I'm not having that. Right now this *new* demo is even worse than the original demo, and this release looks to be a disaster on par with Underworld: Ascendant.
Good Day, sirs.
I'm not saying this is a high quality demo but it is
nowhere near as bad as UA was in its retail (!) version. That game was literally broken with fucked up wall collision, holes in the world that let you drop into an endless void and so on. That
AND the performance was bad. In fact, everything beyond the Underswamp was basically unplayable in v1.0 (especially Titan's Reach). And I know that, because I tortured myself through it. You can read about that fun journey in the UA thread.
Here the only really crucial problems I see are (seemingly random) crashes, performance and maybe AI. Though I'm not completely sure what they wanna do with the latter. AI capabilities often coincide with level design choices (back in the day, Thief illustrated this perfectly, but its true for pretty much any other game, from System Shock to Uncharted). Since level design is almost a 1:1 copy from the original System Shock, I'm not sure where they wanna go with this.
Either way, there are a couple issues even with the most basic AI perception in this demo and that definitely needs to be fixed. I stood in front of a mutant and it wouldn't attack me. Stuff like that really breaks immersion. They gotta adress that. My assumption here is that they are using the basic UE4 AI perception system, which isn't properly exposed to the blueprint level and has an update problem (in other words, the AI "perceives" you, but doesn't react, because the player is e.g., too far away, and when the player then approaches the AI the perception system doesn't update (because it already "saw" you) and re-trigger the proper reaction-sequences -> therefore, no reaction/no attack/etc - this is a very common problem I've seen a couple times, but it can be fixed)
Performance is this demo's main issue. That's a really bad one and they have to do something about that. Whatever the reason may be. The fact that it starts lagging 30 minutes in suggests that this is a clean-up problem (like spawned/killed AI isn't properly removed and keeps running through its routines). That, or some sorta memory leak. But this can be debugged with UE4s profiler front end. Unless its in customly made components.
The crashes are weird. I've had one on starting a new game, but only once. No idea what that could be.
The rest - of what I saw - is really just due to laziness (or tight schedules) and could be fixed with proper polish.
Like the healing animation, the strange textures (which I hope are engine scaled - otherwise that's gonna be a problem), some funky animations, the phaser thingy that isn't attached properly to the cyborgs hand etc. etc. Missing content like implants is to be expected in an alpha demo.
The only thing that really puzzles me is the lack of cyberspace. Cyberspace was such a simple mini-game in the original, setting up the system for it is relatively easy. Even for a hobby programmer. It's basically just a free floating camera shooting different types of ammo at almost static enemies in a mostly untextured environment.
I'm really not trying to play devil's advocate here, but a lot of these things can be relatively quickly adressed.
If they have their content pipeline down they can probably do a release in September 2020. November maybe if they need extra time (which is normally the case). System Shock 2 was made in like 9 months.
So all in all:
Meh....
It has its fair share of problems, but for an alpha (and I mean a real alpha, not a "marketing" alpha) these issues don't seem too dramatic. Of course they gotta get their shit together. Nightdive has been moving in circles for a while now and the only competent move since the original demo was the switch from Unity to Unreal.
With that in mind, we gotta see how they handle the situation - but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
At least - in comparison to UA - they (now) have a relatively clear idea where they wanna go with this project.
UA in its retail version still didn't really know what kinda game it wanted to be. Mind that. That was deadly for the whole project.
