Bring out the dead horse, I wanna kick it and throw nickles down its throat. As much as I’m willing to go up to bat for FS they have been deathly afraid of communicating with the community for years.
Chalk it up to last PR blunders, promises that fell through, or just most forms of official discussion being wasp nests. For one reason or another these swedes are scared stiff to tell us anything about what they’re working on until they release it, at most events like Skulls squeeze something out. If they want to stay in their ivory tower and secretly work on the game that’s fine but it wouldn’t hurt to come out and tell us something every now and then. At least the content droughts wouldn’t hurt so much if you did.
Say what you will about Saber and Space Marine 2 but I think that their community updates at the end of every month have kept spirits up long enough to wait out for the next update.
Honestly this would be great. It doesn’t necessarily need to be big promises or 6 month road maps, but even just end of month updates dropping little hints of things already completed that month to fuel discussion and reassure the community that content is in the works would be much better than radio silence.
Considering that hey didn’t talk about the last update until it was out
I doubt communication is going to be very good for a while
Tbf we haven’t had a content drought per se, their updates have been consistently quarterly for over a year now and i doubt they’ll ever be any faster.
I wish they would take a field trip to Coffee Stain (also in Sweden). They have amazing community management.
It’s the silence from FS that makes it appear they don’t really care about the player experience, because that’s exactly what you do when you don’t care about someone, ignore them. They know crashing/aborting/DCing is bad right now. They know it’s causing Havoc players to derank. Nothing. Just biz as usual.
For Christ’s sake, the splash page on the launcher read “Bond by Duty” in the description section for days back-to-back with “Augmentics” and “Augmenticists” being used interchangably.
Maybe management should try communicating well using proven industry standards and empowering their community team to direct meaningful changes to their games or the associated promotional materials, instead of relegating the role to intern-adjacent, junior-level hires left to backdoor communication with streamers of all people.
But that would require a modicum of respect for the people who pay them, and bitterness has probably long set into the culture.
Anyway, I never got Baron Rivendare’s mount so I figured this would have to do for today.
I think their marketing team is extremely top-heavy (7ish executive level positions) and focusses on bringing in new players rather than engaging with existing players.
I guess they don’t value word of mouth? If the existing players are happy, they’ll pull more people in. I can only imagine that’s marketing 101. Maybe marketing 201 is about how to ignore the existing players and pull in fresh blood other ways.
During the Steam Autumn Sale I was planning on pulling in 2 of my friends, but with all the crashes, aborts, and DCs, I couldn’t do it. Imagine getting your friend to buy or play a game and have it crash on them 2/3 of the way through a mission. I’m not that kind of friend.
Seriously, a simple: “here’s what we’ve worked on the past month” would go a looooong way. Even longer if stuff they’re working on had to do with 3 year old unkept promises like, oh, I don’t know… solo mode?
If FS did talk about what they were doing all we would get is months of people complaining about how slow it is, or holding their feet to the fire for having to drop something they were working on. only so it releases and the vets complain they didnt get enough.
2 years I hope for such communication… when I compare Funcom to Fatshark, this is night and day.
You never know what Fatshark is about to do…
However, if we compare to Funcom, we have a forum where we can express our feelings. For Dune awakening, you just have discord and the steam forum.
Yes… still waiting for it. I just want to have my own char as bots and be able to play solo.
Few adjustments, mainly on bots, are needed to make this a reality… after 2 years, they should deliver what they promised us!
