Recent Hate bomb on steam

Most of the negative reviews are actually about a few short, but still noticeable downtimes we had for our backend servers and the resulting inability to play - both due to overload on the first day and due to attacks on them at several days during the holidays, where our staff was on limited availability. We did what we could to bring it up as quickly as possible again and there has been no more incidents since then, but we do understand the frustration that came out of it.

Other reasons for negative reviews have been provided by other users in this post already. I do see barely any hate there, though. Some people like stuff, others don't. There is valid reasons to criticize and we'll just have to deal with it. I'm rather happy it's little hate.

That is not fully correct - joining a server (and that includes singleplayer, which is only a server hosted locally) requires connection to our backend servers, both to validate the user account as well as to receive avatar and account data. It is not possible to do that when the backend servers are unreachable. The amount of time that was the case was very limited though and there have been no more issues since then - but the reviews unfortunately stay. They will be falling out of the recent rating after 30 days, though.

Animal Husbandry is on the planned features list for a long while.

We had these plans communicated for years though.

No, but noone of us said that either, at least to my knowledge.

Yes, but that is true, at least from my point of view - one of our next. Not the next.

Leading up to Update 11 we plan to do more regular small feature updates (Animal Husbandry is a full new system, so a major update like 10), hopefully nearly monthly. Update 11, which is the next major one, is currently intended to contain a first implementation of that system. 10.2 for example would contain a few smaller features in regard to painting / culture, but the first goal currently is to release a polish update for 10.

I am happy to add a edit note to the review answer if you feel this isn't clear enough, though it has been pretty universally known that our development cycle has major features only in major updates to my knowledge.

Animal Husbandry has also surpassed trains on our canny voting feedback system and we already know and have communicated for years that trains will not be coming before the end of EA. So this is the most natural new major feature to do next, now that we got boats and settlements out which was our priority so far.

I think the first detailed blog we already made in 2020, not absolutely sure, I would need to search it - it should be on Steam, though. But it was generally planned since Kickstarter to have multiple governments - and actually frequently requested from us as well. Things got implemented in stages, to provide a playable game between these stages.

It's always a big problem to try to satisfy everyone, we can only try to get the best compromise and as many configuration options as possible - which we've always been doing.

Thanks for the positive feedback, always heartwearming to see as well :)