Launch and Reception
As most of you by now have discovered, JAF launched end of October. The reception has been all over the board ranging from “Absolutely love it” to extreme hatred by a small rabid core group.
While we do love the positive feedback, it is the negative one that has taken up most bandwidth online and internally at our end.
The entire situation simply makes me sad beyond words. Not only for us and our own future, but also for you and the future of Jagged Alliance.
Besides some rough edges in the game where most of those have been fixed by now, the major feedback issue really stems from expectations. And I think expectations from “outsiders” that have not been following JAF development as a Kickstarter project on a small budget, but expectations from hardcore JA fans expecting JAF to be the next JA3.
As you and we know, this project was never meant to be a replacement for JA2. It was a project where we as a fan community could in unity get JA back to its core roots of great TBS combat, modding and create a foundation for keeping the brand alive. It was deliberately set as a prequel, but it is measured as a sequel.
Stepping back and looking at JAF as a game, I think it’s a great little JA game. Its not a 9/10 – not a 8/10 either. But it has a good solid combat system that screams JA, and an ok story that has good elements. Modding wise it is miles ahead of where JA2 was when it was released. From a full blown level editor to external accessible dialogs, quests, access to LUA scripting etc we really think there is a great basis for lots of content updates in the future through community efforts.
But – we failed to do expectation management towards people expecting JA3. And there is nothing we can do at this point to please those guys.
What we can do and what we have done over the last months since release is to do our best to address whatever else has been coming up as negative feedback.
There is now improved stealth, more weapons, weapon attachments, better initial levels, a nice shop interface, improved AI and lots of smaller bugfixes and improvements.
Looking down the list of issues brought up and improvement suggestions, we have been able to improve on almost everything in the last months.
But at the same time, the gamers or even you as backers have not yet given us credit for this work by revising your reviews on Steam. We still have user reviews that are at this point hurting sales – and thus the possibility of doing future updates. Things hang in a thin thread due to bad sales with bad user review. Heck – I would not buy a game myself that has 40% positive on Steam.
If you really think JAF is only worth 40% positive, then so be it. I cannot change your mind then, and we will be forced to stop here. But with only a few changed reviews or a good handful of more positive reviews, the new gamer perception would improve a lot and possibly gamers will give the game another chance. And with improved sales, we can again do more updates and features.
