Harmonix: fix Dance Central Spotlight or stop selling it

I used to be a Riptide kind of guy, but not this time. :/

I can probably split my life in before and after Dance Central. As a former obese child and teenager who has recently lost 18kg, the kinect sensor and that game give me hope to keep my weight and health in the right track back in 2010.

The first three games of the franchise was breathtaking. Authentic choreos, living characters with strong sense of style and personalities, and the most important — almost technically perfect. I’m pretty sure that Harmonix achieved the maximum of what the sensor was capable.

Lights was one of my favorite DC3 DLCs. Complex, performatic and full of energy.

The latest entry in the series was Dance Central 3, released late 2012. Since then, the fans all over the world was asking for a new game. Harmonix keep silenced until E3 2014, when they announced Dance Central Spotlight.

Spotwhat?!

Spotlight is the first spin off in the series. Downloadable only, it’s exclusive for the Xbox One and got only 10 core tracks. So, you can build your library buying individual songs in the store. Sound cool, right? Yeah, we’re all thought the same… until we discover that the game is nothing more then a “let’s make quick money” project.

Basically, there’s no new choreos in the game. They just splitted moves from dances who has already in the last games, mixed and glued everything to create the “new” routines. Of course every single fan was pissed off.

Fortunately, they’ve annouced that all purchased DLC songs (with real choreos) from the previous games would be available for free. As a former Xbox 360 owner, that was the perfect excuse to get a One. “At least I’ll have a solid library to play until Dance Central 4” — I thought. That was not the case. The game is glitched as hell, suffers from terrible framerates and stuttering issues, among other things.

Dance Central Spotlight clearly had a rushed and low budget development and it’s absolutelly broken. Here’s what they need to fix in the game, even if a DC4 is in the works:

The achievement freeze bug
The first critic bug that I’ve spotted. Look how ridiculous it is: if both players are logged in their profiles and one of they unlock an achievement, the game freezes. Yeah! That’s just ridiculous. My friend Felipe and I used to be achievement hunters (and we’d used to compete against other players in the leaderboards back in the x360 era). When we played DC:S for the first time, we unlock lots of achievements breaking the game SO HARD that we had to restart the console.
The eternal loading screen
For me, the most annoying thing in the game — and just like the achievement freeze bug, something very stupid. The game comes with 10 core songs, and you need to buy the rest. Nothing wrong with that. The problem starts when you (try to) access the song list: the store is integrated into the menu, but the game isn’t capable to fetch the song previews and cover art for each song and cache / store to avoid redownloading. On top of that, looks that request is syncronous (which doesn’t make any sense), blocking the access to select already downloaded songs. I live in Brazil, and the connections here used to be very slow. In my city, for example, the average internet speed is 4mbps. I have a 10mbps connection and I need to wait 3–4 minutes to access the menu and choose a song to play. Serveral times my friends asked me to change to Just Dance, just because of that.
Bonus: 30fps, stuttering and other performance issues.
The previous games achieved 60fps in a 10 year old hardware, and everything looked so much better on x360 (except for the lack of anti-aliasing). DC:S had a 30fps lock with a LOT of framedrops in a 2013 hardware — even on the song selection menu. Mostly of those framedrops ocurr when the venue changes from normal to the peak state. This has a terrible bad impact in-game. For the player sake! This is a DANCE game! Fluidity is mandatory! If the drops relies on the crowd… we don’t care about the crowd with lots of people imitating the main dancers! Actually, this looks way worse than two backup dancers and the random crowd with they own animations like it was before.

These two major problems makes the game basically broken, unresponsive and almost unplayable. Really, HMX… for your sake, please never release a game in this stage of development again. You guys have a massive fanbase all over social media. It won’t cost much use these platforms to get user feedback, discuss bugs and see with the community what can be improved.

Why I think that Harmonix should fix the game or stop selling it? The answer is simple: quality. If you game is broken and/or the experience is awful, people will think before buying any one of your games again. Low budget isn’t a excuse to deliver an incomplete and broken experience for the player. I’m sure that those problems isn’t so hard to fix and can be solved within a few work days.

And if you guys need a playtester, I’m here (pretty good at bug hunting, by the way).