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.