We were promised a firefall successor based around thumping, and planetary war [...] Battling legendary Kiju all while crafting skills, gear and base building.
I do agree that at the get-go, everyone was paying money into this. But I will say that part of developing modernized systems is developing the smaller pieces that eventually combine into what we were promised. Kaiju hunting was always a part of the concept: Open world base building and thumping with potential invasions and kaiju encounters. Therefore, a 4v1 Monster Hunting module, in hindsight, was not unexpected.
The gear crafting, gathering and base building will come eventually. First, all the character designs, modularity, save data, and data tables need to be established. How monsters drop materials, how durability works, how gear sockets work, how damage is applied...all that has to be implemented before time can truly be spent on building a crafting table. The 4v1 Kaiju module is one step into how players will experience gathering, fighting, and inevitably crafting their gear.
Each release has been isolating concepts: we had a jetpack module, we had a limited thumping module, we got a procedurally generated landscape that then converted into voxel, we got a still limited but expanded thumping module with tsi-hu. Next is adding the kaiju encounters in an isolated environment. I would expect the followup would be to add these Kaiju into the Thumper encounters.
It is true we were expecting a thumper playable mockup for the Kickstarter demo. Showing meks with guns, melee, and spells fighting a Kaiju is going to more easily catch attention. For us who have experienced Thumping, we will be able to imagine the Kaiju being added into the Thumper encounter.
The disconnect is that the Kickstarter will happen sooner than those two modules can be combined into a single module.
I am not saying that I am pleased with the pace of development but I do understand that getting it right can take unusual amounts of time. As to why it has taken Years to do all this, I am unsure, but maybe that's just how it goes for a game of this scale. This game is bigger than Firefall and Monster Hunter especially on a network scale.
People are frustrated that the Thumper demo is not going to be the Kickstarter demo and development is slow. I am frustrated that after all these years we have a novel that I'll honestly never read, a tabletop game that I'll likely never play, and the current build that I can't show to my friends. But I can see the steps Em8er has taken and where it's headed. We'll get the Thumper encounter we were promised but not in the timeframe that was initially promised. I sincerely hope that the Kickstarter does Kickstart Em8er into overdrive no matter how much money it raises.
