I wouldn’t be so fast to assume Nintendo is A-OK with cross-play. The only games I know for sure allow it on Switch are Minecraft and Fortnite. They are giants, and they don’t release on a system without cross-play.
GoW doesn’t get to make demands the way Minecraft and Fortnite do, and Nintendo has historically been so uptight with their dev agreements I would believe it if they claimed they could crush diamonds with their buttcheeks.
Outside of actually acquiring an SDK I don’t think either of us will know for sure, and odds are that facet of the developer agreement is under NDA anyway.
A quick Google search brought up 15 Switch games that allow for cross-play. Many of them Indies or games I’ve never heard of.
Fortnite was for sure on PS4 way before they allowed cross play beta testing.
Will this throw all the QoL improvemente we STILL NEED under the literal speeding bus?
(When we asked for a rework on the Shop, for example, we weren’t asking to have a limit of 10 Event Keys per week to avoid carpal tunnel damage on our hands…)
How much more trouble will the develop team have on their hands to keep juggling around instead of ACTUALLY working on fixes and improvementes that ARE relevant unlike chat emoticons?
Please, tell me you guys have a solid plan for the upcoming months/years and that said plans didn’t came from someone who studied planning here:
Besides the old weapons issue.
What else needs to be fixed?
32 million Nintendo Switch’s have been sold.
Gems of War will be one of maybe 10 games on the Nintendo Switch that are free to play.
Since the Switch is coded as a Mobile Platform. I imagine it was relatively easy to Port. (Not that time consuming)
With the Switch being touch screen and controller based. I would prefer playing on the Switch as most people would. (if we could use our existing accounts on it.)
Chat needed to be fixed. The emoji things will draw a lot of criticism. But again… Not time consuming.
The opposite actually. The changes will stream line player Reports. I bet half the tickets the devs deal with each day are about other players.
And we just got a QoL update 2 months ago.
Every update can’t be a new game mode.
This isn’t just to you Razz. But to anyone coming at the devs about the “chat update”.
The chat update/fix to become reliable as a communication method have my full support, i can’t find right now, but when people were really pissed off about the chat and defending that it should be extinguished i was among the ones who defended it for logical reasons related to the player’s experience. The emotes, while nice and cute, should be far below the list of priorities when we still lack:
Shop rework as me and others metioned/requested months ago.
Weapons acquisition as you mentioned and other have been requesting.
Weapons and Upgrades reworks which sort of falls under the balance issues for Kingdoms and Troops.
Troops/Kingdoms balance that are far behind any acceptable measure. Specially for some recent Factions that can only be considered good designs if the devs were aiming for mediocrity…
Ingame economy issues that are not being planned or addressed. The devs are simply capping the content/items we can acquire. What next? A limit on Glory Keys and Traitstones acquired via Troop packs?
There are quite a few things that are not exactly gamebreaking, but also creates a poor experience for players in all level ranges from beginners to veterans. Things that are still being juggled month after month, year after year and so on…
I fear, there is no better word for it honestly, that the devs are aiming too high by investing into another plataform when, in my opinion, they still have a lot on their hands with just two. They are still unable, or unwilling, to devote proper time to address things that are very basic…
My concern, i believe, is reasonable and it’s all about logistics and impact on the experience. Believe or not they could literally have successs expanding into Switch and other plataforms, earn money but still cripple the services for the previous and already estabilished playerbases.
How? It’s all about the game experience and management of human resources. Porting the game to Switch could be easy in a sense, but it will still require thinkering no matter what, and with that comes also a higher demand for Support, Code wizards, Community management…
Do we have people who think that Salty’s work is at best… evasive… for not addressing the very specific, almost state secrets (or gramma’s special spice sauce) level of information they want? Do we have people who think that Kafka’s, and the support crew as a whole, are not doing a great job? And if you think a little and answer “Yes” to these questions while they are handling only the current plataforms you would get to wonder how things will be once they jump into another one…
My apologies. I thought your issues were code based that could be fixed with a patch.
It sounds like instead. That you have a bigger issue with the design and implementation of GoW. And the staff members… None of which can be solved easily with a patch.
Remember when the devs said Dragon’s Eye would be fixed on March 17? I sure as hell don’t. You’ve been playing long enough to know how it works:
Player Reports an issue
Kafka or Cyrup take a look
Lots of Players report the same issue
It then gets on Nimhain and Sirrians Radar.
Depending on the time required for that issue. The new issue gets put at the bottom of the list. (Since they are constantly working on new things, most we haven’t a clue about.)
Months go by…
Players yell at Salty. Salty isn’t allowed to say anything.
More months (years) go by…
Changes are randomly revealed when they are ready and about to be sent out or have been already.
Salty announces and asks happy now?
Community replies “No”… Because you didn’t fix what I wanted you to fix.
Code issues are certainly one of the roots of bigger problems… I’m just glad we didn’t had an episode with an exploit going on with free gems so far. (wink and smile)
The port for Switch is something we have been working on for months, and needed to keep quiet, as I said earlier.
I also wish we could have cross play, but it won’t be happening on release, and we don’t know how that will look in the future. I want to be as honest as possible about that with you, before it releases and any of you invest either time or money into it.
We did a big rework of chat, which was partially prompted by a lot of player reports on how chat wasn’t working correctly. Instead of making a few changes, we decided to rehaul it for an update to further stream line player reports, make it more stable, and have it be a funner experience for a majority of our players.
We will be bringing additional fixes with the next update, but we need to take things one at a time. The team working on the switch port are not the same team working on bug fixes or future updates, so time wasn’t taken from our core development team.
But will this team remain in the company, even if partially? Or once they finish the porting project everything will simply be managed by the current GoW team?
I can assume some new hires, but i still wonder if it will be enough as far as the (elusive and mysterious) plans for the future goes…
(wink and smile)
