A friend group and I, constantly ask questions about how certain skills/perks work due to the horrendous wording of skills in this game.
Let us take some examples: Fury of the faithful:
Dash forward, Replenishing 50% Toughness (of the current? total?) & +20% attack speed for 10s. Your gains +25% (25% what?!) and is a guaranteed Critical Hit. Steady Grip:
+2% Toughness Regeneration (Passive toughness regen? a unique +2% toughness regen? Does it stack?) while bracing your Ranged weapon. Psykinetic’s Aura:
Decreases Ability Cooldown for you and your Allies in Coherency by 5% on Elite or Specialist Kill. (Does that only trigger when the Psyker does it or for everyone in Coherency?)
While you can look at those further + test them to figure out what they do (and I’m sure there will be a good amount of people who gonna tell me they fully understand everything written in this game), we still had too many talks in my group to show it is as a wider issue.
My advice is to take a look at how MtG cards are written, they are very concise and have mastered the brief and direct informative language.
And when in doubt, construct your skills as “When/If, X/Y/Z happens”. Example, Psykinetic’s Aura:
Whenever you kill an Elite or Specialist, you and Allies in Coherency decrease the cooldown of their Ability by 5%.
And if you guys don’t wanna do it, honestly send it my way, I would happily correct and rewrite all of the skill trees for free.
They do not understand the impact it makes on players retention.
Additionally, their UX lead is more like junior or they even dont have one. Most likely their GD lead tells to UX junior what to do.
Not gonna be as doom and gloom about it, don’t think that would be the reason why they are losing players (there are plenty of other reasons for that lmao).
But yeah, it is just something that shouldn’t be very hard to convey, yet they keep fumbling with again and again.
They never explain anything in their games, making people rely on datamining, testing and third party sites. If you want to really fall down the rabbit hole, try figuring out which bonuses are multiplicative, and which are additive. Which is a massive difference.
Mostly they don’t explain anything because FS themselves have absolutely no idea how their game works, or how different abilities interact with each other.
Trust me, my friends and I ask each other that every day lmao
Yeah, dunno, they could color code it, so if it is “+5%” written in green it is multiplicative and if it is “+5%” written in blue it is additive, but what do I know about game design?
Speaking of which, when I studied game design, many of our first projects were to design board games, to train us in conveying information. Because a board game’s ruleset needs to be concise and self-contained within its own manual.
Ofc that used to be the norm with video games too, but that is long forgotten relic, but at least do as Deep Rock Galatic and make an in-game compendium where you explain all your enemies, stats/modifiers and mission types.