It’s like the developers want their game to fail.
Steam game Task Force might just have the worst developers representing it that I’ve seen in recent history, perhaps more feckless than Super Benbo Quest deciding it was worth getting banned by changing the name of the game to call someone a dweeb. The developers of Task Force, Tracer Interactive, are the type of emotionally unstable children who ban critics from the game itself, and block anyone on Twitter who even remotely criticizes the game or its developer’s lack of professionalism.
We covered the game back in 2020 when YouTuber BigFry got banned after exposing the developer illegally ripping assets from SOCOM and uploading them to the game’s workshop under the disguise of a third party uploader, attempting to circumvent Valve’s copyright policies that would no doubt get the game banned otherwise. Tracer Interactive banned BigFry, a number of other critics, and blocked MMO Fallout merely for covering the story, with their community manager having a very public tantrum over people criticizing the game and questioning their very obviously retaliatory bans.
The Steam Early Access page for Task Force, which isn’t on sale yet, might just be the most self-defeating and lunatic nonsense I’ve seen on Steam since Cyber Watch said that they weren’t open for criticism on their game. Normally developers use the early access page to promote the game and make people want to play it. Task Force meanwhile just outright admits that the developers are incompetent, have few resources, and will probably never finish the game.
Not what you want when selling a game.
This game will be in Early Access until we polish up the animations, sounds, or pretty much anything artistic that we couldn’t afford yet. It will need at least 7-10 maps and a bunch of custom character skins before it can be considered fully released. But with the way things go sometimes and the fact that it took us what felt like an eternity to even release into Early Access, it might stay in Early Access hell forever.
Uh huh.
These are just the same questions over and over. It’s unfinished. The animations are amateur, the character skins were bought in the UE4 marketplace. We’ve tried to develop our own characters but have only gotten so far. We have a training map, gray blockouts for 5 maps, and fully-playable drafts of our first 3 maps. But after all these years we’ve learned so much. We could rebuild them a lot better now, especially if we can get the funding and resources necessary. It’s really hard to find decent artists these days unless you have a lot of money to throw around.
I love how the developer writes their own early access questions and then gets impatient four questions in that they might have to justify the game’s existence and asking for money. The animations are amateur, the character skins are bought from the store, the developers are fragile baby snowflakes that can’t handle criticism, the community manager is prone to public tantrums on Twitter, and somehow the developer thinks that this self-deprecating approach of “we suck, and so does our game” is going to lead people to buying it.
Let’s move on.
We would certainly hope so. If the game finally has all the maps, characters, weapons, and everything else we’ve been planning for all these years, then it’s obviously a more completed product with a higher value. So yes we would raise the price once the game is “finished” so to speak. That means you’re going to want to buy it now while it’s a cheap piece of crap. Think of it as a long term investment.
Sure our game is garbage and we have no talented developers on board, but buy it now and it might possibly be good someday in the future if we get our crap together. Nah. You’d have more hope in the value of GameStop’s NFT venture accruing value over time than Task Force, a game I wholly expect the developer to launch, pitch a world-class hissy fit about how gamers are entitled when it doesn’t sell well, and then go work at the liquor store in Arizona with Robert Romine.
At least they’re honest about being as arrogant as they are incompetent and fragile by saying outright they have no interest in feedback from players. It’s always good to get out of the way that the developer despises the people they’re making the game for and will invalidate the whole premise of early access being to build the game with direct feedback from the community. Real manchild energy here.
After years of dealing with the tactical TPS community we have no desire to involve anyone in anything. Just leave us the hell alone so the job of making video games is actually fun and we’ll keep working hard to make cool shit. Now of course we’ll post announcements about what’s changed in each release, put together some update videos, maybe even throw up a poll once in a while. But everyone has an opinion about everything and you can never please everyone, so go find something more productive to do with your time. If you think you can do it better, then go ahead.
The store page itself goes on to try to be aggressive and perhaps funny, only to fail miserably because the developers are openly miserable and channeling that into this odd aggressiveness that I can’t imagine anyone finds pleasing or makes the game attractive.
Also you can’t “keep working hard” at making cool shit when you never started. Just a thought.
This requires a lot of realistic high quality content that covers a wide array of regions. Therefore we need a competent team of artists that can create these characters and environments. So if you don’t buy this game then how could we possibly pay these guys a livable wage, which means we’ll never be able to achieve our dream of seeing this game to completion. And just think how shitty you would feel about yourself if you did that to us!
The folks at Tracer Interactive might be the most depressing developers I’ve seen in years, not only in how badly they present their own product, but in the fact that they almost openly don’t want to be doing this anymore. They seem to have nothing but contempt remaining for the game, the community, critics, or themselves, and have geared the Steam store deliberately to sabotage its hopes of gaining whatever players might buy it unaware of all the controversy around the company, so they can justify shutting the doors and walking away with whatever they manage to skim off the top before going back to working in a toll booth.
Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.
MMO Fallout 