Sounds like you’ve never worked on a game. All software is developed with some level of trial and error, and if you were really a software engineer you’d know that.

Games involve art design, sound design, systems design, and game design. Most software involves a single design philosophy trying to reach a specific objective. Software you can usually take a look at early and with caveats get an idea how it will work together. Games you can’t do that with so easily - that’s why there’s a specific term for it called a vertical slice.

You wouldn’t need a vertical slice if you could just look at any point of the game being developed and get an idea where it’s going.

This doesn’t even touch on the fact that you often can’t be sure if a design will work or will fall flat, software is generally less volatile than that.

Honestly, if you’re not able to see through the issues and understand the underlying vision at this time then take a break. Everyone who has put any money into it has seen something in there, but the state of the game wanes and waxes, just wait longer if this is still not the patch for you.

I don’t know if server meshing will be the magical fix, but personally I play this game maybe 6 weeks a year for a whole stint, but enough bugs that I need to take a break, and then finally jump back in when I’m ready.

It’s not healthy to allow yourself to death spiral in frustration, just don’t think about it for a good while, and then check in where it’s at then.

The game is in active development, and I can tell you as both a regular software developer, and a games developer - games are a completely different beast, and generally come together at the very last moment even on the best projects.

Yeah agreed, I was playing the early PTU versions and it was rough, but in live I feel like interactions have less delay than they did in 3.22

Honestly this is the best most performant patch they have released, and I’m genuinely excited about every feature here (yes I love master modes too).

There’s obviously still bugs, and server performance still hits you like a truck, but I didn’t expect any changes on that this patch.

Can’t wait for 4.0 and hopefully the smoothness to be common rather than just for the first 15 mins of a fresh server (before everyone spreads out).

Personally very excited with all the future versions this leads to. What Chad said about expanding your home bases as you expand into the universe, sounds awesome and a great way for progression to happen in the game.

With newer versions of Steam, it’s just handled automatically as long as you enable it, you can download from other players on the network. True not all games are on steam, and this probably works well for massive LAN setups, but I tried and failed to set this up, it’s a bit of a pain and personally found it not worth the effort.

You can trust the person, without trusting their technical skills, such that they haven’t inadvertently installed malware on their own devices.

I can’t say I’ve ever played Craftopia, but after hearing about this I went to the steam page to see for myself. They have released consistent large updates in the last 6 months and even since the launch of Palworld.

Most of the reviews from people who’ve played it mention it’s getting review bombed because of this mis-information and is actually quite good.

Seems to me if they can pull off making two games with multiple teams both which continue to have development, I say more power to them. I’m enjoying Palworld and will at some point check out Craftopia now because of it.

There’s unfortunately no rule or easy way to tell other than doing your own investigation for each individual game.