The Worlds of Magic Thread - It's out... sorta

[Marobug]

So whoever made the call went ahead with the release when both the community AND his team knew it was too early?
Either he's a special type of incompetent and an absolute imbecile for shitting on people's money and livelihood (in your case and your colleagues), or the company was/is about to go bust.

Regardless, I feel for you. It's not cool to be slapped in the face when it's not your fault. Hope this isn't the end for the project.

 

[mastroego]

Well let's cool our heads for a minute.
What happened is clear enough, no need to linger on the point any longer.

Now, IF the team manages to keep the current fixing and polishing pace for another month or so, I believe the game will reach a "proper release worthy" status. A delayed such status, yes, but still, the ONLY thing that might affect us players is the impact those potential negative reviews might have.
Honestly I can't estimate how much of an impact they might have. It's a niche game after all, many gamers are already informed one way or another, and reviewers themselves might be willing to cut the team some slack.

Remove all the placeholder texts, add the few missing models, fix the most evident issues and "beautify" the thing a bit, and people will be ready to judge the game on its merit.
A lot is made by the sum of little things that add up in the perception game.

 

[Torrasque01]

potential negative reviews

If you take a look at steam user reviews and sort by recent you'll see that 90% are negative and the aggregate is slowly dropping. If you believe games "journalists" will be more charitable you're mistaken. The pressure on them is so high that any chance to bash an easy target outside the clique will be taken. See Godus.

 

[Phage]

eh
to be honest, I definitely agree the release was rushed and too early, but that was not my decision to make.
the gamebreaking bug that've sneaked into the release and other glitches were most unfortunate - especially considering that the game was really stable in the last few builds.
I just want to assure you, we're not pulling a full control and are working double shifts to fix, polish and add stuff (like sounds - outsource guy fucked up and we did what we could but were not able to manage before Thursday - that will be added on Monday or Tuesday).

Good luck men. My snarky post aside, I have had WoM on my wishlist and have been keeping an eye on it. I do hope you get the time and space to get the game to where you'd like it to be

 

[Whiran]

A delayed such status, yes, but still, the ONLY thing that might affect us players is the impact those potential negative reviews might have.
Honestly I can't estimate how much of an impact they might have. It's a niche game after all, many gamers are already informed one way or another, and reviewers themselves might be willing to cut the team some slack.

Remove all the placeholder texts, add the few missing models, fix the most evident issues and "beautify" the thing a bit, and people will be ready to judge the game on its merit.
A lot is made by the sum of little things that add up in the perception game.

The perception of the game is being formed now. It began upon the official release.

There was a generous amount of slack granted during Early Access because that's what Early Access is about. The moment the switch was flipped for the game to be officially released that slack is gone - this is the game.

People who are reviewing the game (whomever they may be) are using the current build. They aren't magically using some future build that doesn't exist and may never exist.

There is an option to re-release the game (since it didn't get a lot of coverage anyway that may not be a bad idea) by renaming the game a little even Worlds of Magic v1.2 could potentially work. Then send the game out to youtubers and streamers - get in touch with Twitch and try to get the game onto the front page.

Since the game is a niche game one can focus on niche youtubers who have regular and paying viewers. There are a fair few youtubers who get like 1k-2k views per video but the conversion rate of people watching those videos turning into paying customers is significantly higher than the norm.

With some solid marketing / PR this game can still become a success - assuming, of course, that the game becomes good or even marginally good.

The game was basically released Dead On Arrival and that's a deep hole to try to get out of. It can be done but it will take a good plan and good execution.

 

[DakaSha]

Games shit, end of story, play dom4

 

[Torrasque01]

One criticism I've seen on various forums and reddit was that using d20 for combat was a mistake. I want to shoot those people into the sun.

 

[Malakal]

One criticism I've seen on various forums and reddit was that using d20 for combat was a mistake. I want to shoot those people into the sun.

It could be a mistake, depending on numbers involved, D20 is a lot of randomness, definitely more than D6 and less than D100.

 

[Torrasque01]

One criticism I've seen on various forums and reddit was that using d20 for combat was a mistake. I want to shoot those people into the sun.

It could be a mistake, depending on numbers involved, D20 is a lot of randomness, definitely more than D6 and less than D100.

I get that but they are literally saying "it's shit because it's just like dnd 3.5"

 

[Malakal]

One criticism I've seen on various forums and reddit was that using d20 for combat was a mistake. I want to shoot those people into the sun.

It could be a mistake, depending on numbers involved, D20 is a lot of randomness, definitely more than D6 and less than D100.

I get that but they are literally saying "it's shit because it's just like dnd 3.5"

Well, DnD isnt known for its great combat. But that was more of a general observation, I dont know how the game dice work.

 

[Dickie]

When I use the Spiky Rocks spell, the game slows to a crawl and, if there are more than three enemies on the screen, it usually locks up when one of the enemies tries to move and I have to Alt+F4 to get out of the game. Anyone else have this problem?

 

[covr]

Yep, I have never finished a single fight Always locks up, with different spells.

 

[Marobug]

Yeah you only have on shot, you fuck up the release you're done. Very few games survived a botched release, and those who did were great games to begin with or just had something different that appealed to a lot of people, which isn't the case here.

I torrented this and my first impressions aren't very positive tbh... the ui is terrible in every aspect. Looks like early 2000 at its best and is just all around really awkward. It's probably been at least a decade since I played a game with an interface this bad. As far as usability goes it's like it's stuck in 1995.
It took me literally 10 minutes to end my first turn because I couldn't figure out what to do or how to build stuff in the city management screen.
Like others said the map said is really confusing and just isn't very appealing, there's something really odd with the elevation of the terrain and placement of props and vegetation, something about it all fucks with my brain in a really unnerving way.
Then I started a combat and it just froze. I could move around the camera but couldnt select or attack anyone, end the turn or interact with anything. Spent another 5 minutes trying to figure out if it wasn't another UI quirk or if I was just being retarded, realized the game was indeed stuck, ragequit.
I only played for a short time and from little I saw I can already tell it will take a lot more than a few months for this game to be in a releasable state.

 

[Dim]

How did you do with Dom4? Must have been nearly impossible for you.

 

[Marobug]

I actually got the hang of it fairly quickly specially when you take into consideration that dom4 is kind of its own thing and at the beginning you don't know shit about most game mechanics, while this is a MOM clone.
When you are familiar with the game mechanics and still feel completely lost, there's something very wrong with the UI. That's made even worse when the UI of the original from 1994 had little to no learning curve, at least for me.

 

[Haba]

 

[InspectorRumpole]

Right, see you in about a year guys. I'm out.

 

[covr]

Maybe less then a year, the game has enormous potential. I can only hope that devs are learning quickly and they will support WoM for a long time. It seems that game has been updated again:

Worlds of Magic has been updated (1.0.2)
The new update is ready to be downloaded.
That was busy weekend, and we are hoping that this will increase your game experience.

Fixes:
-Ancient Mine related crash
-Unit recruitment, city building and any lord-related notifications didn't have any tooltip after loading
-Previous/next unit buttons were not refreshed correctly (Hot seat mode)
-Charmed units sometimes could persist after combat
-Walking Bomb could cause combat freeze when detonated during AI turn
-You can directly launch wom.exe
-Visible armies button (the 'eye' button)
-Graphics settings from launcher are now correctly saved
-Issues with intro scene - wrong lightning
-Some texts were not localized properly
-Pool of pregenerated city names was not restored between games
-Load issues with Inn
-Unit scaling for GUI (queue for city screen and unit roster)
-End game panel
-In some rare situations AI could attack another lord's army/city even if they have a non-aggression pact
-Lord templates could be modified in some rare cases
-It's no longer possible to found new cities on quicksand

Tweaks:
-Added new panel - clicking on an army while having a single-unit spell ready will open a new window for easier targeting
-Lots of small GUI fixes

hoverdog What's the plan for the WoM and it's future? Patches, expansion, enhanced edition, focusing on another game?

 

[Melan]

How do I even collect this game? I got in with a £9 pledge for a digital copy, and while they sent me an update about it being released, it never showed up on my Steam account or anywhere else.

 

[hoverdog]

hoverdog What's the plan for the WoM and it's future? Patches, expansion, enhanced edition, focusing on another game?

Currently we're focusing on fixes, tweaks and late release content (sound&graphical effects, heroes models). We will be adding Titans - horrendously powerful neutral units, a sort of end-game challenge - in the near feature. As soon as we've managed to patch the hideous unpredictable Unity bug (which is down to Unity support, unfortunately - it's on them), we'll be rolling out a demo version, and then we'll see. A new race free add-on is the most possible candidate.
Enhanced editions should be killed with fire.

How do I even collect this game? I got in with a £9 pledge for a digital copy, and while they sent me an update about it being released, it never showed up on my Steam account or anywhere else.

Most probably it's because a) you selected GOG as your platform of choice so you weren't sent EA key automatically and b) you've missed (or your spam filter blocked it) the email sent to all non-steam backers about redeeming steam keys. The GOG release is a bit delayed, if you want a steam key send an email to wom_key[at]wastelands-interactive.com

 

[Melan]

Thanks! Yes, turns out I ordered a GOG copy. Steam is slimy, unpleasant and invasive.

Also, looks like it doesn't hurt if the GOG version comes out after a few extra fixes.

 

[Dickie]

With the PC launch being so rocky, will the PS4 version still be out this year or will that be delayed?

 

[hoverdog]

With the PC launch being so rocky, will the PS4 version still be out this year or will that be delayed?

We are not directly involved in porting, it's being outsourced, so there shouldn't be a delay.

 

[Azira]

Review of the game by RPS can be read here.

Conclusion:
"It’s not at all the case that Worlds of Magic is lousy, other than UI and bugs (particularly a recurrent one which prevented me from closing menus, requiring an Alt-F4 to escape), but it’s not at all the equal of its peers in presentation, and sadly isn’t bold enough in design to make that irrelevant. I don’t regret my time with Worlds of Magic as such – again, it gets the essentials of explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate right, and I appreciated its lack of flab – but I can’t say that it’s lodged any memories in my skull."

 

[Rellin]

Basically sums it up. Lot of other similar games that are much better. I doubt they got enough sales to justify any sort of long term support, DLCs, or expansions so the game's future is very bleak indeed.