I could not agree more, the problem of good tools making poor workers applies to any software industry unfortunately.
fancy dev tools and sdks solve a lot of common problems, but still big chunk of work needs to be done by senior designers, architects and devs to get stuff glued in a smooth way. need of more stuff done quicker translated (thank you covid lockdowns) to disparity between junior and senior members and it is what it is…
hopefully in few years we gonna get more senior ppl out of juniors who drive the show now
There is a lot of this happening across many industries. Say what you will about Boomers, but they had a lot of institutional knowledge and in particular “old knowledge” that was honed from before the modern tech era. A lot of that knowledge isn’t getting passed along, and younger people assume the new tech-heavy thing is better simply because its newer.
I’m a board game designer (as a side gig, but I have been published) and when I look at newer eras of videogames and how they are designed, I worry that there is a chunk of design skill simply missing from a lot of studios. Designs are running on momentum from what was done before, but even that gets corrupted by financially-driven decision making. Someone with an MBA is dictating best practices for design, and that becomes the motivator. The motivator is no longer “designer a good game to have the best player experience.”
The bigger the studio, the more outside investment comes into play, the more this seems to be the state of affairs. There are exceptions of course, where a bigger studio holds tight onto a vision and set of principles for what they want to make. But usually it’s the smaller indie studios that are putting their passions into practice.
There’s a lot of dumb business theories floating around about what drives player retention and so on as well, instead of focusing on the thing the customers desperately care about (having an insanely fun and replayable time) game companies seek to leverage gimicks like crafting without understanding why players like those systems or what makes them work.
Its basically a meme level understanding
put crafting in it
b*ches love crafting
The irony being that if you focus on what the customer wants they’ll shovel money at you.
Right or wrong, I suspect there is a valid argument that can be made for why and how these practices DO drive player retention. But it isn’t like these theories are being tested in a controlled environment where we can see whether a different approach would’ve worked better. It all feels anecdotal and there are so many variables in play that also affect things.
But we can look at the evidence of immediately comparable games - Deep Rock Galactic, Payday 2, Left 4 Dead 2. Those all do NOT have the same contrived retention tactics to DTs extent, and they all have much better player numbers and in many cases those numbers are continuing to grow.
I think a lot of it comes down to knowing your audience and understanding who you’re actually designing the game for. Or if even designing a game for the diehard audience is even worth a consideration.
If Fatshark had a goal to sell 2-million copies, with some amount of cosmetic sales on the back of that - in many cases it doesn’t even matter if they designed the game for the diehard fans or not. So long as they could make the initial sales goal (and the 40k IP helps tremendously with that!) and come amount of premium purchases after what - from their perspective is it even worth the effort to try and make things better? Or is it better to just move onto the next thing?
Speaking of the next thing, Fatshark is no doubt working on the console release. And the updates and fixes we’re getting today are all so they have something they can point to ahead of the console release and say “hey, we fixed all this stuff and the game is great!” Not enough people that might buy it on console are going to care about the 4,300 steam players complaining about the game on the official forums. So long as people can smash heretics for a dozen hours, that’s all they need to accomplish.
Which is to say I’m pretty cynical about Fatshark at this point. They haven’t done a single substantive thing to improve the core design of the game and demonstrate that they care at all about the community or its concerns. We clearly don’t matter to them. And if we’re unlikely to give them any more money, from their perspective, why would they care about us? It’s a cynical loop all around and sad really.
Absolutely. I’ll not even be overly cynical about it. That’s the right thing to do. If they stick the landing they can potentially recruit back a decent playerbase and bring in new PC gamers too who will buy cosmetics. Its just their timescale sucks. If they were running at about 2x the speed, dropping a second map at 3 months and a 3rd map at 6 months and landing a two class release this may (doubt we even get one) you’d have something ready for Xbawks that really impresses.
The crafting system issues are a 200 hour gamer problem. The first few hundred hours are all good times right now, as it is. But the content is where they are dying.
I have never met a game that fights me so hard on playing it. I just want to play with my friends. The problem is, the only thing that’s actually challenging is Hi-Intensity Shock Troop or, maybe, Hi-Intensity Ventilation Purge Sniper Gauntlet. The latter isn’t as hard but is at least fun to play. But normal Hi-Intensity is just a snooze fest, and lmao @ Low-Intensity. Just no.
Consequently the only thing we CAN do is check the mission board anytime we feel like playing and hope It’s really infuriating. I WANT TO PLAY THE GAME. But a cake walk simply isn’t enjoyable to play, and I can’t pick the difficulty modifiers I want. So what do?
I was just scanning through Steam and saw there’s another V2 tourney coming up. Sounded like an interesting idea to bring to DT, so I check the rules. Among them was:
It’s really infuriating. I WANT TO PLAY THE GAME. But a cake walk simply isn’t enjoyable to play, and I can’t pick the difficulty modifiers I want. So what do?