PS4 release

So I just got my Kickstarter rewards in for the SCRPG and reading through the rules put me in the mood to play through Sentinels of Freedom. I happened to see that it was listed as being on the PS4 on the underbite website and the AMA stated that a console release was coming. Has it not been released on the PS4 yet? That AMA was back in April and their facebook page showed the XBOX one release in September. I would love to be able to play it on my PS4, I just cant seem to find it on the store. If anyone on the forums has an answer to my problems, it would be very much appreciated.

Nothing, as far as I can tell.

I'm a KS backer, and am starting to wish I'd done the Switch instead of the PS4, because I had no idea it was going to take this [expletive redacted] long to get the PS4 version. 

There's been no updates released on the project at all since October.

On the other hand, when you finally get the PS4 version, it should be a lot less buggy!

I mean, after the Charlie Foxtrot that was CP2077(Specifically, the PS4 version), just about anything will look good.

Christopher and Adam may have mentioned that they are waiting to do Season 2 and PS4 at the same time.
January-ish possibly (they don’t run the game but they do keep in contact with the people who do)

Season 2 will have Set Back, Guise, and the first appearance of Guise’s cat

And that's something that should be in a KS update.

I don't think I'm being unreasonable wanting updates to the Kickstarter that I'm still waiting on delivery for to be on the KS page.

New Update season 2 late Febuary PS4 soon after

PS4’s been “2-3 months away” since October.

I’ll believe it when it actually gets released, at this point.

Well.

That’s extremely disappointing.

PS4 canceled.

Yeah, not a lot of details given from today’s update about what suddenly changed. I’m not using PS4 but I’m left scratching my head about it.

I commented about the lack of detail and got this reply which leaves me rather concerned in general

We can’t share everything but simply put we no longer have the same resources we previously did.

Yeah, I saw that, and between the less-than reassuring vagueness of that statement, and the continued communication issues, I have similar concerns.

They said up until Monday they were confident.

I feel that they owe their backers more than “we’re sorry, it’s complicated”.

Yeah, that’s disconcerting.

Ss disappointed as I am by waiting over a year after the Steam release (April 16, 2020), 9 months after the Switch release (July 30, 2020) and 7 months after the Xbox release (September 2020), I’m more disappointed by the absolute lack of ANY explanation other than “something happened on Monday, don’t worry about it, but we unexpectedly can’t deliver what we’ve been promising since April 20, 2018”.

On January 13th, they were still “working with Sony on getting [the PS4 version] released]”. That’s a direct quote from their announcement on Discord & Update on Kickstarter, and makes it sound like the PS4 build was much farther along than it clearly has to have been.

And they’ve successfully released cross platform games before. Super Dungeon Tactics has a PS4 release in July of 2018, Xbox in August, Switch in September. So that they’ve suddenly failed only one release and can’t be bothered to give us an actual explanation feels like a slap in the face to those of us who have been waiting patiently.

But this mediocre at best communication about the reason for the cancellation isn’t unexpected, because they’ve been terrible about communication regarding this version for a while now.

Yeah, I hate to say it, but I am iffy on if Underbite is a good fit for any further Sentinels games. The game itself is fine and fun, I have no major complaints there, but the actual development process has been plagued with delays combined with a continued lack of communication.

This is the update in the KS comments

So our lead dev, who handles our ports, was recruited by a AAA studio and is leaving very soon. This is an amazing opportunity but leaves us in a tough spot. We are not large enough to have multiple people trained on PS4 porting since it is only something you do every 2-3 years. We will no longer have anyone who is able to do PS4 ports for a long time. We have new devs coming in but will not be able to get up to speed and any reasonable time as they would need to get into the game code along with learning how to port the game. We talked about any and all possibilities but no solution leads to valid options without 6+ months before even being able to submit. Over this amount of time, it would be likely the Sony would not even accept the game.

There. Communication.

I’m not happy about the end result, but this at least explains it. (and congrats to the lead dev)

I don’t know why this was so hard to put in the initial announcement.

I’d ALSO like to know what caused the PS4 port to be delayed 6+ months behind the Xbox one, because if that hadn’t happened, we’d already have the PS4 port.

But I’m not holding my breath for that.

Edit: Though having a bus number of 1 for a major console port as a software company seems… less than ideal.

To be generous, it’s possible that they didn’t expect the amount of pushback from people regarding how vague it was and needed to get clearance from the dev in question and/or the company that’s hired them before saying this much. The timing of announcements regarding employment changes can be… sensitive for one reason or another.

That being said, and assuming the above is part of why things went this way, in their shoes I would likely have tried to get the various okays ahead of time to have included that detail in the original announcement. It’s good that things have been clarified.

Yeah. It’s an explanation. And this is far better communication about the PS4 port than we’ve received in 6 months.

But I’m still disappointed, especially as they’ve said it was in “final Stages” in June 2020, saying August at the earliest, Sep/Oct more likely, and then in the Jan 13 update, they were “still working with Sony”.

So I’m still really curious what caused a hangup on the PS4 that added more than 6 months past October.

I’m more than disappointed, I reiterate that I feel like GTG should no longer do business with Underbite.

They had significant delays, they gave little to no communication about said delays, and they apparently employ people who care so little about the company or customers that they bail with no warning. This time it was a port that had to get dropped which was bad enough; what happens if next time they lose an important employee in the middle of the main project?

(And I’ll note I’m usually the person defending a company because I feel the problem that happened was genuinely not their fault, so, I feel this was a legitimate chain of preventable screwups.)

Small companies are notorious for not having backfills ready for key employees. This isn’t necessarily they can do something about, with overall less cash on hand than a bigger company to pay for a deep bench in each needed subject area.

I will say I agree I personally don’t see it as much of an issue they don’t have more than one person doing a job. They’re a small company, of course they can’t afford a lot of redundancies.

But, I can’t speak for Blackfang, but I still feel it’s a bit of a red flag when a company has a situation of an employee who spent months not delivering on a product then decided to jump ship before finishing said product they already were months late on delivering. That sort of thing doesn’t usually happen at a company with a healthy behind the scenes development situation.

That’s on top of the other unexpected delays in general combined with them providing barely any communication at all on the matters and even then only doing so on their Discord while maintaining radio silence on Steam and KS.

I’ll mostly note that we were told it was in “Final build” along with the Xbox port in June 2020, and the Xbox build got released in October of that year.

So it’s just a bit maddening that, after another 6 months, they were still “working with Sony” to get it released, until suddenly on May 3 they were completely unable to move forward with the port. It makes every update from June on seem… overly optimistic at best.

In related news: I just got my Switch key a bit ago.

And the Switch eShop is under maintenance.

Because of course it is. XD

Not only that, but they’re claiming they somehow can’t still work on putting out a port because Sony won’t accept it, even though I looked and there’s still plenty of games releasing on the PS4 even with the PS5 coming out.

Then the last straw for me was when they said/did nothing while two fans on their server decided to be horrifically toxic and abusive about the idea that anyone could be unhappy. I was extremely upset after that happened and still feel shaken up.

I just feel increasingly unhappy about how Underbite’s handled this game. And again, this from someone who’s quick to be fair when I do feel a company had no control over issues that happened.

I was able to download and play a bit last night.

My first impressions through the prologue and character creation: It definitely gets that “Comic book” feel down.

Character creation has a lot of options, almost too many.

The dialogue choices felt like a good spread of options.

The writing in the game is a lot of fun; Braithwhite really out did himself.

The VA is great as well, though I wish Underbite would add a VA list to the credits.

I was playing it in handheld mode while watching Leverage with my wife, so I can’t speak to the audio aspects.

I’ll look forward to playing it on the tv, after that glowing review, though.

There are no voice acting credits? What is this, the '90’s? For shame.

They do get a little repetitive, and I can’t quite wrap my brain around Unity’s VA, but overall they’re pretty good.

I know, right? One more gripe on the pile.

We do know Joe Zieja, of course, and Adam stated on this past LP cover stream that the real life Pete which Setback is based on, actually voiced Setback in SoF.