What is the problem with SE5?

[Shadowstar]

As I understand it, the main gripe is that most people don't want to play a game that's so buggy out of the box. These people don't see modding potential and typically never bother looking at what the community is doing. They see the stock game, play it for about 15 minutes, and give up at the first bug they run into. SE5 isn't as skin-pretty as some of the more mainstream games, and unfortunately that is what gets most gamers hooked. If it doesn't have a nicely polished exterior with 5,000-particle explosions, pixel shaders, and fancy ragdoll physics (or water simulation), and especially if it has any bugs you can find within the first 5 minutes of playing, most gamers tend to lose interest pretty quick.

This is also why SE5 gets bad reviews. Reviewers may spend alot more time with a game than Joe Sixpack (the good ones have to - even if they hate it), but in the end thier primary audience is still the casual gamer since they are responsible for the majority of business in the industry. Reviewers who enjoy mods or patched versions of an initially buggy game will still give it a bad review because they understand that most of the people who are reading thier reviews don't have the patience to dig into the game's community or look for patches. The best reviewers will still mention the game's modding potential, and its dedicated community, but only as an afterthought and it will not affect the score they give.

There is precident for a properly patched game to get "re-reviewed" later on and get a better score. CGW re-reviewed X3 after it had been patched quite a bit and gave it a better review than they did initially. So there's still a chance for SE5 Gold to be a big hit right out of the box, but alot of that depends on us, the modders. (This is speculation, I don't know if there will be an SE5 Gold, but it could be a good business move, if it can include enough content to be worth going to retail).