i personally love everything in this game, but there are just so many things i dont understand, and i would like to, for example, this game is CLEARLY missing a lot of things, its is almost competely unplayable as it is, even if you play with someone at home, if you dont have a controller the secondary keyboard controlls are imposible, once you play this game one hour there is nothing else in it for you, unless you CAN make a party of 3+ people to play it with, wich is almost imposible, and yet, this game gets a lot of recognition, and a lot of fame, it has a lot of awards and is quite known in the indie industry.

The guys developing this have spent 10 years on it and yet its not even close to being a playable game... all updates are little tweaks and LUA things so people can mod, but not actuall features, or at least not for the past 6 months, if it took 10 years to get to this almost past 70% status, is it going to take 10 more years for me to be able to play the actual gamethe way it was intended?

what i mean is that i don't know if im playing this game the way im suposed to, am i playing the wrong game? is my version outdated? is there an awesome mod that lets you play online or ads A.I that i don't know about? , basiclly, what im asking for is someone to teach me how to play this game, so far all i can do is play skirmish defense or zombie cave AGAIN.

don't missunderstand me, i love this game, it is brilliant, but im just confused

It can be hard to understand at first, no worries.
The game is definitely unfinished, and your concerns about its completion are valid. The current plan is to have the game finished this year. I can't guarantee it'll happen, but that's what Data has said will happen, and it looks plausible at this point. The main thing missing is a full campaign mode, which will actually have AI to play against. As well, the factions will all be fleshed out some more.
At the moment, people are generally amusing themselves with the different skirmish modes or playing with the countless mods the community has generated over the game's lifetime. The game is more or less a sandbox at this point. I'd strongly suggest grabbing some of the mods in the Mod Releases section if you want some more to play with, or, if you want to play something with more of a defined goal, the Scene Releases section has plenty of things to try (weegee has quite a few particularly good missions, and I have a handful of well-received ones as well).
Hope that helps a bit, at least.

Oh, i see, maybe i will go check out that scene section, as nonsequitorian said, maybe im just taking a wrong aproach, and well, i cant deny i haven't has some fun

thanks, you have anwsered all my doubts, by the way, is terrain generation planned?

Data mentioned he's planning for a CC release "this year", in the new Cave Vehicle Engine video.

I don't think it is, although it would be a neat feature. It could be done by a third party, although it wouldn't be in-game.

Man up. Buy a controller.

Also, this game entertains for days and days, much more that some indies.
Just play one massive skirmish, give yourself infinite funds, hide your brain and just play.
Mods also allow for extra fun.

This game is awesome. The speed at which it is developed is awful.
But someday the game will be done, and angels will forewarn us by urinating down from the heavens, showering us in their holy delight.



Pardon me for asking, but why would this offend people?

Honestly, who wants pudding all over their shoes?

Re. the release date:

Here's the thing - the only necessary difference between the game as it is now and the "full game" is that it isn't currently CALLED "the full game". What's to stop Data from throwing together a hacky "campaign mode", slapping "full game" on the tin and just calling it done? Nothing.

That's why I'm not excited. Sorry.

When you're new to this game you have to be able to look past the things that it lacks that you expect games to have to be able to see the gold inside. Sometimes it takes a little while to be able to appreciate this game for what makes it so awesome. Yay for us lucky few who can do that.

Unfortunately after all this time the reverse has happened to me. Forget the slow development, that doesn't bother me (I spent nearly a decade playing in-development Mount&Blade and loving it to death. In fact, haha, the final game - which is awesome by the way - has a handful of features that wouldn't exist if it weren't for my suggestions and modding activities. You can say "thank you" to me for the Nords, for one thing. How cool is that? Very cool. Go indie games.) What bothers me is that nobody ever sat down and said, "OK, we have a good thing here. Our game mechanics need a little work here and there, and we do need to put a little effort into solidifying our art direction, faction loadouts, and all that stuff, but we've got a great mechanics foundation to work with. Now how can we make this into a game?"

There's more to a game than a working sandboxy thing. The game of the game (excuse me) is what gives you flow and development and growth and purpose as you play. In some games it's a story line (crap games imo), in some it's a natural progression of obstacles to overcome which suggest themselves to the player and allow him to - in a sense - do whatever he wants, while nonetheless doing something. In the best games (in my opinion), the world of the game is designed in such a perfect way that from the interactions of the agents and the heaven and earth of the gameworld arise naturally (some might say "emerge", har har) very compelling purposes and opportunities that empty into each other like streams flowing into a river and allow the player to play-the-game in the most primitive and perfect way (i.e. without his hand being held by his mommy). That's harder to pull off. It's kind of what Minecraft (especially in multiplayer) had going for it before Notch's innate retardedness managed to destroy the last glimmers of the total awesomeness of the original, basic structure of the game (which he, as far as I can tell, stumbled upon completely by accident rather than by any genius or wisdom in game making).


It's what you do. What makes a game isn't that it's called a game, or that when you play it it makes you do things that it thinks games are supposed to make you do. It's what YOU, the player, DO, what YOU EFFECT IN THE GAME WORLD, and consequently it's the nature of the game world in that it does or does not facilitate GAMEPLAY on the part of the GAME PLAYER that decides whether a "game" ever gets to cross over the mystical boundary and become a game. It's not easy to make a real game! Why do you think so many big dollar games suck? Because they AREN'T GAMES.

Nobody ever bothered to make a game out of Cortex Command, in my humble and ignorant view, and it's a shame, really.


I don't know how Data plans to work his campaign thing, but if in reality (this is important: by "in reality" I mean as far as gameplay is concerned, not the way the menus are set up or what the messages you get say or whatever) it's just skirmish mode tied by the neck by some silly lua tricks to a picture of a planet under siege by the-giant-polygon-aliens-of-different-colors and maybe some pre-made scenes, it's not going to be super compelling.

I'm not sure this game can even work as the RTS it's trying to be.


I'm done. If I pissed you off, sorry, but don't bother getting on my ass for not being religious enough about CC (though I do love it), because if that's how you think, I don't care how you think, because you're a moron. Ha ha.



EDIT: P.S. Making a game requires ingenious thinking. You have to be able to design a complex system (not the same thing as complicated) that fits perfectly with the constraints of the mechanics of the game. Not everybody can do that.

Crow, you make an excellent point, thanks for the Nords btw

But, from watching both of those videos, I am actually quite hopeful.
It seems Data has actually developed a string of determination and expectance. For this, I am quite pleased at this. But knowing Data...

I think we can only sum up the rest of our fatal determination and bits of hope and just hope for the best.

Bah, I guess I am unworthy then.

@Crow: You speak words of wisdom. I try to stay positive myself, but, damn, it IS hard.

THANK YOU!!!!!

Crow, even though its kind of sad i have to agree with you about most of what you said, now, just to know your opinion better(yeah, you made me think a lot)

Campaign can be completely fulfilling, amazing, and entertaining, i know it may just look like skirmish mode from here but, don't you think they could add that natural progression you were talking about? Terrain generation and/or more scenarios, base building, the economy system it already has, factions, and others would turn it into a complete new experience, not just a bunch of scenarios set to skirmish game mode, don't you think?

And btw, why do you thin notch "destroyed" minecraft?

wich decisions made you cahnge your opinion about it?

B 27 is looking like its headed far in the right direction. the lack of friendly fire, and the fact that friendly actors can pass through each other will be awesome. In that version you should be able to use squads, instead of one man army-ing everything.

Crow has a good point, and says a lot of good things, but that statement is starting to lose its value; data and the team are working greatly to turn Cortex command into a working game. Look at B25, and 26. the new AI, modding enhancements, pie menu additions go a long way to adding things that greatly enhance gameplay.

I do not see much in campaign right now, but it has huge potential.

The only problem I have is the hugeness of the actors and balance. The weapons don't seem to serve any purpose aside shooting differently, and the factions although unique don't really express a sort of difference aside colors. (This is where crow has gone far, the brutality mod is awesome.)

also i've noticed that the game is much much better when lag free. The actors walk better, the guns shoot better, and the game feels much more like a game during small maps when you've optimized the settings. (b27 is also going toward fixing some of the lag).

The game has its problems, but in its current state feels semi playable at the least. And its still the fun physics packed game play we've come to love.

If we can pull it off, the fully functional campaign mode is really going to pull things together and make the battles meaningful in a bigger context of a metagame; it's going to transform the entire experience of playing Cortex Command. Instead of sandboxy ship-crashy-fun-times, it'll be serious strategic decisions based on hard budget limits, which directly affect your tactical situations on the planet.. the outcomes of which in turn feed back into the strategic situation again.

Sites and the bases built on them that are fought over repeatedly will have the battle scars, with layers of debris and wreckage collected from the beginning of the campaign, enabling a sort of archeology of the history of each place as the campaign progresses. Hopefully you'll grow fond and attached to the bases you lovingly built and defended, and you'll be devastated when the enemy manages to take one from you. You'll be over the moon when you triumphantly wrest it back again. Everything to support that is implemented already, albeit in a rough unpolished state.

What's missing is the strategic AI opponents, and that's what we're aiming to deliver with build 27. It'll still be unpolished, but it'll be far more playable. The polish and real optimizations comes after that, before the 1.0 of the game is released, sometime mid this year. Upon starting to make the RTE engine, I vowed to myself to make it into a finished game i'm proud of.. we're not letting it go after all this time without reaching that goal.

Seeing is believing, and so try to reserve your judgment until you can actually play it, but what I've already been seeing in my mind's eye is SUPER exciting, even after working on this damn thing for a decade. Fingers crossed that our vision will pan out as a very fun actual gaming experience as well! I, for one, have enough confidence in it happening that I'm betting the studio's foreseeable financial future on it, as well as my own.