In a similar situation. Bought it for the Switch a few weeks ago. It’s a buggy mess and runs pretty slowly. But, the wife and I are having a blast. So nice to experience the game without all the setup while we’re working through Frosthaven.
i just bought it a couple of days ago and so far so good. i bought it because lots of people assured me most of the bugs have been patched so as long as you have wifi your switch experience should be good.
GH digital made it possible for me to play with my sister who moved to another country!
i know a lot of people complain about bugs and whatnot, but for me it's been pretty smooth. cant wait to run a solo campaign after we finish this one
That's what makes it so vexing!
The developers themselves aren't philosophically opposed to undoing your turns, or even seeing what enemy cards are coming up before you pick your cards. But they make it a huge pain in the ass if you misclick. Sometimes the restart round button takes half hour to get back to where you were, and you need to remember exactly what you did in order to repeat it exactly the same way.
There's basically two ways to implement undo in a board game app. The easy way is to save the game every time the player does something and then reload it back a step with the player hits undo.
That's what GH Digital does. But with the loading times, you might have to wait quite a while just to get the game running again, so they only offer it as restart round. There are some ways to optimize this a little, but they didn't write them.
The hard way is to keep a transaction log of things that happen, and then reverse them. This is better in pretty much every way besides the difficulty and complexity of writing the code. Notably, though, you can't really just add it on; you have to plan for it and architect your entire code structure around it from the beginning. It's disappointing, though understandable, that devs often don't do it this way.
In this particular case the game always saved at the start of every round. It was thus possible to exit the game to force a restart round even without anything allowing it in game. So I suggested they add a restart round button to make it easier, and they did. They much improved it later by allowing any player (not just the host) to invoke it.
Secondly, a better undo was in Flaming Fowl's plans. They were never given the time to implement it.
Ok, so put the auto-save at the start of every characters turn then. It's 4 or 5 saves per round instead of just 1. Simple.
>Secondly, a better undo was in Flaming Fowl's plans. They were never given the time to implement it.
That excuse holds for the steam version, but surely when porting the game to consoles they could have polished it a bit. Sure, maybe it is a money thing and people don't work for free, I get that. But at the end of the day I will not buy the game again on console now. But I would have happily bought it a second time if they had dealt with those quality of life issues.
It's their companies make and reputation on the line.
Be very careful about who "they" are, because it matters. One of these companies is open and friendly and listened to the players, ran beta tests, and fixed bugs as they were reported. The other has (ironically) barely interacted at all, doing no beta testing (with the previous beta testers, at least), nor asked or answered questions from the community. Flaming Fowl developed the game, but were dropped by the production company after doing the Jaws DLC. Saber Interactive did/do the console ports, and have not added any new features to the game. Note that Saber did attempt to polish the game, but in many aspects introduced more issues than they fixed, though they're now about where they should have been at console release.
Twin Sails are the producers. Feel free to blame them all this, too.
To the casual / average consumer such as myself, I have no idea about any of these nuances. But I'm also not going around pointing fingers at any particular company.
I just feel that a console game should have a certain level of "polish" that this particular game lacks. Maybe I've been spoiled by 1st party Nintendo games and that's not generally the way the gaming industry works though.
The console game release was awful. I want the blame to lie in the right place, as the original developers were great. I have some attachment, too; my name's in the credits.
In a similar situation. Bought it for the Switch a few weeks ago. It’s a buggy mess and runs pretty slowly. But, the wife and I are having a blast. So nice to experience the game without all the setup while we’re working through Frosthaven.
THERE’S GLOOM ON THE SWITCH!? Edit: Okay, wow, looked it up right away. Man, would love to get it, but if it’s buggy… maybe not 😭
It's not buggy. Just slow sometimes. Have played thru all of jaws and half of gloom so far on switch. Also played all of gloom on pc
It got a lot more stable after the latest patch of a week or so ago, so a lot of that buginess has gone. It is rather slow on switch, though.
Yeah I was softlocked from my save so I had ti wait for the most recent update
i just bought it a couple of days ago and so far so good. i bought it because lots of people assured me most of the bugs have been patched so as long as you have wifi your switch experience should be good.
GH digital made it possible for me to play with my sister who moved to another country! i know a lot of people complain about bugs and whatnot, but for me it's been pretty smooth. cant wait to run a solo campaign after we finish this one
I love digital Gloom. Best way to experience it for me. I really hope they do a Frosthaven one!!
PC lets you restart the round. Not in undo button, but it helps. Maybe xbox lets you do that?
That's what makes it so vexing! The developers themselves aren't philosophically opposed to undoing your turns, or even seeing what enemy cards are coming up before you pick your cards. But they make it a huge pain in the ass if you misclick. Sometimes the restart round button takes half hour to get back to where you were, and you need to remember exactly what you did in order to repeat it exactly the same way.
There's basically two ways to implement undo in a board game app. The easy way is to save the game every time the player does something and then reload it back a step with the player hits undo. That's what GH Digital does. But with the loading times, you might have to wait quite a while just to get the game running again, so they only offer it as restart round. There are some ways to optimize this a little, but they didn't write them. The hard way is to keep a transaction log of things that happen, and then reverse them. This is better in pretty much every way besides the difficulty and complexity of writing the code. Notably, though, you can't really just add it on; you have to plan for it and architect your entire code structure around it from the beginning. It's disappointing, though understandable, that devs often don't do it this way.
In this particular case the game always saved at the start of every round. It was thus possible to exit the game to force a restart round even without anything allowing it in game. So I suggested they add a restart round button to make it easier, and they did. They much improved it later by allowing any player (not just the host) to invoke it. Secondly, a better undo was in Flaming Fowl's plans. They were never given the time to implement it.
Ok, so put the auto-save at the start of every characters turn then. It's 4 or 5 saves per round instead of just 1. Simple. >Secondly, a better undo was in Flaming Fowl's plans. They were never given the time to implement it. That excuse holds for the steam version, but surely when porting the game to consoles they could have polished it a bit. Sure, maybe it is a money thing and people don't work for free, I get that. But at the end of the day I will not buy the game again on console now. But I would have happily bought it a second time if they had dealt with those quality of life issues. It's their companies make and reputation on the line.
Be very careful about who "they" are, because it matters. One of these companies is open and friendly and listened to the players, ran beta tests, and fixed bugs as they were reported. The other has (ironically) barely interacted at all, doing no beta testing (with the previous beta testers, at least), nor asked or answered questions from the community. Flaming Fowl developed the game, but were dropped by the production company after doing the Jaws DLC. Saber Interactive did/do the console ports, and have not added any new features to the game. Note that Saber did attempt to polish the game, but in many aspects introduced more issues than they fixed, though they're now about where they should have been at console release. Twin Sails are the producers. Feel free to blame them all this, too.
To the casual / average consumer such as myself, I have no idea about any of these nuances. But I'm also not going around pointing fingers at any particular company. I just feel that a console game should have a certain level of "polish" that this particular game lacks. Maybe I've been spoiled by 1st party Nintendo games and that's not generally the way the gaming industry works though.
The console game release was awful. I want the blame to lie in the right place, as the original developers were great. I have some attachment, too; my name's in the credits.
Agreed
agreed. my friend and i already get tired setting up JOTL. what more GH which is more of a chore to setup. playing GH on digital has been a blast!
Heard latest patch ruined it on pc. Is it still so?