Would anyone here argue the game wasn’t worth £40/€40? I’ve easily had that.
The shop is ridiculously priced and I’m not interested in those cosmetics at all.
But I would happily help support some ongoing dev work by paying another £7 for another 4 maps. Maybe they could be set in a 2nd mega city. Or the desert. Or…well, whatever. Just a different feel from the black on grey on black.
I’d also pay a £5 for a totally new player class (/archetype or whatever you like to call it).
And that money could maybe just help then support time to do some weapon balancing and crafting improvements.
Seriously what I’m far less interested in are more weapons. I’ve not used over half of what’s already out there as it stands, and have no interest in another variant of the same functional weapon.
Premium cosmetics are there to avoid gating content behind additional cost.
Even changing the system to paid content and free/cheaper cosmetics would be worse than having most if not all (VA cost encured by making a new archetype could force them to have it be sold) content remain free
Releasing DLC maps was their old model of monetisation but they pretty much transitioned to cosmetics saying they didn’t like DLC fragmenting the QP pool so they’d prefer to release maps for free while monetising cosmetics instead. I don’t think they’re likely to return to the old model, and I tend to agree splitting the playerbase with DLC maps is not ideal.
Vermintide 2, for all its faults, also launched in a far better and more complete state than darktide did and was more quickly fixed up.
Meanwhile, darktide launched face first into its own freshly dug grave. And even 18 months after launch Fatshark is still managing to struggle to achieve any head way towards climbing out of that hole.
Ah yes. Before I expect a product with advertised features to deliver said features I should prostrate myself in front of the seller and apologize for expecting the goods I paid for to be delivered.
I love the game and am invested. They just need to stop not releasing sh*t that was promised one time or another. Not once a year, ffs.
For instance the Karnak twin update was cool! It was something. But I don’t give a kark about them. I mashed them up and moved on. Instead the damned crafting system is there forever and I always interact with it, miserably as usual.
I am not interested in paying for maps. I think maps should be released at a steady pace each time but for free. What I am interested in paying for and seems reasonable to me is Classes as you said and very rarely skins. Maps are cool and all, but I don’t get the same out of a map by a longshot vs what i get out of a class. After the first times maybe admiring the environment the map is a space in which I fight in. The team, me and the content we’re fighting is what keeps me going, not the fact the map is pretty or whatever. It’s a space. I don’t know if I’m explaining myself adequately.
Big issue with paying for maps in the first place is that as of now there aren’t a lot of them and many retread some of the same ground from previous missions with slight alterations.
It also splits up an already small community even more by people who shelled out for the maps and people who did not. Personally if I had to pay for one (and this is contingent on them actually fixing their itemization) I would be more ok with Classes.
If it’s not a class I’m interested in I can just safely ignore it and still play the game.
If it’s a new map I basically need to get it in order to keep playing the up to date content. This is especially with their mission board, like imagine loading in one day and half the mission board is maps you flat out don’t own.
The issue with mappacks is that it further fragments the already very thinly spread playerbase.
Same goes for difficulties. Locking Cataclysm behind WoM for instance was a terrible idea back in VT2.
Not to mention that Darktide has mission board RNG. Imagine paying for a map DLC and being unable to play it BECAUSE THERE’S NO FCCKING WAY TO SELECT MAPS STILL.
