Alright, since nobody else has mentioned it, I feel obliged to say it given my excitement in the past for this title (as well as for anyone else hoping it's a good SWAT 4/classic R6 experience): the game's probably going to blow or at the very least, VOID Interactive have handled communication so badly that it definitely comes off like it will. As someone who has followed the game as much as possible since paying for Standard edition in hopes of supporting a small dev team since their 2019 singleplayer gameplay pre-order trailer looked promising, it's mostly been downhill since then. VOID essentially started to go radio silent between March 2019 - September 2019 which could be argued as simply wanting to hunker down to develop the game back then. At the very least, by September of 2019, they finally did a new Developer Log, started doing (roughly) monthly newsletters, and uploaded short videos on their channel showing off things like animations, assets, and scenarios of the game (as can be seen from more recent posts here).
Come April 2020 (a couple months before the promised June 2020 demo) and the devs decide to release the PvP portion of the game from NDA temporarily to the public for streaming most likely for more publicity and maybe even take advantage of the Corona situation. The night of the live event started off pretty badly after their online server shit the bed for a couple hours so streamers got frustrated and once the game was finally ready to be played, it was a
fucking mess. Tons of technical issues ranging from unstable servers to in-game issues, quite a few features shown off from the older trailers missing even right down to missing doors so no breaching and entering, and absolutely retarded voice acting which doesn't fit at all with the general setting and tone of what we've seen so far (the most joked one being a SWAT officer sometimes over dramatically saying "I CAN FEEL THEM" for no fucking reason (or maybe it's a RoboCop reference, idk)). Afterwards, VOID decided to make the PvP
public to all people who owned the Alpha version of the game as well as bug fix multiple issues within a matter of days but the damage was more or less already done. People who funded/watched the game were confused why VOID decided to focus on a component that didn't matter anywhere near as much as the singleplayer/co-op content as well as just looking fucking sloppy. People who never knew of the game before looked at it and wrote it off as a shitty Insurgency clone. Unsurprisingly, the release date of the Beta was pushed back in a
newsletter in the middle of June.
A few other noteworthy things to mention:
-This is purely from a friend of mine who opted for the Alpha version of the game which gave him access to the NDA singleplayer so the source of this is basically "dude, trust me," but essentially his theory on why they decided not to open the NDA on the singleplayer content is because of how utterly broken the AI for both enemies and squads are. Enemies awkwardly moving and having their arms flail around while trying to aim while squad mates stacking and entering into a room via conga line style so they all get murdered one by one was commonplace from his experience.
- Eezstreet (the SWAT 4 Elite Force creator the devs picked up as one of the game designers) announced his departure from VOID Interactive on May in frustration as he felt the devs slowly started to throw more and more workloads on him despite simply being a contractor for the game (and compared to other contractors they hired, he was getting a fuckton more work for little to no extra pay). In fact, he finally got to release
v7 of Elite Force in June so good on him and check it out since Elite Force is a fucking excellent mod to SWAT 4.
-They're already planning a
PS5 version of the game when quite frankly, they should be focusing on getting the game finished first.
-VOID Interactive late June decided to give a
coupon for 60% off the $80 upgrade to the Supporter/Alpha edition of the game to people like me who already ordered the Standard Edition. Suffice to say, it just came off looking desperate.
-"faQ" (community manager) left in October of this month. While it is for more generally
personal reasons and gives the devs his best wishes, it's now resulted in the dark age of lack of media information for the game as he was essentially the head of community management and probably resulted in the thing that just happened below.
-Most recently (a few days ago in the literal sense), they announced the game's beta has been pushed back
to June 2021 with zero fan fare, and even without a fucking newsletter of all things. The only reason people realized it was because someone on the official Discord noticed they changed the date on the
"Standard Edition" purchase when it was June 2020 indefinitely until now.
Suffice to say, thank god Xsolla takes goddamn refunds even if its been over a year since a purchase.
At the end of the day, if the devs turn this around by some miracle by final release, I'll gladly eat my own words and pay the full $60 they're proposing once it's out of Early Access/Beta phase. Something tells me this isn't going to be the case though and frankly I am glad to have the opportunity to jump ship at all (especially given the crowdfunding nightmares some of you have had in the past here RPG or not).
tl;dr: The devs have done a fucking atrocious job at keeping up with the community at even a monthly basis at this point, the PvP sections of the game publicly available right now is unpolished, buggy, and not what people want out of this game, next to no new singleplayer footage since 2019, and now the beta has been delayed to June 2021 with the community going out of its way to find out instead of the devs officially telling people.
