Legends of Pegasus from Novacore Studios and Kalypso Media is now officially out.
Legends of Pegasus is a turn-based space 4X game with real-time battles for the PC. It offers a 40h single-player campaign (something rarely seen in 4X games). It also offers sand-box mode gameplay and multiplayer. LoP features 3 unique races: the Humans, the mechanical X’or and the organic Arthrox. Features also include: modular ship design, slot-based colony management, diplomacy and RTS combat.
You can buy Legends of Pegasus digital on GamersGate, GreenManGaming, GameStop. Steam or directly from Kalypso’s shop. You can buy box at Amazon.
To know more about Legends of Pegasus checkout our first interview and our second round interview with Andre Overhagen, Novacore Studios’ CEO, which we thank for his time and detailed answers.
We have a collection of screenshots here. Hope to have a review for you guys in the next week or so. As always we don’t rush things here as you know.
Hey, can’t complain on lack of space 4X games of lately can we? :)
The Arthrox race
The X’or race
Humans
Demo Walkthrough Trailer (Cam) at GC (2011)
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Really looking forward to your impression here.
Great trailer release yesterday by the way. So many awesome features and interesting looking gameplay. I would encourage anyone who likes the 4x genre to keep an eye on Stardrive and Zerosum Games.
You have them already down below on the comments. Here.
Found a tiny bit of gameplay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hOn75RopYU
I hope the bug reports will change from ‘can’t play/save/load the game’ to ‘found this minor annoyance’ soon.
I could save/load my campaign game. Looks like this save/load issue was solved in today’s patch “- Different savegame fixes and a minor bugfixes”.
The international and German Kalypso forums are not encouraging at all. Lots of bugs and braindead AI according to them. But people complain more often than they extol the values of a game. Has anyone had a chance to try it out at release today and could give impressions? I wasn’t confident enough in the information and trailers provided to preorder.
You have my very first impressions down below. Quick link.
Early indications are not good we’re looking at a SOTSII style paid beta very depressing I knew I should of held out! :(
SOTS II t least worked for most part, this is even worse
Many of us would disagree with you there.
I don’t think it’s worse. I had only a crash on a 1h play session. When SotS2 was released I couldn’t play 2-3 turns (couldn’t play “.”) without bumping into some crash (almost everything crashed on SotS2 – that’s fixed now).
You have my very first impressions on LoP down below. Here’s the quick link.
it tok 5 restarts to even load first map , then it chrashed after first combat,
so it’s way worse on my machine
Oh yes Ive been playing it (if you by playing means getting angry at bugs)
No graphics options (had to force my gtx 570 to use virtual sync for fps limitation in menu’s. as the card was making wierd noises)
Long load times and bug’d save games (not sure about that first part it true
Failure to load a new game and just loads overlapping menus (confirmed that one myself, oh joy)
I can go on
Kalypso had a good track records until now, they must be under pressure as this would normally not happen.
Loads were fine here. They should have fixed that with today’s patch which includes a “save/load fixes” entry on the release note.
Well there are many bugs atm and crashed are frequent in some scenarios, many features are disabled or not there (can’t add CPU players in skirmish; save & reload; video options leave you changing the resolution and nothing else, windows mode may cause a crash…)
There are also bugs that prevent players from progressing the campaign in various ways…
All this aside, LoP is good 4x game. I love the free, open, rather large (=realistic) solar systems
. Gorgeous galaxy map, though I’ve only seen it once in skirmish before the crash. Good planetary economy & production management. Fairly straightforward (minus the drag & drop stuff) but with more than enough depth. Haven’t seen all the stuff yet but it’s looking good as far as depth is concerned.
I dislike the camera. Camera acceleration has never been good in any game or environment. There’s no way to disable this. Controls are decent but no camera focus when double clicking selected units which is supremely annoying as you’ll move back and forth between fleets & planets. Moving between planets is easy, there’s a planet menu available.
Fleets doesn’t mean much from what I’ve seen. There’s no formation, behavior or anything and since hotkeys 1-9 doesn’t on fleets, I found the feature rather useless atm.
Research is fine. Nothing special here, there are a good amount of stuff to research but quite allot of filler techs too.
From the little I’ve seen in the ship design so far, it’s working great and it’s better than most equivalents out there.
Combat is pretty simple but the AI is very buggy and sometimes ignore orders or do something else. basically all you do is right clicking enemy ships, focus fire or not. Then when one of your ships are low hp, you micro them to the back of the fight. The battleground is the entire solar system, so you may use jump drives (they move much faster)which is fairly clumsy at the moment (can’t cancel order and cannot order the ships before they arrive). Overall pretty meh, but still, it’s going to be quite satifying I can imagine due to the great ship design.
Haven’t seen any diplomacy yet (both campaign and skirmish unplayable atm but patches are coming…).
I think the lack of communication with a ship using its jump drive is a feature, not a bug. This way, you have to think about where to send your ships.
Ah, that makes sense.
I had a similar experience as yours, and I subscribe your comment almost entirely although I haven’t played with ship design yet. I’m still going through the campaign’s first mission/tutorial. The trouble is that I can’t see all the missions box text (my resolution is 1280×1024), and then … crash. You have my very first impressions below btw. Here’s a quick link.
I was about to buy this game when there was 15% discount but then I thought about SotS2 release (and the fact that is it still not ‘all clear’) and decided to wait for the first impressions. Well, seems I’d made a good choice. Now let’s wait few month till they reach beta state and maybe in the next 4-6 months it will be gold.
Back to Distant Worlds then :-)
There were many indicators that this was going to be a sword of the stars 2 follower.
media:
-no recent previews.
-no recent gameplay vids from any external sources.
public:
-no access to public testing/demo…etc.
-no real discussion anywhere about its actual gameplay (based on the previous point).
publishing:
-high pre-order price.
-from publisher that has released disappointing/buggy games for at least the past 2 years.
one or two of the above isnt a massive flaw, but when a game has so many indicators it means there could be something wrong.
Hopefully the game is patched decently in the next 6-8 months, so there is at least another decent 4x game worth playing.
The more games released like this in the 4x genre the more likely the genre will have less of a market. As in a new player to 4x today who decided to buy a few 4x games on release and all were missing even menus will give the new player a really bad impression of the 4x gaming market (especially when only a several are released every year).
4X games are never polished when they release and almost always need user feedback, further polishing and a few patches before they get into shape, if you account for a few exceptions of course. 4X games are among the hardest games to develop because they are so complex, featuring many different kinds of game mechanics. I think I speak for many fans that understand how hard these games are to program, and so we are patient, we like to shape a 4X game with our feedback to some extent, but there’s a limit to things.
Civ3, Civ4, Civ5, GalCiv, GalCiv2, SotS, Armada 2526, Star Ruler, Distant Worlds. None of these games started well. SotS2 is a different case because the game was completely unplayable, unfinished and unstable at release. That’s much different. Many of these games are true 4X gems now. As for SotS2 we’ll see, I still have high hopes it will turn into one of the best, I really am.
As for Legends of Pegasus it’s still early to tell but the game clearly needs further polishing. It’s playable, I did play for about an hour or so before it crashed. I have mixed feelings at the moment but it doesn’t seem to be the disaster SotS2 was at release that’s for sure. Let’s see what Novacore and Kalypso manage to do in the next days and weeks.
Looks like another brilliant looking game falls by the waste-side and bursts into flames. Seems like making a decent and solid 4X game is becoming a dying art.
Come on Stardrive, show them how it’s meant to be done!
good post omegaai, i agree
I fell for the Pre-Order but I’m wondering if I should even bother installing it.
It’s worth it, your install I mean. I only played for an hour so but the game is playable and enjoyable at places, although a bit clunky and crashy here and there. Clearly needs further polishing. Give it a try and let us know your thoughts.
Ah man what a let down I was really looking forward to this one. Well back to hoping for better things on Red Shift and StarDrive or finally just succumbing to Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion
Try Distant Worlds:Legends instead. At the moment is the best there is. Quite pricy alright, but worth it. But, if you’re more into gorgeous space battles then Sins:Rebellion is the best. But if you played Trinity already you probably can skip it.
Thank goodness I didnt pre-order this one!!! It was hard to resist but I just had to keep reminding my self of SotS2 and it was easier. Dont know about you all but my gaming budget is very tight so even saving a few bucks is very appealing. Releases like this make me long for the days of Micropose and some of the other old timers.
well lets hope its patched very soon and lives up to what we expect from a good 4x space game!
I also long for the days of Microprose some times, but games were different then, we’re more demanding now. And, everybody wants to overreach. Maybe the bar is too up, the technology too unstable, the budgets too thin or the investors too greedy. Perhaps all of them sometimes.
I refrained from ordering this product because certain previews on other websites, the way they where written,did hint to me that this game might not be ready for prime time by the release date. Seems from initial reports this seems to be so. So now we need to watch and see how quickly the game developers release patches (or updates). To be completely honest gameplay is at least 90 percent importance to me. I can suffer poor graphics if the gameplay and strategy play out well. So far we appear to have reports of a Dumb AI in sandbox mode. Maybe it needs a fair bit of fine tuning. For me as it stands this appears to be another game that has been time crushed to meet a specific launch date…
I might come back to it when the price drops or I read reports that patching has improved the experience.
Thanks everyone for posting the comments. I came very close to purchasing this game today, but after reading everyone’s comments I decided against it. It’s a shame though. I like the idea of the combo of turn based and real time, and also that the game has a single player campaign. In fact it was the lack of single player campaign that is making me hold off on SINS: Rebellion despite that game’s good reviews. Oh well, guess I’ll save my 4X space money for Slitherine’s upcoming Alpha Centauri clone ‘Pandora’.
Sins: Rebellion is great for a Sins newcomer. For a veteran player that played Trinity not that much, at least for the price Stardock asks for it.
Yea, let’s hope Pandora comes out at least as good as Alpha Centauri, that would be a major success.
Ok, first hour or so playing the campaign.
It was fairly easy to adapt to the mouse controls. You can move around fairly quickly, rotate your view and zoom-in and out. We could have options to adjust zoom speed but it was quite alright.
The system view looks nice. Planets are well rendered and you get a good feeling of being in space.
One thing I noticed immediately was how hard it was to create ship groups or fleets. It was like the game was forgetting the groups or I was not using the fleet UI correctly. That part of the UI seems to be a bit clunky still. Anyway it was tough at times to divide ships into fleets and use them to defend two separate positions.
I couldn’t understand also how to repair ships using my repair base. I clicked repair, then on the ship, but then nothing happened. I guess the ship needed the repairs but quite frankly I don’t yet know what the green, red and blue bars mean. I guess HP, armor and shields perhaps?
Colony management feels nice after you absorb all the information available. I didn’t understand all of it as there are no tooltips available but construction was fairly easy to learn and the economy system basics also easy to understand.
Research seems straightforward but there’s some clunkiness there too as I didn’t understand the tech-tree organization.
The worst part is that I’m having problems with my 1280×1024 resolution. Part of the mission window is not visible, so, unfortunately, I’m having difficulties understanding what I need to do in the campaign. I have to guess part of the text, I hope that gets fixed very soon.
One thing I didn’t like was that ship orders have no ETA on them, so you don’t know how many turns it takes for them to reach some place. So far they’re taking only 1 turn to reach a location but I found the ETA-lacking quite odd.
Combat starts when hostiles arrive or are near. You immediately jump to “combat mode” and everything happens in real-time. You can’t access your planets while in battle. Combat is enjoyable enough but I didn’t found the ship graphics particularly great. You select, point and click and that’s pretty much it. But, some ships do have special powers that you can use although the icons to activate them are quite small and hard to pick. When the battle ends you return automatically to turn-based mode again and you can resume your colony management and ship orders.
Music is good. Reminded me of the Alien movies kind of tone. Dark, cold, space.
Then I had a crash when I pressed F4 which I think it’s the fleet tab function, or is it diplomacy? And that was it for now.
I had no problem saving/loading as some have reported. That seems to be fixed now judging from today’s patch release notes.
I enjoyed some bits of the experience but it’s clear that the game is still a bit rough on the edges. Needs patches to further refine the UI, provide more tooltips and a more usable and robust fleet and group creation system. It needs also to adjust better the resolutions. At least here I can’t see all the text.
I only played for an hour or so on the campaign, so it’s too soon to conclude anything definite. I tried the sand-box mode (skirmish?) but I couldn’t choose more than one AI player to fight against. Was I doing something wrong?
This is it for now. Will play more through the weekend and will provide you with more info in the coming days.
Adam, your guardedly optimistic first impressions lead me to believe that I may not want to write Pegasus off just yet. Anyway, I look forward to your full review.
I always try my best to see both sides of the coin John, the good and bad in things. Over-reacting leads you no where. Blind hope isn’t desirable either.
I think LoP is “reviewable”, something that SotS2 (just for the sake of example) really wasn’t at release. I see no point in reviewing “games” that crash every 5 minutes. That would be like: “Game crashes like crazy and is unplayable”. A one sentence review with a 1.0 score. What’s the point in that? SotS2 people came out and said “sorry folks, bad call, wait a few more months and here’s a freebie (SotS Complete Collection)”. No point in reviewing a bad call when it’s public that the thing isn’t finished. Here I think it’s a different case, but I may be wrong of course.
They limited the number of players in sandbox to 2 for now becasue the game can’t handle more at the moment, as I understand it. This should be changed in some future patch.
Correction: The limit is 1 AI player, the number of players is back to 8. But as has been said before, the AI is pretty helpless.
I too played about an hour thus far of the campaign and agree with your assessment. The biggest issues for me have been:
The game took an abnormally long time to start the campaign after selecting it. Probably 1 to 2 minutes of looking at a black screen and occasionally a very quick image flashing by or some audio glitches. Once it got past this the intro cinematic worked fine.
Camera that doesn’t respond as I’d expect. Sometimes simply rotating changes my camera view to some far off distant area of space for no apparent reason.
Abilities that don’t always seem to work, or at least work in a way that isn’t obvious to me. I think it’s left click on the ability and then left click somewhere to use them, but I don’t always get feedback indicating I’ve done this correctly. The warp ability as I understand it allows ships to quickly jump across the map, as long as the area you try to use it in shows up with a green icon after clicking the ability, but either it’s not working or even at warp speed some of these ships are quite slow.
Repair doesn’t seem very straightforward. It seems my repair station can repair 1 ship per turn outside of combat. I’m not sure in-combat. Out of combat I once successfully performed a repair using one of my ship’s repair abilities. I tried left click repair from ability menu, left click damaged ship, then end turn, but that didn’t work. Next I tried selecting the repair ship, then left click near the damaged ship, then end turn. This put my ship next to the damaged ship. On the second turn I performed the same steps as above, left click repair ability, left click damaged ship, end turn. This time it repaired the ship. It seems the game won’t automatically move a ship into a position where it can actually perform the repair on its own. It takes two turns and manual intervention.
Also, I was unable to move the Mykonos ship after awhile. It still has the move ability, but refuses to move. I’m not sure if it has some kind of engine damage, if this is a story related issue, or it’s a bug.
I did not personally experience any crashes. I agree that it seems unpolished. It is nowhere near as bad as the SOTS2 in my opinion, and I was a day 1 player of both games. The tutorial has worked for me (and SOTS2 didn’t even have a tutorial at all upon release), and the game campaign at least seems playable.
Well… don’t seem to be able to load my save. When I click load save, it takes me back to the campaign select menu instead of into my campaign game. I tried clicking start from the menu after trying to load my game, but after waiting several minutes at the black screen nothing seemed to happen. I’m going to let this simmer for a bit and wait for some more patches. Looking forward to your continued impressions/review Adam!
I’m not sure if this works, but some people recommend this:
1) try to load
2) if it does not load, alt-tab out of the game and then back in
3) if still no change after a few seconds, repeat step 2
Hope the crash-when-alt-tab is fixed though…
If you have a ship in warp when combat finishes that ship becomes uncontrollable. Good times. Apparently if you save and reload (assuming you can get your reload to work) it supposedly fixes it. Sometimes the ship will complete the warp in the next combat and you’ll get control back but I had at least one ship that remained uncontrollable forever. I didn’t try reloading though as I was afraid that wouldn’t work and I’d have to replay the whole scenario.
Thanks for the quick review, Adam. Even though your experience was mixed, your impressions seemed more positive than most I’ve read.
The game certainly sounds like it was shipped before it was finished, a common complaint lately. We appreciate your doing the grunt work of playing the game in this state so we don’t have to!
You’re welcome. My pleasure also. I will probably write a more detailed first impressions first in the next days, and only then a review as I see Novacore and Kalypso have some homework to do in the next days and weeks. I mean, load/saves were fixed at release time, so I see no point in reviewing something that will get deprecated 5 minutes after being published. Let’s wait for the dust to settle.
Don’t waste your time with this game. It is not even close to being worth the price they are asking. It feels like an extremely early beta or maybe even alpha version of a game.
The camera controls are clunky, unresponsive, and unintuitive. For example, I had some sort of bug when trying to zoom in and out. It would zoom out fine then I try to zoom in and it zooms in a bit, then randomly starts zooming out and moving the view in a random direction (towards the bottom right for example like I placed my mouse at the bottom right of the screen, and remember I am only using the mouse wheel to try and zoom in). I could not get this fixed, I closed the game and restarted the campaign since I figured I missed a lot of information.
Tutorial is garbage for the most part. The parts it does explain sure, it’s fine, but it leaves out a lot of information as well that is pretty critical to new players. The repair dock, I have no clue how this damn thing works. I tried clicking on it and then moving the wrench to a ship, ended turn, nothing happened. I tried moving a ship to the repair dock, ended turn, nothing happened. Moved a ship near the repair dock, clicked on the repair button and hovered over the damaged ship, ended turn, nothing happened. Also note it never tells you how, just “repair damaged ships with the repair dock”
The warp function for ships to move faster. I don’t understand why it will work in some places and wont in others. I don’t see any difference and the game never really explains or gives you any feedback on why you can’t warp in a specific location sometimes and other times you can.
Text is cut off on the right side of the screen so I’m not sure how much information I’m missing either. I tried multiple resolutions and aspect ratios and none of them fix the text being cut off.
I didn’t even get past the tutorial so take this little review however you want. I really want to get into a fun and user friendly space game and lately all of the ones being released have been a huge disappointment to me (including endless space but I still have hope that it might turn into something better, but I will never get over how random the battles feel to me).
I wanted to get into this game more so I can see all the cool features like planets terraforming or changing in various ways, building ships, etc… but in it’s current state it is just not playable for me. I don’t know how they are going to save this game if they plan to.
I’m mostly pointing out all the negatives, there are some good aspects (graphically it’s pretty cool, I’m sure the 40 hour long campaign is nice (or it could be awful), what little experience I have with the battles I feel are better than endless space) but at this point, it’s no where near worth the money. Not even close.
here is a quick review i haven’t played the campaign but have been trying out skirmish.
UNPLAYABLE
Unplayable because it is buggy
or
unplayable because it has no features, badly designed, wrong concept, lack of depth?
The first can be addressed by patches later, the second is a fatal problem.
(trailers always lie, I used to ignore them, they show nothing from the game apart from short animations and marvelous marketing texts)
The first one. I Reaaaally hope they can fix the critical bugs and fix skirmish % multiplayer…
it randomly crashes when you try designing ships, it randomly crashes at end of combat
both
Played through the first part of the campaign earlier today. I initially thought it had crashed due to how long it took after I clicked campaign though.
The turn based colony management part seemed solid enough, but the real time part seemed a bit unpolished – and the campaign is not the best tutorial, for a start it mentions nothing about research, you could easily not do any if you waited for the game to tell you when to start.
I also had issues with the repair yard – I worked out eventually that a ship whose movement line pointed somewhere near it and didn’t end in a circle would move there next turn and repair – but it was an unecessary annoyance.
Unfortunately my campaign ended prematurely when the game crashed. Since the autosave won’t load I’ll have to start again from the beginning. I might wait until it gets a patch.
The game needs a little polish but it still has promise.
this news are very bad…i bought legends of pegasus thinking that the game will be better than the rest but in the kalypso forum the users is reporting many bugs…
i am downloading the game i hope novacore fix thats problems fast but this is not a good starting point
can we even trust the developer to fix it,
the other Kalypso game new “Jagged Aliance” is still a mess, and the developers are making bunch of DLC and expansion instead of fixing the game
On a completely unrelated note, in my disappointment I bought sins of a solar empire: rebellion and came to the conclusion, that it is still as good of a game as trinity was.
Sad thing about LoP. A lot better off than SOTS2 in a few ways a lot worse in others. Unlike SOTS2, they do not have a SOTS prime to fall back on for reference in how they can pull things together. Many of us decided to stick with SOTS2 because of how good a game SOTS prime was.
I just do not see that happening with LoP. It is not even the bugs, it is the horrible UI design. I swear they purposefully went out of their way to ignore EVERY damn conventional shortcut or UI solution out there that has been in use in the past decade, just so the player will have to re-learn the UI from scratch.
Inconsistent, unfriendly, hard to use. After playing it for half an hour, I was still fighting with basic stuff like how you can leave a planet screen.
Some of the developers must have misread the design document, where it said: “the game will feature a challenging AI”, he must have seen: “the game will feature a challenging UI” instead. Minor mistake, makes a helluva difference.
It seems that nobody gets beyond the first hour of gameplay. Don’t know if there is a major blocker there or if that’s just the average time to overwhelming frustration.
The Kalypso guy in the german forum says, they are surprised by the bad launch and will offer a gift next week as compensation (german post: http://forum.kalypsomedia.com/showthread.php?tid=15868). Not sure if I believe that since a patch seems to have been already in the making when the game was released. On the other hand, they paid an external group for testing which is not as effective as a public alpha/beta.
There could be an other patch in the next 12 hours.
Correction: Now they say the next patch comes probably tomorrow.
I made it to my sixth hour of gaming. Fun.
I like how you can put xeno teams on ships, then drag them to planets. I think that’s a great idea, actually.
Thanks to all you guys for reviews they were very helpful
The 90+ achievements looked suspicious, but I too fell for the hype 2 hours before release…
The UI text is way too small. I played about a hour before the first crash, after loading the autosave, I was stuck due a missing waypoint indicator. (At least they have XML save format.) And it took me 10 minutes figure out how to produce ships. That drag&drop is a bit overused and under-explained.
The ships sometimes don’t attack a target in turn mode, I need to move to the spot to start the battle. No multiple autosaves for the last N turns. So far I think the game could have gone for full real time (with pause) instead of turn based. Stats are ample but unexplained. (ES did a better job in this matter. Still, a bit better than Gemini Wars in many ways.)
Two observations so far: indies have about the same disappointment factor as regular devs, going 3D takes valuable resources away from other game aspect developments.
I don’t think it’s an issue of 3d taking time and resources from other aspects of development. I think it’s more a matter of the developers not appreciating the extent to which they would need to test and polish the game before release, e.g. testing the game of different platforms, etc. That’s indirectly related to 3d, but none of the bugs I’ve experienced have been graphics related.
I made it into the second part of the first campaign but it seems extremely poorly designed. You’re told to build up forces in a new solar system and given a new colony. However, it takes many many turns to build up to the point where you can crank out ships at a decent rate. If you just focus on ships you’ll be screwed once you finish that objective.
In the meantime, the enemy pops in about every 8 turns with three little ships that your forces easily devastate, then you repair while your colony lumbers on. Once you finish that objective, you have to build two mining posts, again with the three annoying attack ships that stand no chance. After that, all of the sudden the enemy jumps up to 6+ cruisers (larger than your three starting destroyers) and basically wipes you out.
The only way to get past it, I beleve, is to build up your colony and tech so you can crank out larger ships pretty quickly (for reference, a frigate takes 13 turns with 4 factories on the available red squares). If you try to upgrade to the larger factory building, those cost 300 maintenance per building and you won’t have the population/income to sustain more than one. The scenario also assumes you won’t expand to the other two available planets before those cruisers arrive.
I finally got tired of the annoying repetitive combat every 8 turns or so and shelved it last night. Extremely badly designed scenario.
I actually laughed IRL how bad that mission was. I’ve put aside the game for now.
Argh !! What a waste of my money.
Patch promises for tomorrow:
– less crashing
– save/load fixes
– no more ships stuck in warp
– escaping through stargates while in battle
– combat improvements (?)
– AI improvements
– UI improvements
– fixes issues where plot missions could not be completed (don’t know if this includes balancing)
While I’m not too confident that all of this will really be fixed tomorrow, it is nice to see that they are working on it. I really want to know, how the game is once it is done.
It makes you wonder – if they could churn out a patch that fast based on feedback…why didn’t they have some sort of open test phase?
It’s tomorrow and the patch is nowhere to be seen. It’s almost midnight in Germany now, where the developers are. Oh well, I didn’t expect any path done this quickly to be good or resolve many issues (without introducing many more). They’ve already demonstrated that they’re extremely bad at testing.
Well, so much for “churning out a patch that fast”!
I don’t know what else to say besides it sounds like they weren’t ready and testing software generally isn’t very difficult – it is time consuming.
well Im holding my $$ for now but still have hope for a good finished game once all the patches come out. Fingers crossed!
thanks for the reviews guys please keep us cosiouse people up to date on the patches….. Adam great review was nice to read a post that did just bash a poor launch but gave the good and that bad….. yous and a couple of others(soki,randomblue) are what give me hope for a fun finished game
All of these reviews made me come to my senses to not buy the game, at least not at this ridiculous price.
I’m afraid they dug this hole themselves. If they had released more information on the game mechanics and allowed random individuals or people who pre-ordered the game to test it in a public/private beta, I’m sure quite a few of these bugs would be fixed by now. In fact, how many people have even pre ordered or bought LoP? I’m sure the revenue this game title made so far has been quite small because of the doubt the development team seeded in everyones’ mind.
However, if it took them THIS long to get it in a playable state, then it seems like to me the team has more bigger problems than just the bugs. In that case, would it even be worth it to buy it after they patched it up? Maybe once they do release the expansion pack (all of the patches), maybe a formal review of the game can be made? This seems like a half a title that was rushed into a release.
I’ve played the game into Chapter 2 of the Human Arc.
Impressions thus far…
Game is unplayable in this state..too many gameplay / bug issues to list here but anyone can go the the Kalypso forums and read the litany.
Graphics are amaturish at best, think 1998 space game graphics.. not 2012, the game “Homeworld” had far better graphics and control and how may years has that been out? Mouse cursor is nearly uncontrollable and suffers as well from “dead” moments when it does not seem to read at all, usually happens when you need it the most.
For the asking price of 35+ dollars / euros it is a no buy, to be honest even at $15 it’s a no buy simply due to the massive number of problems that is in the software.
I hope that helps, I did try to be objective in my comments and fair in my assesment of the game.
Cheers
I”m really sorry to hear all the bad news concerning this game. I would venture a guess that this is what happens when project managers and accountants run the show rather than the game developers. As a wise man in corporate America once wrote: “The bitter taste of poor quality lingers long after the sweetness of meeting the schedule has been forgotten.”
Actually, a lack of project managers would be more to the point, and clearly a lack of a knowledgeable testing team. Accountants, well, that’s another thing altogether. Without a project manager to steer the team you have trouble with a capital T.
Leelu, IMHO project managers are among that ‘useless third of humanity’ that scifi writer Douglas Adams mentioned in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; the useless middlemen between the great thinkers/leaders and the people who actually do the real work. When I left a major US bank several years ago, there were more project managers in our division than there were developers. What’s wrong with this picture? No wonder the US economy is in such dire straits.
All the elements of a turkey were here:
– Small publisher and smaller studio releasing first game.
– Promises of unique content in a neglected genre.
– Repeated delays of the release date.
– No public alpha, nor public or closed beta testing.
– No game play videos.
– No review copies released to gaming media.
– No demo.
Check out the forums at Kalypso and Steam. Users are positively apoplectic over the state of LoP. What did they expect? The Second Coming of MOOII?
I grant you that publishers/developers shouldn’t release a game until it is complete and stable. But consumers have the duty to research their purchases and support publishers that sell playable products. Hoping that the game turns out right is no substitute for completing due diligence on the product.
Remember: a wise man once said, “Hope is not a strategy.”
They expected a game that was mostly bug free and at least playable. If it turned out to be boring or overly complicated or a different style than expected that’s one thing. The unplayable, untested mess that it is now is a joke. It’s obvious that they didn’t even bother to play through (normally) the missions they created for the campaign, let alone other parts of the game.
What other game that features skirmish with up to 8 players will only allow you to add one (easy) AI player to the skirmish (even for a single player skirmish)?
Blaming the customers for this is like blaming [rest of sentence deleted by moderator (offensive and unnecessary)].
[sentence deleted by moderator (offensive and unnecessary)]
Mister, I don’t think we need this kind of sentences here. I find it sexist and insulting. I would like to hear the owner of this blog on that matter. Is there any kind of moderation?
RandomBlue has done several comments in the past but I do agree with you that he may have gone a bit out of line with that last sentence. It’s understandable that people are a bit emotional with LoP right now but the sentence was unnecessary I agree.
Thank you Adam, for this and all the work you put into this blog.
I suggest you still keep the posts as they were. Moderation is not censorship. People need / want to know what was found offensive.
People know the sentence could be perceived as offensive or that it was unnecessary, let’s leave like that shall we :)
I hadn’t intended it to be offensive and I thought it was a bit strong when I typed it, but I didn’t think it crossed the line. Apparently I was wrong and I apologize. However, my point remains that blaming the customers is ridiculous.
No problem. It has to do with people’s different sensitivities. We know you didn’t intend to be offensive. Your point was clear though. Blaming on the customer is never a wise strategy.
Although I do agree with Jeff to some extent on the customer side of things. Having many videos published and they appearing in sites like Space Sector is not synonym of a good product. It’s my job and other site’s editors to inform the public on everything there is about a particular game. Now, if a product is good enough to buy or not I always advise people to wait for reviews or at very least an hands-on (played) preview, which in this case there wasn’t one.
As for a review I’m still digesting the game’s state and will track what’s next and then assess if the current build is “reviewable” or not. By reviewable I mean if it is stable enough to play. So far it seems so but I need a couple more days to know for sure.
“Adam Solo”
“”As for a review I’m still digesting the game’s state and will track what’s next and then assess if the current build is “reviewable” or not. By reviewable I mean if it is stable enough to play. So far it seems so but I need a couple more days to know for sure.””
Well Play faster!!!! its killing me waiting for these patches to come in then, having to hunt the net for updated info LOL. I’m still hanging on to hope for this game. I have been planning on making it a Birthday present to myself :)
Got my fingers crossed that you will give us a thumbs up today….. even if its just for the campain I can play that while waiting for the scermish stuff to finish being patched…..
You have my LoP early assessment (very first impressions) here in the comments. Here’s a quick link. I’ve been on other matters today (check tomorrow to see what). LoP will have to wait.
In any case Kalypso has made an announcement 1 day after release stating that “the launch of Legends of Pegasus was very rocky and totally not what we wanted it to be (…) The flood of problems has really surprised us. We are working hard to patch the game and we think that most of the problems can be solved in a few days (…) Kalypso will provide a free compensation in the course of next week. We do not know what it will be exactly but we will think of something nice.”.
As you see there seems to be a lot of work ahead of Novacore and Kalypso to get it right, so, it’s premature to jump into a review in these conditions, taking into account that the game seems to be in a state of flux and that it’s public now that the game responsibles acknowledge (in their forums and on facebook) that the release was “very rocky and totally not what we wanted it to be”.
However I will write a proper first impressions article in the coming days stating what people can expect from this game.
I just noticed that at the end of the game teaser, they put in “Forget your Sins, become a Legend”… Does that line actually makes references to SoaSE?
The generalized idea was that it was a reference to Sins yes (not officially, just an impression). LoP was targeted to release much earlier, like in May/June if I remember correctly, when Sins came out. So, that was part of the marketing wars I guess. That’s a teaser alright.
It’s not quite safe enough to take my flak jacket off yet, but I’ve left the bomb shelter. There has certainly been no shortage of strong opinions about the LoP release on the Kalypso forums, and in some cases here as well. I can’t blame anyone for being upset about the release. With Sword of the Stars II not far behind us, and comments from Kalypsochris pre-release indicating how aware they were of SOTSII’s infamous launch, it is somewhat baffling that they would decide to tread a similar path. A failed launch like this will not only hurt the sales of LoP. Unlike SOTSII, Novacore does not have a forum or representative from their organization taking the bullets for the team (thinking of Mecron here). Kalypso is shouldering the blame here.
I have hope that the game will be cleaned up so that I can fully experience what it has to offer. I’m not completely surprised by the launch given some of the indicators JeffP pointed to earlier in this thread. While I’m upset it’s not as playable as I would like, I can safely say I knew the risk of what I was doing when I placed my preorder. I’d advise anyone who didn’t pre-order to hold off until Adam fully tests the game and gives his all clear at this point. There are too many other promising titles in alpha/beta to consider before spending your money on this as of yet.
The game continue with many errors in the Gui interfaz the buttons dissapear in the second mission after i built the second colony and enter to a battle the button of turn disappear
there are problems with selection units something one press click and no select
problems when one mark many ships and point in another part of map the ships dont move
review the select and click in the units somethings the system dont recognize the clicks over one unit simply dont select it
in this way its impossible to play…. i am going to abandon for now the game until novacore do some better with this game is a big mistake launch a game in this condition….
i am going to play sword of the stars II at least is more stable now and maybe in one month or two i will back to try legends of pegasus…i am deception because i believe with passion in this game i think it will be better thant sins and better thant sword of the stars but the reality show us that the game have many problems and bugs it give the impression like the developers dont test in the best way this game before release
sorry is the true i have the impresion that this game never pass a strict test of control and quality if you at least before release a alpha you now will have a better product to the gamers
For me is a great surprise that a game like homeworld II is a very old game have many clean controls and better GUI interfaz….no point of comparission homeworld II is miles away from legends of pegasus in GUI interfaz and click and control units likea before person who put in this post
“Homeworld” had far better graphics and control and how may years has that been out? Mouse cursor is nearly uncontrollable and suffers as well from “dead” moments when it does not seem to read at all, usually happens when you need it the most.
in this way legends of pegasus is a hell to try to play it
Adam sorry if I gave the wrong impression there when I made the “Play faster” remark I was kidding lol. there have been some very good 1st impressions in this thread. Even a bit of hope for a finished game to appear from the debacle of the launch :)
Here is my first impressions:
Bad UI: Not polished, simple and hard to use/read at the same time. For example, the HP of the ships are displayed in a green bar but with no indications of how much HP are left. Armor and Shield are quite useless too, depleting too fast.
Bad Gameplay: The idea of a turn based management and real time battles was good but poorly executed: I would have liked the possibility to skip the battles leaving them in autoresolve. The battles can be resumed by click and wait, with more waiting than clicking…
Bugs: Too much bugs….
The good points: The management of planet is quite good, I like it. It reminds of GalCiv II a bit. The ship design is also a good point even though the UI is a bit too rigid here too.
So too many bad points and too little good points in my opinion.