Whats cooking: new skins for the Arbi, a new boring map with reused objectives, a vet skill tree rework forcing you to remap your vet profiles.
You often have the hard role of the devil’s advocate and I respect your integrity because you bring some hard fact arguments counterbalancing the growing frustration of the entire forum but you also often come out as hard coping, borderline naïve.
FS clearly shows evidence for a massive lack of Quality processes, and an undeniable sense of lack of care. After three years we have only seen post launch half baked features being polished, asset recycling left and right and some new, yet grim and boring maps with redundant objectives, outside of the refreshing train map and the under used new icy biome of Gloriana. Oh, and one extra class.
No new real content: no new faction exploring the near infinite WH lore, no new mob behavior forcing us to adapt our gameplay while suffering in joy, no relevant game mode players truly want, no fun weapon, and overall no new real and unexpected gameplay mechanic leaving us mindblown.
Fatshark will never deliver map verticality, weapon customization, mob AI improvement, planet exploration, exciting storytelling, raid bosses…
There isn’t growing frustration anywhere. Maybe you weren’t here during launch or the first year or even up until Unlocked & Loaded. The game has (across the board) been, and continues to be, improved in substantial ways. And the metrics we can see prove that out.
You can consider me naive for having a charitable viewpoint on many of FS’s fumbles (it’s not my job, just my opinion). That’s fine. I think it’s naive and hard-mope to expect “verticality” and “raid bosses” or to be utterly positive that they won’t continue to add to the game (potentially with a new faction and solo mode, both of which they have experience with and you’ve stated are impossibilities) so we’re even on that front.
You spend more time than me answering here yet you refuse to acknowledge reality.
Fascinating.
I have never seen a game forum with that many well expressed complaints about a game not delivering basic features, server issues, lack of care and content.
Every single DT subsection of this forum has at least one highly active topic about one key feature not delivering per players’ basic expectations.
FYI, I have played since Month 2 after release, I am a WH40k fan and I have the same desire to see thisngameplay improve, but I have left the boat last year because I realized FS is fooling us while working on their new IP.
They treat you as a cattle.
I am not letting them milk others without a fight.
The reality you’re claiming to exist does not in fact exist. This place has massively chilled out because the game has massively improved.
By all means, keep doing whatever you’d like. I’m certainly not going to try to stop you, and you aren’t depleting my energy by having an opinion.
We just don’t agree.
FS has a product, we have bought the product. It is in FS’s best interests to continue improving the product. They’re doing it, they’re going to continue doing it.
To give Badwin some credit…this place has chilled out since launch.
Crafting got fixed so we’re not getting a thread every day or two demanding it be something better. Comms until 3-4 months ago were better. Balance was happening.
It’s been the past couple months of vacation plus Strawhat vanishing that has seen ‘the community’ get riled again, and even this current situation isn’t as bad as it was beforehand.
So the frustration is growing, but it’s not critical.
This is true and they have more or less kept that promise, but the problem is that these updates are more or less thrown out of nowhere without telling us what’s going to be in them ahead of time, releasing early patch notes for players to give reviews on, or general maintenance of the game (fixes to stability or balance tweaks).
Back in UL&L they released early patch notes detailing what changes were going to be made to the Ogryn and other weapons, and it was great. We all got to discuss what we liked about the changes and what wouldn’t address his main problems.
Since then, we’ve gotten nothing of the sort. They added the cops to the game (I don’t follow Warhammer, but RT also got an arbites DLC around the same time, so I wonder if these were to promote new arbites models) and we got like 3 days to preview the talent tree and weapons, which doesn’t really hit the same as the patch notes.
Balance tweaks are coming, and sound like they’re going to be prioritized in some way, according to Kitefin’s post when they gave us an early look on the balance changes before the last quarterly update. And it happened with U&L, as you’ve mentioned. And we got a preview for Nightmares & Visions, as well as balance update info for that. And they did similar preview dev blogs for Grim Protocols too (although no balance preview I don’t think).
Stability/performance is an ongoing issue, but they’re working on it. It’s pretty impactful for a range of players, so it makes sense for them to prioritize that. But I don’t know what process, or hangup(s), causes some issues to take a while to get fixed.
I too wish communication about this stuff came earlier and more regularly, so I could get hyped. But they do post this stuff, and they do seem to take feedback (which may just take a while to arrive). Have they integrated the players more closely into their process? Even through things I think would be easy, like player polls? They haven’t, and I wish they did. But that’d just be a bonus to me.
I don’t need updates about what’s coming months in advance, especially if there’s a chance they won’t deliver. I’d rather a clockwork company of happy people saying a thing then doing that thing. It feels like they have multiple teams working concurrently on different upcoming updates, and some of those get juggled around as needed. If that’s what’s been happening for 2+ years, I think it’s working pretty well.
This place has chilled out because it’s mostly dead compared to launch. It’s always the same people replying to the same topics because it’s the same core community that was there at launch and the same problem that have not been solved. If Fatshark did a better job at keeping a community you would see more people than the 10 or so usual suspects always active here and the few newcomers that join, ask a question or voice an opinion only to get the typical “not happening, we have been asking the same thing for the last 3 years” answer and never come back to the forum
I concur. Outside of no solo option and quibbles about map selection still (oh and the dumb FOMO shop), FS has fixed most of the major pain points in the game that it launched with. Which is good. But they’ve also left the gameplay in a rather monotonous unbalanced state. I think the forums have chilled out mostly because people have just stopped caring (and thus stopped posting).
The game is definitely in a draught right now, and the precipitous drop in player counts from the highest peak it had since launch is I think a testament to peoples’ feelings. Hard to get excited, passionate, vehement, whatever when there isn’t anything to get excited about on the horizon.
the place has “chilled out” because a lot of the people who were criticising fatshark’s lack of action on core issues have completely given up because it’s pointless trying to change this company that’s been like this for over a decade by complaining on a forum. even some of the playtesters are giving up on giving fatshark suggestions because fatshark dont listen
I might be in a minority but i keep coming back to this game because of it’s unique combat and overall quality in it’s core mechanics, even when some patches stir up the balance of the game it’s fun because at the core it’s really good.
The sound design is fantastic, the graphics is really good, the game runs very good (my personal experience) constantly, free content updates like new penance system, Class overhauls, Havoc, Mortis-trials, In-game party finder, weapons, skins etc.
The game three years old in November, that’s a lot of free updates.
But the steam charts shows that the player-base is growing, it’s small growth but it’s growth. We just received a whole new class how is this game in a drought?
The move from VT2 to Darktide was painful and felt disrespectful beyond belief due to so many learned and actioned on lessons that were absolutely trashed. There is something about their dev cycles that apparently completely isolates 1 project from another (which boggles the mind).
Knowing about long-term future plans is highly overrated in gaming communities. It’s not no-value but the person who is displeased with the game and awaiting changes/new content but would be playing the game now if they knew something was coming in X months does not exist. FS has also been burned by people making up nonsense from a discussion of incomplete/unreleased features/content. The only incentive for FS to announce way in advance what they’re planning to release is that there are fewer people moaning about communication on the internet. It just doesn’t meaningfully move the needle in any way that’s really relevant for them.
When they have something to deliver, they do a good job of communicating a) what they are delivering and b) interesting BTS/essentially optional information to the update. They do it in a way that is actually near (typically 1 month out) to the date of content release such that the hype built usually translates into a meaningful player count increase. Having a publicly accessible JIRA board, as an extreme example, or like a weekly “here’s what’s happening at FS” post just does not produce enough juice from the squeeze. If anything it would give fuel to all the armchair project managers and such types to further negative discussion around the game. If you’re very anxious about whether or not a game developer is working on your favorite video game, I’d recommend finding some coping strategies that don’t involve being on the internet.
Ok I did forget about NM&V, that’s on me. It is good that we are getting this previews… regularly now, I think. Not 100%? I don’t remember if the Arbites update included patch note previews for everything that wasn’t the cops.
Again, I really don’t want to ask for much. Just monthly words about the current direction the game is going, known issues being worked on, known issues on the backburner, etc.
I feel like people are looking back on the mostly finished VT2 and not a snapshot of a similar point in time where it was basically the same situation as today. Though there was always more base game since it had all the enemies of VT1 + the rotbloods, 3 new monsters and 4 lords…we haven’t gotten anything new to kill since the gas bomber that was mentioned in the beta and could be spawned by creature spawner like a year before he appeared (but he didn’t work and made fire grenades iirc).
What, you mean you didn’t love the radio operator?
Oh wait, maybe you were one of the countless that didn’t even notice it outside of it being placed on a penance yet being unavailable after the event it was in. Yet another time they memory-holed their own work.
that, and it was dead before the waves of enemies it would spawn would even appear, unless it lucked out and managed to survive running away from you. which wasn’t likely with scab gunner AI and only 2000 HP on T5. and with the like 2 or 3 a level it was a nothingburger. the rotten armor reskin was more impactful and it didn’t even work properly (apparently all damage was supposed to be buffered, not just ranged). too bad we didn’t get the proper version of THAT event…the rotten armor reskinned maulers looked even cooler, since they still wore so many bones.
But yeah at least tentacle guys and Moebian 21st got a home.
“When they have something to deliver, they do a good job of communicating”
Brother, the issue is not the communication, its the failure to delivery + spam of nonsense comms combined with menial hotfixes that do nothing and the lackluster updates.
Everything combined over the lifespan of the game has chased out the vast majority of the playerbase. Look at other successful service games and compare. From the outside looking in the updates are sporadic, there is no consistency between the patch cadence. POE is the greatest example of why you should have a user facing delivery schedule for your content pipeline.
This isn’t FS’ first rodeo either, they’ve been repeating the same mistakes over and over which is what causes the most friction with the people that genuinely enjoy the gameplay niche they are serving, not the fact that they are making mistakes.