Why is this game in Early Access?

Genuine question here - not being sarcastic at all.

Why is this game available to the public? I’ve just re-read the changelogs for every patch of release. And without the slightest hyperbole - I’m very confused why this game is still not being developed in house?

The team et al clearly doesn’t accept player feedback and make direct, timely adjustments. All feedback is thrown to the void of “I’ll pass this along to the team”.

It was my understanding that one of the benefits of an Early Access release would be to build goodwill with the Early Adopters. Ignoring the feedback given - or worse yet - condescend to “fix” a situation with something that could not be called anything other than a bandage.

So again - what is the purpose to have this released publicly at all? You are doing more damage than good.

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Answer: Better than free testing since some income is being generated

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Incoming large post, colored by the 25 years of my interacting with the gaming industry (jaded and cynical it has now become, unfortunately)

Plainly to me, 505 games are becoming the new EA games - hopping on the gaming cancerous bandwagon of releasing unfinished games but still asking for obscene microtransaction money from beta testers (us).

I can only guess that they’ve done what EA do best, acquire studios and trash them. Probably Infinity Plus 2’s old game design and coding talent has moved on to greener pastures and the development is now run by clueless project managers that have no idea how to make a fun game but are experts in monetizing stale game play by drip feeding and copying ideas we’ve seen in every other money sucking mobile game.

Remember that Puzzle Quest was the original game that innovated this genre of fun gem matching puzzling plus RPG elements in the first place. Yet, what we have here is some kind of pale facsimile with fancy and time wasting animated 3d models that do not much besides drain your phone’s battery… see:

As you’ve noted, there’s been 6 months of in depth feedback so far from us where a lot of quality of life suggestions have been totally ignored because they probably have no idea how to implement them gracefully and in a fun way, or above mentioned project managers have too big of an ego to admit they’re wrong and get out of the way.

I appreciate that they’ve reduced the grind of the daily tasks of the game, and some core problematic tenets such as shards have been looked at, but a lot things they have tried have been so laughably inept and ham-fisted in its implementation and execution, examples coming to mind being re-balancing, clunky and nonsensical UI implementation and entire game modes being broken…

If I could give one grace to this game so far, is that the majority of it has been managed an produced during the midst of the pandemic. Covid19 sucks and living in Melbourne during it was incredibly tough, being locked down really messed with me, personally and professionally so I can relate to the struggles of trying to co-ordinate something as big as making a game. However, we’re now in a time where things are getting back to normal… things have got to improve…

Anyway, in short, I don’t have an answer really to why this game isn’t being developed in house.

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Eatch patch that goes by, this question becomes more relevant… I’m tired of being an unpaid QA tester on a game with a real money store attatched

especially on patches that have big Unity crashing bugs

This really isn’t Early Access. It’s a public beta test with a forum.

When Salty was here atleast there were the semi-regular streams where people (in the right time zone) could have a bit of interaction asking questions and some got responses. She left months ago and nothing seems to have been done to replace those streams or provide anything really from the dev side. Any Dev diaries, insights into characters, or anything really about upcoming aspects of the game seemed to end there.

Months ago I asked if there was any roadmap that could be shared, any indication of future areas for focus, even a vague indication of where the game is heading? Milestone targets? Anything? Something?

In recent months it seems the only interactions from PQ staff is “I’ll pass it on to the devs” or “I don’t have any info on the next update”.

When there are months of consistent feedback on the same topics with nothing being done about it, I do wonder if it’s even worth the time posting here. If it’s only going to end up players responding to players, then we might as well stick to discord - quicker answers and more responsive, and an equal level of impact on the course the game is heading it seems.

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