This is good news and certainly good development in the right direction. I do hope you continue your work to finish the game, and I certainly hope you take the feedback about locking into consideration.
Are you secretary the fatshark employee that decided to lock traits?
I think they must be. Honestly. At what point do you say “ok I am by far the minority voice in this playerbase community and should defer to the way most people like to play this game,” instead of “no, it’s the masses who must be wrong. Here’s a bunch of corporate game design reasons why”???
EDIT: and the nerve to run a TF2 profile pic… you know, a game where you can deterministically get whatever weapon you want with minimal effort so that you can try it out in-game.
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I mean good god, Payday 2 of all games figured out random progression wasn’t fun and players would rather buy / earn upgrades and new guns then rng them out of boxes and it gives you actual paths for progression beyond the slot machine.
I reiterate, Payday 2, a game that had a terrible RNG mechanic figured this out.
Even in games like Risk of Rain 2 where it’s a rogue like at its core still has ways to effect the outcome and mitigate the true randomness to actually get what you want and not just hope the slot machine fairy delivers what you need.
Godwins law of FS forums but Deep Rock managed to have its cake and eat it too by having its main line weapon progress be an upgrade system while in the late game you find cosmetics, Overclocks, and other stuff.
Guess what? Overclocks Feel satisfying to find and use because rather than being a basic rng stat you have no control over if you get or not you instead get a fun modification to change at a whim and make entire builds around.
Basically if you think the only thing keeping your players around is a Skinner box you have either screwed up somewhere along your design process or you are a mobile game dev trying to milk people out of money.
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LOL!!! Fatshark’s plan was to turn us into Skavenslaves this entire time.
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This is the question they should’ve been asking themselves when they designed the game. Instead, and this is increasing common nowadays, they are telling people what they want. Then wondering what went wrong later.
Reminds me of the blizzcon panel when a guy from the crowd asked them for wow classic and he told him “you think you do but you don’t” and another meme was born.
Its fine for devs to do their thing if they get it right. What’s not fine is when they get it wrong then refuse to listen to their player base.
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One up on all the “THIS IS NOT FIXING IT” comments.
Give me a sure cut way to achieve a weapon build I want or I’m not coming back. The review stays negative too. Man I’m disappointed.
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Sure and that at least sounds like a much more reasonable and clear (and actionable!) set of criteria, if the community roughly agrees (and I do think they might!).
I’m not sure that what the community agrees on is always best for a game (for example the WoW community at various points might’ve roughly agreed they want to be max level, but letting you reach that level too quickly is actually a pretty terrible idea).
For example in the case of DT I find value (not a ton, but a meaningful amount) to knowing my weapons are distinct from others weapons, and that’s only possible when you can’t easily upgrade base stats (or at least when you can’t upgrade them all to max so that everyone has the same exact everything-80% or everything -100% weapons). The limitations on perks are part of that too, though they need to seriously look at things like +XP, +Curio, and +Dockets which are just totally trash regardless of build (again, the game does really need a perks/blessings pass!). As a result of those limitations, it’s very hard for someone to get exactly the same item as me (and vice-versa), which makes things interesting. It makes the crafting system itself take at least a little skill. Not as much as all the skill factors during actual gameplay, but way more than if you just followed some boring linear progression where eventually every item is perfectly maxed.
Well to me, “Games are a series of interesting decisions.” (Sid Meier), and so that’s why I’m so in favor of making the crafting system be about interesting decisions. Well that can only happen if mistakes can be made an problems exist which must be dealt with or mitigated against.
Exactly. Leave that RNG fiesta to Destiny 2 community, they are masochists.
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I think just “knowing your weapons aren’t the same as everyones” is better to achieve through balancing and having lots of viable build options. Not hard grind to a few viable paths. Does it feel better knowing everyone is going for the same perks and blessings on the same weapons with some different values or the odd perk or blessing swapped out? Or people trying devil claw, because why not they have the resources and time, may try using it on a build.
Separate issue- this is why when doing pub matches an easy way to swap class and build would be best. Don’t want to be the fourth ogyrn in the match or the same weapon (we already have two flamers? Don’t need a third).
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Well, we have to bear in mind that we here, who criticize the DT equipment system, might be the vocal minority. There are indicators that other share our concerns, e.g. the player drop in the 3rd month and many reviewers saying similar things that are written here, but the only reliable one that I can see that we are not the vocal minority is the consistency of the issues in any reasonably long Steam review (positive or negative).
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When it comes to how we asses all feedback and then push design changes forward, we don’t serve people based on what they want, we serve people based on what they need.
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I have learned that Axehilt is just shilling for the sake of shilling.
When presented with actual evidence of the contrary he stops responding.
Don’t even bother :).
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I mean you can’t sweep the grimdark vs. basic zombie invasion aesthetics under the rug. One of those is in fact more broadly appealing than the other. (Hint: it isn’t grimdark.)
Additionally all the changes they’ve proposed do in fact indicate good gear comes dramatically faster from skill. If I’m not remembering wrong, they said grim/scrip will start giving resources, and harder difficulty already gives you quite a lot more resources, and so a good player is not only going to make better choices in this new crafting system (a system where choices will matter) but they’ll have more resources to fuel the system too. I mean we can’t say for sure what magnitude the changes will be and I don’t think I heard anything about monstrosities being rewarded (but they should be!), but even without those changes we already have a system where Damnation players advance 54% faster than Malice players (that’s the current difference in Plasteel per run).
Why would games with a shallower weapon system be more hardcore? That doesn’t make any sense at all. Fact is Darktide’s weapons are individually dramatically deeper than anything L4D2 offers; it’s not even close. You can actually have a strategy guide on a single Mark of a single weapon type in this game, but you wouldn’t see that in L4D2 because the guns are quite shallow in use.
Pretty much hit it on the head. It’s fine to try new things or experiment with different ideas if the final result is interesting or engaging to interact with. So far, the new ideas being proposed in Darktide are none of the above, on the contrary, the new ideas being explored within Darktide are both harmful and hostile towards players; as well as the fact that they’re a complete downgrade to its predecessor. I can not fathom why this developer is reinventing the wheel when they already had a system that only needed refinement rather than being discarded completely - you could have saved so much development time budget by refining the systems you already had built up through years of development.
Again, I must reiterate: all of this could have been excused if the new ideas resulted in an engaging final product; however this isn’t the case, you traded one thing that worked for something that doesn’t work at all; do mind that you also wasted time budget on all of these features too, great job by the way, siphoning away development budget on nonsensical features that are actively harming the product. No one wants this garbage “crafting”, or this “map selection”, or the no score board, or the touted character customization.
All we wanted was Vermintide in space - read: memorable cast with amazing dialogue, crafting that allows you to actually craft your weapons and tinker with them, hand crafted maps, challenging content, rewarding progression based systems, feats that actually facilitate build diversity, ability to host private games, a functional lobby browser, entertaining weapons, good melee combat, and a developer that actually cares about its dedicated community that’s been with you since Vermintide 1.
The above could have easily been accomplished through refining existing systems and reiterating upon them in a way that addresses key feedback elements in which players gave you over the years. This process of reiteration instead of tearing everything down and starting from point a would have saved so much time budget and freed resources up to focus on new interesting content like more maps, more weapons, more classes, and so on.
It is ludicrous for me to think of how this developer mishandled what should have been that big break for Fatshark. The cherry on top though is the singular truth of how these bad systems are creating a schism within the community - there are actual individuals defending these garbage systems, some are even preferring them.
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Quote the devs doing that. (Fatshark’s devs, not unrelated devs.)
When you can’t, maybe pump the brakes on telling outright lies?
The closest you can come to that (and it isn’t telling people what they want at all) is basically what I’ve been describing post after post:
- players want maxed stuff.
- that doesn’t mean it’s the best game design to give players all maxed stuff immediately. (Just like players want to complete missions successfully, but it wouldn’t be good design if there weren’t obstacles to completing those missions!)
I believe at this point in its life (~3 months), even Payday 2 had gotten rid of the dogshit RNG in its mission selection system via the contract broker.
To be clear, nobody’s arguing for a hard grind to few viable paths. Many times in this thread (and I think to you directly) I’ve mentioned we really need a Perk/Blessings pass, which would cause there to be way more viable paths.
Yeah I completely agree with this and have suggested it myself (though mine was a little more limited: ‘allow players to set several favorite loadouts, see their team comp and then select a favorite loadout before joining’. So I didn’t suggest class change, but I think that’d be even better!)
Hmm, what did you mean here? Because my Sharpshooter uses a purple Catachan with +175% cleave blessing and with that alone it’s Damnation viable.
- I do think Catachan is slightly underpowered (either it needs more damage against armor or a slight increase to both light and heavy cleave targets, depending on if they want it to be a generalist or horde clear weapon)
- I also suspect +Cleave blessings are too strong.
- When +Cleave blessings are balanced, we’d almost certainly need a pass on weapon Cleave Targets too, since I think there are a few that just dominate due to their lights having higher cleave targets than some weapons’ heavy attacks (and by “some weapons” I’m not really referring to Combat Axes where the intent is clearly that they mostly suck at hordes; I’m talking about stuff like Catachans where you incur a lot of risk doing a heavy attack and you only get 8 targets, vs. Bull Butcher and Turtolsky having more than that on their light attacks!)
- I also think Catachan is overshadowed by Power Sword being overpowered.
So yeah, it’s a pretty complicated sub-topic and probably not worth diving into too much, but the comment just felt weird to me.
Not deeper. They are overwhelming because of the quantity and false variety. And here we go back to the effort required to try to get something you want…
Sorry, in L4D2 do you use different attacks with your melee weapons based on the quantity and type of enemies present? No, you just swing the melee weapon because “attack” is the only open you have. No combos to weave, no attacks better against some types of targets (or quantities of targets) than others. Well that’s what makes weapons shallow: that there’s almost no skill depth to any given weapon in L4D2. The depth difference isn’t a small one; it’s huge. Even with ranged weapons (which are much shallower than the melee ones) there’s a significant gap.
And then on top of that there’s also all those perks/blessings modifying things, yes. (The depth is dramatically deeper even if we assumed there was zero variation in damage, blessings, and perks. But then those factors make things deeper still.)