More appropriately though, how did they go from Bloodlines to Dead State?
Dead State was at least insanely ambitious, with the whole 'open map + gameworld/plot advances with time, independently of what the player does', which is what lead to all the imbalance and bugs (player can go anywhere, characters are scripted to die on certain days, locations change on certain days, put that all together and you've got a clusterfuck of breakable quest triggers that's a nightmare to both debug and balance). It's the right
kind of fuckup for an indie developer - one where they're testing mechanics that the big players won't touch, and sometimes discovering that there's good reason why the AAA studios won't touch them. A visual novel is a step in the exact opposite direction - it's going from a flawed product with amazingly ambitious scope (to the point where, after the various patches, it's an impressive game to examine even if the actual gameplay gets stale), to something so utterly unambitious that there's no reason to check it out.
I really felt with Dead State, they needed to get a PR monkey out speaking for them, or got someone from Iron Tower with a bit of distance, to do all the post-release interaction, and de-activated their twitter accounts for 6 months.Annie posted some stupid shit when players complained about bugs. Thing is, she has a point in that you can't
make a game with such an ambitious central mechanic (the 'world moves on with time, independently of the player, and in a big way, as in all the quests are time-triggered, instead of the player having the safety of being able to wait and trigger the quests at his/her leisure') as an indie studio without having a fuckload of bugs that will take many many patches post-release to iron out.
Trouble is, she lacked the skills to communicate that point, and like most developers she was too close to it to take criticism, so she said crazy shit like 'I can't believe this guy is giving us bad reviews because of BUGS! Players reviews shouldn't appear on the steam page!!' etc.
They needed someone who wasn't emotionally invested in the game to step up and say "Yes, we realise that there are far more bugs in this game than what we'd like. But that's an unavoidable by-product of such a unique and incredible mechanic, in which the whole gameworld, main questline included, progresses according to the passage of time, not the player. We believe that's critical in a game about survival, and we didn't want to compromise such an important part of our vision by making it yet another game that
pretends to have urgency, while patiently waiting for the player to initiate challenges and his or her convenience. It's simply not possible for a studio of our size to find and remove all of those bugs prior to launch - there are so many different ways that players can progress through our game, that we simply can't predict all of them, and we think that's a wonderful thing. We know that does not make bugs acceptable, and we are committed to hearing your feedback and making this into the bug-free experience that we wish we could have provided at launch. It's not an excuse, but it
is the price of having games so radically different to the AAA alternatives".
Something like that pinned to the top of the game forums would have earnt them a
lot of goodwill.