Over the last few years there has been a massive decline in the game’s updates. One of the few reasons being the introduction of the Episodes DLC, whos development has going on for more than a year and a half. Now, while I admire iA’s effort, and even the ability to still push out content such as boot camp, summer edition and even implement new waves from the community, this is simply not enough. This boils down to a much bigger problem; the game has totally lost its appeal, and why it was so actractive in the first place. Compared to the standalone episodes, Universe felt like a fresh new experiement, however, its nature remained as such; just an experiemnt. It never had a clear goal other than extending the series’ lifespan, and while it is cool the community has played a major role into its development, there has been a few patterns that are starting to crak the whole player base, starting with the veterans, who are now completely sick of the game; too repetitive and too little incentive to keep playing, for nothing other than griding, competition and multiplayer. Competition is another aspect that falls short, as various modes like Galactic Cup, Daily Challenges and especially League,are the same thing over and over; just there to waste your time to rank points and make others mad, or vice versa. The same goes for the regular gameplay, with too many missions and too combersome mechanics. This leads us to newbies, who might still find the game enjoyale, but it’s only a matter of time before it becomes borign to them too. Once you got a few ships and all the times there is really nothing much to do other than competition and regular missions, which would take you a lifetime to complete and they become repetitive very soon. Quests are another of those things, put there just for the sake of dragging out the pace. I don’t know if you realize, but despite of a few neat things here and there, the whole game missed water from every point, and I’m certanly not the only one who noticed that.
In addition to all of this, iA has not done a good job at managing his own game. Ignopring the possibility of making it open source and fully community driven, which fair enough, I get why, but the way he relized on the community is very picky and at time abusive. Let me explain. Playtesting updates is fine, and at first you’d think implementing waves made by the community is a great thing, however, out of all the ideas for the game thrown out there, this is by fart the most redundent, because there were already too many waves in the game; we did not need a thousends of new ones still. They simply don’t hold a candle compared to lets say a new boss, enemy, weapon, satellite or any other new gameplay element. Yes there has been boot camp, but despite havign a cool new boss, is yet another endless mode, again, so more of the same shit, as if the core game wasn’t endless enough. The summer edition is purely cosmetic, although neat. Then the last updates were focussed entierly on tweaking the DLCs and fixing the latest waves, that’s it. Yes, the gear gimmick was added, but again, while neat it gets old very quickly. The whole game is just stagnating, and on top of that, iA missed the opporunity to do a cool manuver, that would have boosted the DLCs’ value and replayability by a ton; even just making the original ships and HUDs from the episodes as an exclusive reward you get for purchasing the respective DLC and completing its mission in CIU; would added a lot more value, for what was worth it, but haven’t got even that. Color randomizing and paintjobs exporting were feature that should have been there since day 1, and even then they just fall short the again.
All of this is just nitpicking, but there is a fondamental problem with iA himself; relying on the community only when its most conventional. Other than general ideas, feedback and playtesting, translation has been the only thing he got right, but interActing with interAction studios is kind of a challenge. I get the massive influence and the time he puts in the work, but deliberatly not responding some emeils, and worse of all, not being present in the Discord server of your community as frequently as you are on the forum, makes it so much harder to reach. I get it might have been done to filter out people, but being able to talk to the dev only once an update comes, purely for debugging purpose and a few questions, sounds a bit baffling, especially when other solo devs of their game (eg. Geometry Dash) are easly available there and are therefore closer to their community. The server itself was never made official, which is another missed opportunity, especially to promote the game. So once again, only use the community when its most conventinal. Oh speaking of promoting the game, iA’s greatest plan to do so was…GEN…now, on paper it may have sounded cool, but lets face it; CI was never popular to begin with, so posting daily matches that from the outside look all the same, only has a limited effect on the main community, and next to none from the outsiders and forigners of the series. The matches are also picked randomly and whole system is automate, which again, fair enough enough, but it all sounds like a very artificial way to boost the game’s popularity, while still terribly failing at it. Because if the game gains popularity, the fans would do the rest. Rather than this GEN stuff, how about making themed events of some sort? LakeFeperd, solo creator of Spark the Electric Jester, made a speedrunning contest a month after Spark 3’s relase, to promote the game. People would record their speedrun of the game, make a montage and then submit it to Lake, which would then pick up his favorites and rank them, ultimately giving some neat rewards to the winners; simple and effective. There is no way iA couldn’t have come up with something spicy like this, with all the potential that CIU provides, but even that was yet again another exausted short-terms solution that missed the whole point of both the game, its audience and its community.
The last point I want to bring up is the annual Galactic Party, which on paper sounds like a great thing; playing dirctly with iA all the while asking him questions of any kind with its own community. However, there is a ton of things wrong in execution. First off, why should it be an annual thing? I get its a tradition at this point, but why? And its the only time of the year to speak up to iA directly; like a god that decents to earth once in a blue moon to speak up to mortals. Which laches on to the second point; more than a galactic party is nothing more than a chaotic mess, not only for the sheer amount of players, which other than the chaos, overload the server and make it impossible to join for other people if you weren’t fast enough, but the connection is unstable as hell. But that’s not all, as iA is always eager to show us his game dev powers, by spawing whatever he wants, how much he wants, whenver he wants. So forget about a serious play with him and just let your mind abbandon to the chaos, as you blast through millions of bullets and bosses spawned out of no were, all among thousends of players. Yes, it may be fun for some people, but couldn’t it been replaced by something more… concrete? Like, preparing some special missions in which that stuff does appear, but at fixed points mayhaps. And whats the point of gathering all in one location of the map? None. Mmmh…why not to put those special mitions there? So there is an actual point in going there. I have proposed many of these quality of life imporvements to iA, like the ability to also reply key rushes without the key bonus, just to name another one, but they were taken into consideration, as the community got too accomodate with whatever iA decids. I get it’s his game, but given his track record, we should probably demand him to do a little bit more than the bare minimum.
But what holds for the future you may ask? As of now, iA has no plans, other than his usual galactic party at the end of the year, with once again nothing new other than a possible increase to 99 players max, just to test his new connection, so yeah, even more chaos; wanna see how that connection would hold up. There have been a few hints of possible new additions, like police chase mitions and procedural planet missions like in CI5. CI6 has also been spoiled as “it would be mostly based on CIU as the base, especially for thewaves. But that’s not going to happen anytime soon”, so all things left up in the air for the time being; not even iA has a clear roadmap. Even his latest project; UltraVOLT is nothing more than a fun experiment with volumetric shaders and noithing more as of now, and he hasn’t been inclined to work on it because his focus is all on CIU, even though once again, he is not doing even the bare minimum. It all sounds like CIU has been bogged down and is bogging down his own creator and the community around it; it’s undeniable at this point.
That’s why I tell you all: DO NOT GET BY. DO NOT ACCOMODATE WITH MEDIOCRACY. THE SERIES, THE DEVELOPER, AND THE WHOLE FANBASE DESRVES MORE. If CI can’t find the same appeal it had initally with the episodes, the may as well just die. I know it sounds so drastic, especially since iA now gets a living out of it, but it’s exactly for this reasons, that he needs to actually listen to its community, and vice versa, the community should not get by with whatever he does, just because it’s his own series. We have more power than you are left to belive; speak with your actions, send the message clearly: STOP STRUGGLING TO GET BY DOING THE BARE MINIMUM, and I’m going to tell 3 simple things you all can do in order to protest for real and send the message:
1 - Stop playing
Stop wasting your time in game that does not give you any enjoyment no more, only pain and emptyness. Delete your account if you wanna go a step further, if you feel like you’re done with the game in any way.
2 - Don’t buy anything
iA’s only way of income is through your purchase. If you stop buying stuff (again, only to keep playing a game you’re fed up with) he would seriously had to consider giving players a better service.
3 - Do not join the galactic party
This is the only time you have to interact with iA, but don’t give him what he wants or expect; do not partecipate in the galactic party, rather, take the oppotunity to join the voice chat with him, and collectively shouting for questions about his plans; it’s a much better investment than losing your braicells on a chaos madness while he has fun spawing things left and right.
Lastly, shout all your concerns under this post; do not filter or limit yourslelf. This is the opportunity to get out everything you kept inside for all this time. The point is to hopefully get iA to see all of this and get clear understeanding of what the problem is and how it could be fixed if he’s actually willing to listen and improve as a game dev and possibly as a person.
I don’t mean any disrespect to iA; he shaped out childhood, and I appreciate how he got closer to his community and still cared to deliver content about all this time later, but there are far too many issues at this point to let it slide, and if he actually cares about his playerbase something good would come out of this in some way.
I’m also gonna stay, since I’m not unaware, if iA has a problem and he’s seriously strugglig to focus on his work for whatever reason, it should be expressed clearly; he is not forced to keep pushing through because of demans. Again, this is his only way of income, and I get it, but things need to change, and change now. So if he is not willing to commit to the change I’m more than fine with that; if he is burnt out he just needs to tell it. The point of this is that we care for him, but at the same time he has to care about us in the same regard with the same respect, since he does rely entierly on us for his living.
But I know you may ask how is he going to survive if he is done with CIU (to say), welol here’s a thing that could never work: remaster your older games (Piggly, Loco, Island Wars etc.), bundle everything in a collection and put it on Steam; me and all your community would be more than willing to buy that and fully support him, so he can still generate some income while shifting away from CIU for a while, since this point it would be beneficial for everyone.
Hope this all doesn’t sound like I’m targeting iA directly; far from it. I’m just stating the current state of things and shouting loud for the whole community, all in the attempt to actually get results that would lead to great things, as we all got fed up of this stagnation of the series. Hope things will actually move in a better direction after all of this.
I’d side somewhere in the middle — but leaning slightly with the protest side.
.
not blind rage, not blind defense.
