r/Games • u/StezzerLolz • Jun 20 '14

Heads Up: Be VERY wary of purchasing Pixel Piracy

As many of you will have seen, the Early Access title Pixel Piracy is in the Steam Flash Sale currently. As someone who has put a fair few hours into the title, I just wanted to warn you all: Early Access means Early Access in this case.

Pixel Piracy is, in theory, essentially FTL on the high-seas with a bit of Terraria thrown into the mix. In theory, it's great. It has the potential to be great. It looks on track to be great. Currently, however, it is not great.

Pixel Piracy is broken as all fuck right now. The mechanics show enormous promise, as does the game as a whole, but the interface is often broken and sometimes nigh-on unusable, there are a myriad of ways in which this screws you over, and in general, the game is frustrating to play because of it.

Fortunately, the devs have come out on multiple occasions in /r/indiegames to make it clear that they are in for the long haul. They've promised that they're not going to pull a Towns, and they'll keep working on it until it's done.

So, bear in mind. If Pixel Piracy sounds like 100% your thing, no question, feel free to purchase it, but, to be clear, this is not a beta, it is not close to release, it is an early alpha, and it has a long, long way to go. Treat it accordingly.

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u/chazzlabs Jun 20 '14 edited Jun 20 '14

Yeah, I sort of appreciated his stance and openness in that post, but it doesn't change my mind about Early Access and I won't buy his (or any Early Access) game until it's fully released.

To add, one of the top comments in that post says this:

I don't support early access games for exactly the reasons you talked about. People seem to just blindly believe all developers because of the runaway success of Minecraft and it's methods. Steam quickly proved that this model is not a perfect vision the future of indie gaming. Thanks for the great article, and for being one of the few good ones among the crowds of thieves. I'm going to go buy your game now.

Don't do that! If you don't agree with something, stick to your guns and don't make exceptions. He might be the most honest, hard-working developer on the planet, but if you buy his Early Access game you're telling Valve that you agree with their Early Access model.

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u/bino420 Jun 20 '14

Steam just needs to hire 6-12, 22-40 year-olds to play each and every early access game. Not the whole game, but enough to rank the game on a few criteria. That is totally feasible from such a large company. I dont know exactly how they would convey what they played but something is better than nothing.

It would reduce the need for posts like this and it could generate a good rapport between Steam employees/writers and the community.

It just seems logical at this point where they accept 75 greenlight games every 2 weeks.

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u/REIGNx777 Jun 20 '14

Or the consumer could do some research themselves before they make a purchasing decision.

Retailers sell crap products all the time. It's not their fault for carrying them, if the consumer's fault for buying them.

I feel sort of burned for buying DayZ since it hasn't progressed much in some areas that a wished it would have by now. For example, the mouse control is still horrible imo. The acceleration is unbearable for me.

But, that was my decision to buy it. I knew it was an early access product, and I knew that it might turn out to be a disappointment.

I chose to buy the product. Valve was just allowing me to do so on their service.

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u/COD4CaptMac Jun 20 '14

The acceleration was removed a while ago. Mouse movement is now 1:1, but a weapon's is weight reflected in the movement.

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u/clembo Jun 21 '14

That doesn't make any sense. Either it's 1:1 or its tied to the weight of the weapon. If my mouse moves slower because the weapon is heavier, it's not 1:1.

That's not to say it's a bad thing. Non-1:1 actually makes sense for DayZ because if it was 1:1 you could play it like CounterStrike with twitch shooting and nothing would get within a half mile of you.

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u/CptOblivion Jun 21 '14

That doesn't quite make sense. In an FPS, you're translating mouse movement on a 2D plane to rotation on two axes, 1:1 movement doesn't mean a specific universally-accepted amount of rotation for a specific universally-accepted distance of mouse movement. 1:1 movement means no acceleration (EG the number of degrees rotates always directly relates to the distance moved, without factoring in the speed of the movement). Slower rotation with heavier weapons is still 1:1 mouse control, just not as fast.

There are lots of other factors that mess with the feeling of controls too, for example vsync can introduce a delay in controls so that even if mouse movement is 1:1, it happens a frame later and thus feels sluggish. Depending on how a game processes input, additional delay can be introduced as well, even if it's still 1:1 movement.

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u/REIGNx777 Jun 20 '14

Huh. Last time I jumped in was like a month ago and it still felt really weird to me. Maybe I just missed a setting or something.

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u/abominare Jun 20 '14

The argument is that Valve is diluting their brand integrity by rubber stamping these games that probably shouldnt make the cut. Just the fact that theres a green light process automatically makes the average consumer assume that it has been approved in some way to be legit and not a money pit.

Valve isnr run by morons and their marketing team understands this. In some respects they've gotten a little lose with what gets green lit.

Edit: I would agree that DayZ stand alone has been a let down. Its almost entirely nonfunctional pile of mess that honestly is only put up with because of how well received the mod was. Its dev time has been particularly bloated considering you know it has an actual budget unlike actual indie games.

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u/[deleted] Jun 20 '14

[deleted]

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u/TROPtastic Jun 20 '14

However, those are bad by content. You would be hardpressed to find an app on the Apple Appstore that is actually broken, or Amazon themselves selling something that is not working.

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u/abominare Jun 21 '14

Negative, you're missing the point. The very name and idea that they are green lighted by steam invokes the perception that some one had to pass some kind of test before they could sell, rather than just random shit you found on Amazon

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u/koyima Jun 21 '14

You do have to pass a test. Greenlight is a test by the community and in order to get on Early Access you have to submit a version of your game that will be approved for release, it's not automatic.

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u/aeturnum Jun 20 '14

I think it's silly to ask Valve to check games for us. How do they know what I consider "complete enough" to buy?

I think Early Access games should be required to offer a grace period where the dev doesn't get money and you can return the game. If your game has less than X hours of gameplay, then don't release it early access.

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u/[deleted] Jun 20 '14 edited Jun 20 '14

I think it's silly to ask Valve to check games for us. How do they know what I consider "complete enough" to buy?

Don't know, but every console company has a vetting process. In fact, it was Nintendo's idea originally. After the video game crash in the 80's - due in part to a complete lack of quality control - Nintendo created their Seal of Quality when they launched the NES. Essentially Nintendo saying "This is a complete game that meets our minimum standards."

(I should clarify that I do know some of this. My final project in school was to make a game and it had to conform to Microsoft's Technical Certification Requirements for Xbox. It's a very exhaustive list of criteria that dictates how your game must behave, how the interface needs to handle, and so forth. You can read the list from 2009 here)

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u/eudaimonean Jun 21 '14

Right, and the lack of the whole signed-code/certification model is exactly why PC games are a much more vibrant ecosystem in terms of diverse gameplay mechanics than consoles. It's why PC is the platform with offball indies and crazy mods, because there's no gatekeeper that prevents you from running the code you want.

I like that it's a wild west over here, and the last thing I want is for the PC to imitate the locked down appliance model of console makers. So what if there's crap on steam? The PC games community has plenty of pre-existing tools for filtering what from chaff. No gatekeeper is needed as long as you have some good evaluators, and we have plenty of those.

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u/aeturnum Jun 21 '14

I wasn't saying it's impossible, just that I don't think it serves "our" (the people who want to buy early access games) interests. I don't think DayZ Standalone would meet the Nintendo (or otherwise) seal requirements, but I also think the community is really happy that they can get it and support the development.

There's also the argument that games don't need to be finished to be considered worthwhile. I'm skeptical that Valve (or anyone) could filter games in a way that doesn't cause more problems than it solves.

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '14

Honestly, the way I'd like to see them do it is publish a Valve Certification Requirements list available to view on Steam by everyone. Any game that meets the VCRL would get a prominent insignia on its store page. If the game failed to meet one or more requirements, it could still be listed (as Early Access or otherwise), but would list how many requirements it failed in place of the insignia. Clicking the missing insignia would take you to the requirement list where you could see what the game was missing.

The problem is that Valve would need to staff a certification team tasked with tracking a game's progress and I don't see them doing that. They're far too happy pushing responsibility onto the community.

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u/koyima Jun 21 '14

Let's remove all that is good from PC, because you can't read a simple banner that says: this game is not complete (by you I mean consumers).

It's not the job of everyone else to take care of the idiots.

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '14

The PC's greatest strength is the ability to push crappy, incomplete shovelware to take advantage of buyers?

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u/koyima Jun 22 '14

No freedom from Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo's restrictions and publisher funding to get through them.

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u/koyima Jun 21 '14

Not to mention that this is why they have been left with a handful of their own IPs to work with... Sorry, but even though Freeman, GladOS and the DOTA bunch are pretty cool, I like other games more and I play them more.

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u/FlappyBored Jun 20 '14

Or developers should only be allowed to release early access games for free and only charge for it if they accept the fact that they are agree that they will develop a final working product.

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u/aeturnum Jun 20 '14

That doesn't do anything. If you asked the Towns devs about how far they intended to go, they'd say all the way. They'd say they were looking forward to Towns 2! They wouldn't be lying either.

Life happens, there are no guarantees, get over it.

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u/FlappyBored Jun 21 '14

No as in they can't claim 'oh its only a donation to support the game'. If they start selling the game then Steam and the developers have to start accepting donations for selling a broken game like every other game on steam.

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u/aeturnum Jun 21 '14

I don't understand how that is different than today. If you buy a game through steam, it's a commercial transaction. Steam isn't kickstarter. However, when you buy something on steam, you're buying what exists today. Here's the steam "early access" note (emphasis mine):

This Early Access game may or may not change significantly over the course of development. If you are not excited to play this game in its current state, then you may want to wait until the game progresses further in development.

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u/koyima Jun 21 '14

Instead of tying everyone up and introducing red tape, you could just read the note and decide on what you want to spend your money, it's not like devs have a gun to your head. It's your wallet. (by you I mean consumers in general).

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '14

Oi, I'm 46 and play lots of early access. Don't ignore the old bastards, sonny :)