The Walking Dead: Betrayal

What a ♥♥♥♥ show, huh. This was written largely to allow me to process my own thoughts on the game, as well as air out some frustrations I have with it before its gone for good. For those unaware, the game will be permanently pulled from steam in the coming days. This is because the games daily peak players has been around 5 or 6 for the past few months, meaning its almost impossible to play the game. Personally, I'm glad they are giving full refunds as I would have expected them to just take the money and run, so that was a nice surprise. The thing I find truly amazing about this whole situation is how the developers managed to screw this up. This should have been a easy game to make. Take the fantastic core gameplay loop of Project Winter, mix up the gameplay and items a bit, throw on a Walking Dead coat of paint and you have yourself a successful game. Not only can you attract Walking Dead fans, but as its so similar to Project Winter, you can attract that dedicated group of players looking for a new version of their favourite game. It's almost fool proof. Almost. The main problem was the first beta test that took place between the 10th and 14th of August. This beta was only really known to the Project Winter community, which, if successful, would be the bedrock on which Betrayal could built their own player base, so it was really important that they did this right. I cannot describe how catastrophic this beta was. I've played all manner of early access games, and this blew me away with the utter incompetence on display. I spent THREE FULL HOURS playing, and had 1-2 games where nothing major broke. Here a small list of massive game breaking bugs that I can remember off my head: - The voice communication would often break, meaning we could not type, talk, or hear each other. - The regular audio could just break. - Very frequently, trying to load into a game would just fail and kick all players back to the main menu. - Changing the graphics settings would cause a crash. - Sometimes, the frame rate would just keep going lower and lower, until you are trapped in a 1 fps hell hole until the game was over. - Sometimes, the "listen to yourself" button on the microphone would just stay on permanently, meaning you could hear yourself talk until you restarted the game. - Often the zombies wouldn't spawn for some players, but they would for everyone else. At the same time, a couple zombies would spawn but they would be invisible and exclusively attack those who couldn't see the rest of the zombies. And many, many more. If you want to see some of these in action, check out the video I posted on youtube, the channel name is "Project Pybro". Its very clear to me that the developers made no attempt to playtest the game on the patch that went live, because any attempt to play the game would have brought up these issues immediately. These weren't some niche problems that happened solely to me, every single person trying to play this game found it incredibly difficult to play the game. A minimum of 500 people played this beta (that was the steam chart peak), with undoubtedly many more having played it. Those who didn't try it out were likely told that it was a disaster of a game, so they themselves steer cleared of it. In one fell swoop, the developers managed convince an entire community that this game wasn't worth playing at the moment. After this unmitigated disaster, what do the developers decide to do? Just hold another free weekend with most of the bugs fixed and then release it in early access for £15. Because, when you convince your main player base, the people who you need to play your multiplayer game for it to function and attract new players, that your game is not in a playable state, you lock it behind a paywall, so even fewer people will play. Most people didn't bother to pay, and for the few (like me) who did, they didn't play the game because it was devoid of players. They cut the price in half in a bid to attract players, but never did they think to hold a free weekend, a strategy that worked out fairly well for Project Winter. In addition, no advertising was done post early access on the Project Winter discord to try and attract new players. Did the developers do any work on the game in the meantime? No! A couple of bug fixed and balanced tweaks here and there, completely unnecessary additions like adding 4 player lobbies and a matchmaking queue system, and adding the all important shop, because making sure players can purchase some cosmetics with microtransactions takes precedent over actually building a community. Then, after 3 months of adding little of substance and no real effort to build a player base for a game that requires players to be able to play the damn thing, they just delete the game. Above everything else, the thing I want to know is whose fault is it? I've just been saying it was the "developers", but who really caused this? Was it Other Ocean Interactive? Was it Skybound Games? Was it some higher ups at either company who forced them onto an unrealistic schedule? Was it some mix of all of those factors? I really have no clue. I didn't make this to hate on the developers or anything. I can't imagine how miserable it must feel to work on a project for what I have to assume was at least a year, only for it to just be canned one day, never to be spoken of again. It just feels insane seeing this collapse from afar. This could have easily been a moderately successful game if handled properly, and could have likely been saved with free marketing on the Project Winter discord and some free weekends. But instead, it just gets deleted, leaving Project Winter to it inevitable fate of bleeding players until it dies, with no successor to carry on its legacy.