this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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Others can probably add more, but PA started as a Kickstarter back in the wild West days of Kickstarter. Lots of promises made, lots of concepts shown. Biggest failures I can recall from that hazily distant time:
Last minute they added an always-online requirement to play. This was in the early 2010s, and was very frowned upon considering the local-first nature of TA. Also lead to enormous stability issues for months after launch.
The promise was for a TA/SC successor, but what we got was far more cartoony and watered down than TA/SC and what was shown during Kickstarter. A lot of the core game loops of TA/SC were simply missing or so simplified they no longer mattered.
While the game was still in a fairly immature, broken, buggy, incomplete state, they released Planetary Annihilation: Titans. This was probably done to duck all the poor reviews they had on their Steam page, which stemmed from the issues with the Kickstarter campaign promises and the mentioned bugs/incompleteness on release. Titans was significantly better, but required a new purchase (begrudgingly discounted if you had bought PA early enough) and offered a lot of improvements that should have been brought to the original game for free.
All of that said, since the Titans release, Uber has generally done right by the community, but it was a painful and bumpy road. Most of the community turned their focus to work on Beyond All Reason, rather than continue to depend on Uber.
Thanks for the summary! Yeah, I can see how anyone who bought the original Planetary Annihilation would have felt burned by all of that. Titans is what I've played and I did have a good time with it, but it seems like getting to that point was a rough time. I'll have to check out Beyond All Reason, I'm not familiar with it but it seems promising from the reviews!
Huh, I supported the game on Kickstarter and liked the game when it released. I didn't even realize there was drama. So take that for what it's worth.
They also had a crypto miner put into their dying game SMNC during one of its last patches, you could mine crypto from them to get keys for lootboxes to get hats in SMNC.
Horrible company.
That's a good summary
I backed the game at a high enough level to get a "physical" release, and enjoyed my time with the game, but the game ever hit it's stride until Titans came out.