I assume that the version that will be on steam will be the Stable version?
Because if it’s the experimental, the major and most important thing that needs to be done is to be crystal clear with potential players about the fact that the game is in constant development and constantly changing, as well as to who is managing the “steam side of things” for the game, if it isn’t going to be done by the devs themselves.
I see several potential issues cropping up:
- Potential broken new features / fixes to existing features:
If something is introduced to the game that happens to be broken or to have a glaring flaw that breaks the game - which can happen - or something that is introduced but never really explained properly because its still a WIP (Like proficiencies were, for example), this would lead to people either “review bombing” / trashing the game because they don’t understand how the game is maintained or to completely refuse to give the game a go later down the line because “those evil developers keep on breaking the game and its literally unplayable™”.
everytime a new build is put out with fixes / introducing new mechanics / tweaks to already existing mechanics, there would have to be a proper log detailing the changes. That is something i’ve mentioned in another thread, the fact that the “changelogs” are super vague (and currently non-existent) so people updating the game (or having steam forcing the updates on them) would have no idea as to why a game is being updated several times a day and what changes the game is having.
(and yes, you can tell them to check the build numbers on github but that only shows us the code, and maths equations highlighted in green and red don’t really mean anything to people who don’t understand programming languages).
- people starting to use steam forums for support:
This would probably cause a lot of misinformation to be spread quite quickly, and bugs being reported on steam instead of being reported where they should be. It would also lead to people being pissed off if they think that it’s the actual developers/maintainers putting the game on steam (which, correct me if I am wrong, does not seem to be the case?). It could lead to those situations where people would throw insults and accusations at the team for things they have no fault on.
- People complaining about the lack of current/up-to-date information.
The Wiki is vastly out of date in most of its articles, google searches often uncover results that are months out of date (hell, even week-old threads can already be out of date due to updates/tweaks done in regards to a similar problem). This will most likely get people to be confused as to why there’s no main source for information on gameplay mechanics or a comprehensive list of things™ that’s updated as they’d expect it to be.
- People wanting to trouble-shoot faults with their system because CDDA (according to reddit) can run even on a toaster.
Everyone has a different system and thus a lot of potential bugs/glitches/problems can occur with the game. Namely the fact that some people might look up streamers and old (pre-Forced Z-Levels) videos and see like “oh shit the game processes so fast!” but when they see that the game is horrendously slow in some specific areas, or that the game starts slugging along after 2, 3, 4 in-game months, they’ll start complaining about how the game “is this and that and it’s literally unplayable because its too slow when crafting/sleeping!”.
Just my opinion here though. I personally won’t be using steam for the game, as I feel there’s no need to do it - the game runs well on both my Operating Systems, the only complaint I have is what I mentioned above about the Change Logs but that’s me personally.
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