I was pissed off every time I searched for VOs update and found all things still the same. Imagine Its been several years already. Developers are potentially good but its potential are not released. Game is amazing especially the physics and the idea in general, but graphics, sounds, effects and all are ughhhhh. Grr Im pissed off. Im tired of listening too much active feedbacks from developers. if incarnate read this dont remove my account. Peace.

Here is a list of the newsletters that have focused on the major updates that have occured. We also don't get to see some of the server-side work that goes on, or any of the less "development" sides of running a business that Incarnate has to handle.

For two developers, the amount of things that get done are incredible. Its just, those things you've pointed out (graphics, sounds, and effects) aren't primary focuses compared to what a lot of the *current* direction appears to be focused on - shoring up the new player experience and making the game more accessible, something like a foundation as far as how players interact with the game goes.

I'll do my best to give you an answer that encompasses as much of the reality as I can.

I will note that we haven't pushed any of our updates to News in a few months. So, if that's what you're trying to read.. that's not an accurate reflection of the number of updates and changes (visible in the client patch-log). But.. that all being said..

1) It can be arduous to maintain a game like this one. Now, I use the word "maintain" literally: I don't mean "improving" or "advancing" or "expanding" or otherwise adding into the game. I literally mean maintaining the game exactly as it is.

This is arduous because the rest of the world is constantly in motion:

(This is not intended to be a complaint-fest, but I suspect if I don't enumerate some examples of what I mean, I won't be conveying the extent of the issue)

- Legislation gets passed somewhere and you have to update something so you don't get sued or fined, because you run an international online game. So now, every government on earth believes they should get to determine what you do. No normalized world standards, no global treaties, just a massive free-form potpourri of well-intentioned-but-flawed legal issues being prosecuted by 195 unique countries (and then also different US states).

- New drivers are released for a device, now a bunch of your players are suddenly crashing, and you have to figure out a workaround, because we aren't a big enough game to cause big companies to ship super-fast driver updates.

- One of your ISPs, a gigantic global fiber provider, keeps having fiber cuts, and can't seem to maintain a stable network; interrupting your development and ability to ship releases, while sometimes forcing emergency server deployment.

- Services you depend on keep getting worse, or breaking entirely, or becoming incredibly expensive. We've had this happen.. a lot. Email providers that send our newsletter suddenly increasing their prices 10x. Google Login suddenly not working for 40% of new players, worldwide. ReCaptcha being taken over by Google, who drops the free tier to 1% of what it was, and increases fees.

- Platforms issue mandatory changes to APIs, meaning someone has to re-write code to do the same thing the game has done for decades, because someone decided that forcing all developers to make arbitrary and largely pointless updates is "good" for software.

- So on and so forth.. server administration and security maintenance, development environment maintenance, all kinds of things.. and this is without even getting into tasks directly related to the game's live-ops, like player community oversight, ticket responses, posting explanations on forums..

So, basically.. to do nothing at all to the game, just to maintain a stable service, is still a non-trivial amount of effort. Sometimes more than I would like to admit.

I usually have to deal with something every week. This doesn't mean our development is stalled every week, or anything like that, but it does mean there's a lot of "stuff" that has to be handled and tracked.

2) VO is a different game to different people. So, what you might think is critically important and "obviously" what the game needs.. will be totally met by disagreement from others in the community.

For example, you think the graphics are a problem. I get it, I understand why. But, for a lot of people playing on lower-end computers and devices, what they actually want to see is more server-side content: New economy, more complex NPCs and pirates, new variants of ships to work on and manufacture, etc. Because new-graphics, while shiny and awesome, don't actually change underlying gameplay.

So, while you're personally frustrated because you believe "all things [are] still the same", you aren't actually correct.. some things have been changing, but perhaps not all the things that you happen to think are best.

And that's not a problem that I can really "fix". I can try to explain things to people with a Game Development Direction thread, and periodically sending out Newsletters, but ultimately I have found that "People Want What They Want" and they are often not-understanding of not getting what they want.

I don't really have a solution there. I'm obviously pretty resource limited, and trying to operate a big and complicated game. I don't claim all my choices are the best, or that I do the best job of.. well.. anything, frankly.

That said, we are trying to move forward and accomplish major goals, like:

- Slowly rolling out a completely new user interface (which is.. really difficult.. beyond the scope of this post).
- Localizing the 350,000-word game into 19 additional languages.
- Figuring out the best process for completely re-working the entire game universe.
- Re-structuring how the game server fundamentally works internally.
- Slowly reworking the new user experience and tutorials to be a lot smoother (platform and input specific).
- Building the Persistent Event Mission system and other tools that will allow us to build "MOAR FUN" into the game more quickly and easily.
- Creating tools to manage Administrative issues (like support tickets and Reports) more quickly and easily, so they don't require so much developer time, letting us put more energy into the actual game.

So on and so forth.

None of that sounds very sexy. It's not like "Look at the new 50 million polygon capship! Buy it now in advance!". I'm viscerally aware of what people would actually.. like to see.

But, by every measure of every lesson I've learned from almost 30 years of operating an MMO game studio.. that new capship graphic isn't actually what we need the most. I mean, I want that too (and we have spent time on such things, in the past year), but, I have "other fish to fry" that are more mission-critical overall.

I hope that helps, I'm genuinely sorry you're frustrated.

But, for whatever it's worth, you're never going to be as frustrated about VO development challenges as I am. No one feels the time and the weight and the burden like the team rolling the boulder up the hill, and periodically watching it slip and go backwards and then continuing to push it back up.

So, I empathize. But, I have to do what I think is right.. for everyone. For you, for our game's community in general, for my coworkers, etc. Every day I'm trying to figure that out the best that I can, and keep us on some kind of course, even if it doesn't always seem to go quite where I hope.

From a simple man trying his best to leave something valuable in this world to another just like him.
My sincerest respect to you, Incarnate, and thank you for your efforts.

I've dicked around with enough C to know that building large projects nevermind a whole ass game engine with networking; tied to a website/billing system... backend databases that are probably upwards of terabytes if not more for a slew of shit whilst supporting... at least 5 different distinct platforms that have wildly different architectures and input methods is... one hell of a fucking feat.

As far as the game looking dated; that's mostly a result of old assets that were drawn 20+ years ago; the game engine can scale exceptionally well given it has adequate hardware at it's disposal.

On top of that you have all the additional bullshit that comes with complying with software distributors that don't really give half a flying fuck about a small game like vo; when you pay for vo through other platforms they happily take a significant cut of the money and give back sweet-fuck all - vo was built right when software distribution over the internet started to become commercialized as such vo runs on it's own and doesn't technically need google play - it's just that google's decided to stop giving a fuck about devs and end users and want to squeeze every penny out of it's money printing machine before future antitrust lawsuits skin them alive.

All that to say; whilst all that shit might sound like complaints these are real fucking problems (particularly the legal shit between countries/and giant tech companies)

Perhaps, VO just needs to be kept as-is.

Personally, I don't care about better graphics or sound effects, just like chess players probably don't care about how fancy the figurines are.

What matters, is the devs are maintaining it well despite all the above mentioned difficulties - 20 years and still going.

I am not against new graphics - I just don't see a point in spending dev time on something the players will quickly get used to.

There is just way too many games nowadays competing for the limited pool of players who are after a quick dopamine fix. It just doesn't work like that with most MMOs.

To devs, you guys are doing better than most other larger game studios.

Well to the Devs, Im sorry to express my frustrations. My frustrations are evidence of how I love your game VO. Infact 6 yrs ago I said to myself, "I will go to the VO devs and invest my money to throttle the development". But thats not lifes priority now. VO is the best game to be honest, it is the only game I quit and back again. Its like a true love. I even dreamed of heaven as VO, like when I die I hope there is a real VO in heaven where we play in real. Again, frustration is temporary and true love is forever. I love you devs, and all. Muahh

"Figuring out the best process for completely re-working the entire game universe."

When you said this, incarnate, do you mind explaining what you mean in like 1-2 sentences?

When you said this, incarnate, do you mind explaining what you mean in like 1-2 sentences?

It's difficult to meet your two-sentence goal. But, you can read the paragraph from the Game Development Direction sticky:

"Universe Redux - A very long-standing project. The Unknown System is a testbed, but I'm waiting on renderer improvements before we can go at this more intensely. Also bears directly on the "Server Scalability" topic above: NPC pathfinding is simpler with 100 asteroids, as opposed to a million asteroids, or 100,000 pieces of debris that may dynamically move around."

We have a variety of test sectors, and one test-system (the "Unknown System"), that are intended to see how things work using dynamically-movable objects, along with a much higher density of objects. "Objects" can mean practically anything, this could be huge numbers of asteroids, or there are a couple of sectors in the Unknown System where upwards of 300 NPCs can aggro on a single player at the same time.

I also reference the change in object density in the next-generation mining RFC:

"As Vendetta Online evolves, it is likely that the next-generation versions of game systems will have much, much higher asteroid densities than those from the "classic" galaxy. Perhaps a million asteroids in a sector, or more?"

So, basically, we're replacing the entire universe with a more complex and high-definition version of the universe we've known. This goes from asteroid fields, to space debris, to station complexity, to NPC behaviour, etc. But, we have to be cautious in doing so, as we don't want to seriously degrade the performance for people on mobile and VR.

When I reference "process", I mean we have to roll it out into the production game in a way that doesn't break the game, and allows us to test things and make sure they're stable and performant. Releasing something into an online service, while maintaining service availability, is considerably harder than just "making a completely new game", with new requirements and expectations.

This is an excruciatingly longstanding project, that I've been talking about for many years, but it's also a.. really big undertaking.

Thank you for your reply and providing more than I asked for. Appreciate you and all the hard work you do <3

As someone who has been following the game for... oh dear, I really didn't want to do that math, many years... and has been doing so passively since I last played the game... actually I didn't want to do that math either, years ago... this thread has been really interesting. I appreciate the writeup. On the other hand, I'm sorry you feel the need to keep defending yourself.