Yeah - I don’t disagree necessarily with any of these points. But …
a GOOD map, a REALLY good map, completely and utterly changes the team play going in to it. It changes team dynamic; enemy spread, the compactness you have to play in, what abilities are going to work better and when, which weapons are going to work best in specific sections and which are going to rely on teammates, how the flow will go, how the player(s) will feel, the speed you can progress, choke points, hold points, spawn points, grenade use. Can players wander solo? For how long? Where? And how does it look? Feel?
The new map Ascension Riser; that middle part where you have to race through small sections for example. Music ramps up, and you’re just carving through as fast as you can. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Compare that to the staircase right at the start in (I can’t remember the map name, but you always play it in the dark) where you have to go down a spiral staircase… or used to before it changed slightly. That’s horrific game play. It’s just luck on what turns up and whether you get through unscathed.
Look back at CS de_dust2. Remember de_train? No? Few do. I’m going to go out on a limb and say I bet the assassination missions are far more played than Hab Dreyko just because of the simplicity and tightness of the missions.
Anyway…
A new character by comparison: yeah, it offers some levelling abilities. Something a bit different and for sure I’m in. But in a melee/fps game, it’s just push, swing and shoot no? But bearing in mind we’ve still many players just playing a SINGLE character …
Too long a post I know. But tl;dr - really good maps take a lot of skill and time. You can * hope * for these to be free, but I’m gonna bet they’re expensive to make. So I was just saying I’d be happy to pay. But not via poo-ey cosmetics.
edit
^ came in as I was constructing my reply. Yes. Fair point. Let us choose our maps! Or rotate areas of Atoma so that there are fewer options, but less time in each zone. IDK
Probably Bogenhafen which was laughably low value DLC with the ability to queue up maps without paying, which is why all the subsequent expansions had (very poorly balanced) weapons as an extra.
Not just that, but they also ran into serious issues trying to sell Winds of Magic because nobody wanted weaves. They had to stuff that dlc full of crap to try to make it appeal to as many people as possible and it still failed.
There is a damn good reason that every map Fatshark has released since 2019, as well as Chaos Wastes, have been free releases. And ultimately it’s because they couldn’t make enough money on them, which I believe Hedge stated publicly at one point.
Had a friend that didn’t buy the expension because of beastmen. I think he wasn’t alone. If I could get cata without beastmen, I’d have taken the opportunity.
Flagbearer is the kind of enemy design I hate with passion.
Which is why they eventually made it so beastmen show up regardless of if you have WoM. And also why they changed it so that if you disabled the dlc you would no longer have access to the weapons from it.
I do, I spent thousands of hours in my youth on 1.6 and yes a map can definitely change things. But ultimately this is coop PvE so I’m not sure it’s as important. I love the new music in the maps though imo they’re not the best of the bunch we had since game launch. I play 100% of my games on quickplay unless I go Maelstorm so I make my builds in such a manner that I won’t struggle with geometry. Sure some maps are better than others for certain builds but I am not bothered. A full new class in my mind is much much better than 3 new maps. Also if you want to monetize maps AND classes you’ll be in trouble imo. Most likely I wouldn’t buy all the maps.
In fact in VT2 for a good bit of time I didn’t have map DLC. I got them on a very good discount.
And at that time I probably had around 500+ hours on the game, but I did buy classes almost instantly every time. If you monetize both, say we have 4 maps and 2 characters per year. 2 Char probably 14 euro total + 4 maps say 20Euro total? That’s almost as much as the game costs.
I’ll be damned if I have paid DLC and MTX in the same game. Having microtransactions in a game I paid money for is already pushing it, personally, and I do NOT want to pay additional money for additional content.
Microtransactions have been selected as the main way to continue to generate revenue, and the last thing I want is having to shell more money to the game just to play more of it, especially if said DLC is pay-to-win.
Idk there might be some merit to what you say but I don’t find it scandalous to pay for classes if we have like 2 per year and at like 5-7 euro per piece.
yeah but there’s also huge impetus for the ‘designers’ to absolutely dumpster the gameplay for potentially a YEAR if SoTT is any proof. so game breakingly stupid that they had to nerf it like a month after launch just to keep people from queue dropping when they saw her, and then about a year until proper nerfs that made it not the best damage career in the game x survival that would make IB blush.
and outcast engineer post buff, axe/falchion when they came out, mace/sword still…billhook, coru, like everything DLC is a minus to the game if you look at base content. Bardin’s melee selection on everyone’s tier list has 2 DLCs and then the rest. please do not encourage the same for this game…when weapons like rapier and exe sword are getting power crept, the entire spirit of what made the gameplay fun in the first place is getting siphoned away.
I think these are some good points but it’s going to require them scrapping the mission board and giving us something more standard (which imo is the best option anyways).
The problem i forsee is a very simple one where once you pass say 2-3 DLC maps there is a good chance that they will either do the following:
The fill up 50-60% of the mission board and it’s given difficulty which isn’t great for the people who passed on it
You only get 1-2 DLC missions per board which is never the difficulty you want and you basically wasted your money to never actually play the DLC missions except for once in a blue moon.
To me it’s not really a question of if new maps can be great and if they should be bought. It’s that within the current system having dlc maps will present a variety of problems either for the people who buy them or people who choose not to.
I would be happy if they just scrapped the mission board and went with something akin to Vermintide 2. I’ve been a fairly strong proponent of that since day one and if i don’t have to play toxin refinery 3 times in one day again i think the experience would be better for it.
It would be a similar experience to releasing De_Dust and having only De_Dust as an option with nothing else because the server filter was permanently stuck on filtering to only that map.
Yeah, sadly that’s the core issue for me. Too little and too late. The most frustrating part is that I feel they wasted a lot of time on development of absolutely terrible design ideas.
Like with the itemisation / crafting, players kept communicating “we DESPISE the RNG”, they acknowledged it, promised to fix it and added MORE of it in DT. There is no mistake here.
They also took multiple steps backwards with basic features we took for granted in VT2: freedom to select mission / difficult modifiers, a cosmetic shop which is actually functional and not malicious on multiple levels.
No to map DLC unless they overhaul the mission select system completely to allow you to, at the very least, select the difficulty and mission you want.
Imagine paying for something that you can’t access when you want to access it due to RNG.
Said updates having enough content to justify this glacial pace.
A couple new weapons and a new map isn’t enough to justify months of silence and minor patches, even if it does include a rework of a core system that shouldn’t have been like this in the first place.
I’ll accept the rework. I’m not greedy, but at least give us some more toys to play with in the future. Feature bloat is definitely a thing that we need to be careful to avoid, so we absolutely need either a better armory sorter or just to stop adding weapons eventually.
Overall I just don’t believe that you can take several months to develop a “major update” and have that update contain very little of note besides the main attraction. Maybe I’m wrong, though.