Proper documentation is an industry standard…and it’s also easy af.
I promise you this is not the case.
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I’d love to see your job essay…
Lemme guess, Cyber Athlete and Pro Gamer, right?
I love the people who come to “prove us wrong” that certification has been a frustrating, long process for us.
It seems like the whole point here is that, if the port was going to take this long, because I guess we’re idiots, we should have waited longer to announce it? I suppose we have to own that mistake. We didn’t anticipate the extent to which some other developer would lose their shit over our port taking too long and come here to berate us about it. Hopefully you’re right and we have learned a little about becoming professional developers. We have a long way to go but I hope someday we can make it as professionals in the game industry.
Wait, who am I kidding, we have no intentions of becoming professional…
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“You got us”
Clearly I did, where’s the game? Next year?
I bought the game and all the expansions for several of my friends on PC. I’ve played it for several hundred hours. I stopped in 2018’ish mostly because the Xbox news. So your own early admission hurt the amount of hours I played on it. That is most certainly on you all.
It’s a great game, awesome like I said, but this port stuff is a joke. Let’s be real. Announcing stuff too early is always a mistake. But when you hear articles saying the Sony stuff fell through, then you went to Xbox, then no release for 3 years, it starts to look like it’s not Sony, or Xbox, but you. I’m not saying that’s the case, but that is the impression it leaves.
I’m not trying to get you. I am one of your fans/champions that wants you to succeed. But you do yourself no favors by this sort of @#$!. Take the criticism to heart and try and make things better going forward. Or just retire and hang up and let others do their thing. Your call.
Titan Quest can do it (with your own engine/game) and that team was definitely ultra jank and they still got it working, I played through Ragnarok/Atlantis on Xbox (works fine now). I highly doubt that is a big team porting that going by the quality.
Don’t take it personal, just make it right. I never said you or your game sucked, just this port job.
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You know they make money when you buy the game and DLC, not by how much you play the game - right?
And not sure why you stopped playing to wait for the Xbox port.
Now you’re mad because you made a bad decision to NOT play a game you already bought.
Talk about a joke - lol?
Now imagine if they would have released it during E3, on Game Pass (taken that Xbox Game Pass money) plus the Sales that are guaranteed with GP plus the publicity of E3?
Instead they did what? Oh right, nothing. Excellent business sense. Because clearly not selling copies on another platform for 3 years is the best idea ever
You know they are a small team right? And that they are working on multiple projects, as well as tweaking GD. Also, just plug in an Xbox controller to your PC. Easy enough.
No, I have no clue they’re a small team of 5 people since I supported it on Steam Greenlight, nope no idea whatsoever. Yet 9th Dawn: Shadows of Erthil made it to Xbox (which I own). So tell me something else. It just doesn’t past the test anymore.
How much would they have made?
Don’t know why you are so angry about this, you already own the game.
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Maybe because I want to play it on Xbox? Got a problem with that? And maybe other friends that don’t have PCs want to play it on Xbox. Ever thought of that? Or do businesses not care to expand into other markets to extend their growth?
Even SMT5 got a release date this year.
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So much anger. Tut, tut.
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Anger gets $%^! done. Even the dev responded to me, so clearly it touched a nerve.
Yes, I’m sure they are going to press that Xbox release button and it will be out tomorrow! LOL!
As for the devs response, I don’t think it means what you think it means! LOL!
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No I do think I know what it means. That this port won’t be out anytime soon and that I think it’s very likely to be a footnote on some random whatever game site stating the port has been canceled. That seems more likely at this point.
Plus look at the guy that responded and backed it up, I agree with that. You can lick the boots all you want, not going to do anything for you, like you all said, they got your money, what are they getting for you praising them? Nothing. That’s on you.
Edit: Crate: In case you’re wondering. I’m still going to buy it, if you release it on Xbox. I’m just offering criticism. Maybe you don’t feel it’s constructive, but neither do I feel leaving your fans hanging for 3 years is either
That’s exactly what we did. We retired from GD to devote our attention to new projects… we just happen to also be working on an Xbone port in our retirement.
The difference between us and Nordic/THQ, is that they’re a publisher who bought an IP and are trying to milk it for every dollar they can get out of it because they’re in the business of investing in IPs for profit. We’re developers who make games - of course, we hope they’ll be profitable but profit isn’t the sole factor in our decision-making and the more money we make, the less of a factor it becomes. At some point, had to decide whether we wanted to try milking every dollar out of GD or, if we were willing to leave some money on the table, shift our focus to developing new games. In the end, working on new games sounded a lot more exciting after 10 years of GD development.
We decided to do just an Xbone port because one of our engineers was interested in it and it seemed like it would be a bit easier than other console ports. Could it have been done faster - for sure. If we had put more people on it, from the start, I’m sure we could have sped it up. We had that one engineer on it, who also was working on a new engine, on the side. At the same time, it isn’t untrue that in the latter half of development, especially in the past 6 months, it’s taken way longer to wrap up than we thought due to certification issues and additional testing / requirements for the Xbox X. At this point, even if we put more people on it, it wouldn’t go any faster.
And yes, many of the cert issues where things where, once you go through it, it would be a lot easier to do again; so some lessons have been learned.
Now imagine if they would have released it during E3, on Game Pass (taken that Xbox Game Pass money) plus the Sales that are guaranteed with GP plus the publicity of E3?
Instead they did what? Oh right, nothing. Excellent business sense. Because clearly not selling copies on another platform for 3 years is the best idea ever
Couldn’t care less about trying to line up release timing with E3 for some little extra publicity. On a company scale, it’s like if someone criticized you for not cutting coupons out of the newspaper ahead of your trip to the grocery store. If you’re a grandma on limited income, with a lot of free time, the coupon value proposition is probably appealing. If you’re highly paid and working long hours, you probably don’t have the fucks left, when you get home, to care about cutting out a coupon to save $0.50 on canned chicken.
Some companies, especially public ones or those with investors, are more obsessive about maximizing profit and they hire producers and marketing people who try to justify their existence by pushing the team to hit important PR events / release windows. We don’t have those people, so there was no one around to rush us into shipping some half-baked, buggy release to line up with E3… sorry.
Edit: Crate: In case you’re wondering. I’m still going to buy it, if you release it on Xbox. I’m just offering criticism. Maybe you don’t feel it’s constructive, but neither do I feel leaving your fans hanging for 3 years is either
I don’t think its cool to keep fans waiting 3 years and frankly, it’s pissing me off too but it is what it is. We couldn’t devote more people to it, because we made a strategic / creative decision to invest our man-power in new projects. But we knew some people wanted to see GD on Xbox and we did have someone who wanted to do it. So the result is, you’re not getting it quickly but you will be getting it. At the end of the day, its not ideal but it seems better than having decided not to do it at all?
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We understand that there are other games out there that got through certification quicker than we are, and that other small teams have also ported their games to consoles. What you need to understand is that not every game is the same, and not every game is going to have the same certification requirements. The console features that your game takes advantage of determine the amount of certification requirements you are going to have to check off. More features, more certs. More certs, more work.
For your part, you pointed out both 9th Dawn: Shadows of Erthil and Shin Megami Tensei 5 as examples that got ports, presumably within a shorter time frame that we have been working on ours, or at least that’s the implication I got from reading. I would point out that both of those games are single player, and not having to worry about multiplayer takes away a significant amount of work that you need to do in order to ensure that requirements are met. So right off the bat, the two games you bring up as example have a much smaller workload than Grim Dawn does, in terms of porting.
If we look at the titles individually, Shin Megami Tensei V is part of a long running series developed by Atlus, who have decades of experience releasing their games on consoles. The experience itself is invaluable enough, but add on to that the reputation and pull that they have with the companies they work with, and the capital they have to speed things up as needed? Of course they got through cert faster.
9th Dawn: Shadows of Erthil is made using the Unity engine, which, while it doesn’t make porting as easy as simply clicking a button, it does handle all of the backend work that is required to get the project setup and producing a working executable for the console(s), it handles all of the input mapping, provides you API’s that you can easily use to get common features up and running (i.e. achievements, friends lists, etc…), debugging tools, profiling tools, the list goes on.
And that doesn’t even begin to address the fact that separate codebases means that some certs are going to be easier for your project to check off than others. It is not an apples-to-apples comparison to take other games that got ports and compare them to a game made with a different engine, and by a different company.
Finally, I’ll address this directly:
“Crate: In case you’re wondering. I’m still going to buy it, if you release it on Xbox. I’m just offering criticism. Maybe you don’t feel it’s constructive, but neither do I feel leaving your fans hanging for 3 years is either”
Coming on to our forums and suggesting that we have been making excuses, feeding our community bullshit, and lying about the state of the port or the tremendous amount of work that has gone into it so far, is not “just offering criticism”. It’s insulting, and not just to the games that we produce or the effort we spend producing them, but to our integrity as developers. If you want to criticize how long the port has taken? Fair enough. We certainly had no intention of it ever taking this long, and even we are beyond frustrated at this point. If you want to criticize the game/port itself? Sure, go for it; you’re not going to hurt our feelings if you think the game sucks. But speculating that the reason for any issues we’re experiencing comes down purely to incompetence, lies, and/or greed? With no evidence whatsoever? That’s insulting.
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You must be loved at restaurants with that kind of logic. We are happy to respond to players throughout these forums and do so on the regular, including, what, at least 6 times in this thread alone prior to you? Unfortunately misinformed delusions often require a response so that others are not also misinformed in turn. It’s like seeing a car wreck, can’t look away.
Not sure what “anger” and “criticism” is supposed to achieve here exactly. Hoping some dev is gonna wake up, go OH SHIT, THE CERT! and get back to work?
At no point did we set a release date that we missed or delayed, we didn’t take preorders, we didn’t even announce a price point or what’s included in the console version.
Players have no investment in this process besides maybe anticipation; which again, in hindsight, perhaps we should not have announced as early as we did, but we announced Grim Dawn years before it even went to Kickstarter because we like to keep our fanbase in the loop about what’s going on at Crate.
It’s not like we took preorder money and then went radio silent for years while twirling our mustaches.
So coming in here acting like we owe you something comes off as truly bizarre.
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Tease us with the new UI Crate!
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When it’s ready.
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so any news? would you say it will be done around holidays '21?