Avalanche Studios co-founder and Just Cause co-creator Christofer Sundberg is back with Samson, the open-world-ish crime fest from his new studio that's borrowing from the ingredients that make up GTA. But Sundberg's latest is suffering from a less than ideal launch, so the studio boss is promising quick fixes for the son of Sam's "unacceptable" problems.
Samson is a pretty creatively structured as far as crime-ridden action-adventure games go. It plops the titular character into open-world city districts to gradually pay off a high-stakes debt or otherwise risk his sister being chomped by shady loan sharks. Miss a day's quota and the interest will only compound, so you've gotta be judicious in the missions you go for.
Seems interesting enough, but the reception to Samson by both general players and critics has been a little icy. On Metacritic, the game has a pretty worrying average critic score of 48. Steam user reviews don't paint a brighter picture, either: 47% of the game's almost 1,000 reviews give it a thumbs down and complain of performance woes, bugs aplenty, and awkward animations.
"We have been having a lot of fun watching folks have fun with the game and we released a game with flaws for a number of reasons," Sundberg, the game's creative director and studio head, writes in a recent blog post before turning his gaze to common complaints.
"Early impressions are mixed and many of you are experiencing game-breaking bugs and performance issues," Sundberg continues. "That’s unacceptable and we are listening to everyone’s feedback and are hard at work to deliver the game we spent years of our lives developing. Launching a game is a ton of work and I'm proud of the effort our team has put into seeing Samson from its initial concept, through release."
Sundberg says he and developer Liquid Swords are "committed" to the future of the game and that "Samson is here to stay" with bug fixes, content improvements, and general polish coming well into the future.
Right on queue, Liquid Swords soon after detailed a wide-ranging patch that's due to drop tomorrow, April 10. The first patch for dear old Samson includes "several performance fixes," updates that should make crashes related to audio and animations much less common, and sweeping improvements to almost every other part of the game. The patch notes are quite extensive, but you can read them in full here.
Sundberg didn't exactly promise a bug-free launch before release. In an interview with PC Gamer, he said the team were "making it the best it really can be." Perhaps taking Samson out of the oven before it had time to properly bronze up was the developer's attempt at getting well away from the deluge of new games that are about to drop later this year.
