know that!
Cheers and happy expansioning! (literally can’t wait lol)
I don’t think anyone is asking for the release of an unfinished product.
If the expansion boss is T posing, any argument is moot as I don’t think Crate should be going Last Epoch’s route and leaving the story parts out and “patching them in” later at some point. That, by definition, is unfinished.
Having said that, Crate mentioned that some features, that I assumed would be brought with FoA, will making its way to the PTR such as item tool tip changes and UI stuff, if I read it correctly. This is what I feel @deen (devil’s advocate) is referring too…maybe?
The thought process being finish the base of FoA and release all that added content post that Crate wanted to add. For example, the awakened epics could have come in a patch later on.
Since I am not Dev or a Crate employee I can’t say which way is better. I get that looking at another year of development is rough from a players perspective but I feel Z’s post about things in the next patch or 2 shows an understating of the “wait” concern.
