That’s why I said it’s whoever is in charge of them, aka the person who authorizes what they disclose. Do you have a reading comprehension problem?
The solution to that is only promising what you can deliver, not complete radio silence.
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Maybe that’s exactly what they’re doing, and they didn’t announce it until they were sure they could deliver it.
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I’m ambivalent about the idea of a skill tree.
But if we can’t change our selections at will like we currently can with feats, I change my review on steam to thumbs down, uninstall my game and close my forum account.
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Don’t get me wrong, it’s absolutely not my first choice. Or my choice at any level. The only thing that even made me consider it is the line “RPG-style”. Plenty of RPGs make skill point purchases permanent so it is a possibility but not one that is in line with the model of the Tide games thus far.
If it is freely changeable, all we need is an Athanor-like mechanic for weapons and the game will be “perfect” in my eyes (or thereabouts).
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Good change, sidesteps the need to develop subclasses.
Still need to make crafting not as antagonistic as it is, and work on new missions.
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Looking at the thumbnail art for the Zealot tree it looks like some sort of buff/de-buff specialist on the left, something pretty close to the front-liner melee guy we have now in the middle and another melee on the right, maybe an assassin, glass-dagger type?
I also notice that the current talents we have seem to be taken from both the middle and right branches. I’d always wondered why the current classes felt like generalist, Jack-of-all-trades sorta deals. For instance, the grenade talents on the “sharpshooter”, as useful as they can be on certain builds, they’re clearly more of a demolition specialist’s (typically called a “breacher” in lore) talent than a marksman’s. If the current talents we have on all classes are actually a mixture of all three paths or at least two that would make a lot of sense on why they feel that way.
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Pretty cool, this is basically what they promised pre-release (they kept saying that careers will be different from Vermintide and more customizable).
Hopefully they keep up this trend of working on delivering on pre-release concepts. A lot of the things they talked about pre-release but clearly didn’t make the cut would be amazing for the game, e.g. weapon customization replacing an RNG crafting system.
If they keep up this direction the game will rapidly approach the actual 1.0 state it should’ve launched as which will be great
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Meh.
This is sorely needed as the existing classes are bland af, but it’s not going to do a lot to bring me back to the game. It’ll be a minor novelty to play with these mechanics, but it’ll be better saved to experience when they deliver the rest of the 1.0 version of the game.
…because we’re not even at the 1.0 stage of the game yet since the article mentions that these skill tree changes were in the works before the game actually released.
It has me wondering how many other systems in the game are placeholders for the actual systems they wanted to release with, and it kind of really annoys me because this information would have been fantastic to know about at launch.
I’ll be honest, I probably would have refunded straight away with the knowledge that most of the systems are/were placeholders, but I would have been much more likely to come back when everything was finished, instead of stewing in a bog of resentment while being gaslighted about the next update that was always due Next Week™.
Or better yet, they should have known better and pushed their game as early access instead of being terrible and wanting all that preorder money.
It’s also step in the right direction, but it’s method of delivery has kind of left a salty taste in my mouth.
To push this news without releasing it in concert with a comm-link from the community managers seems slimy as all heck. The CM’s have been taking heat for the state of the game since day one. The least FS should do is let them deliver the good news, and not only the bad.
This reads to me like Anders knows he has crapped the bed and is trying to claw back some kind of legitimacy as a Game Director in the eyes of the industry.
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Something else I don’t see being discussed a heap here yet. This is basically all subclasses for free wrapped up in a neat package with vastly more flexible build possibilities. I was fully expecting the VT2 monetized classes model but very happy to be wrong about that. Never imagined not only would subclasses be free but we’d be able to mix and match their passives, Ult, blitz, and feats. The possibilities are genuinely extremely exciting.
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If anything, this suggests to me that they probably are going to charge for new classes, and they’ll probably be more expensive than V2’s subclasses given that each new class will have a skill tree like this.
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That’s still vastly preferable because we get all the subclass content we thought we’d be paying for for free then when new paid archetypes or whatever they’re called come out they’re genuinely substantial additions. Seems like a win win.
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Depends on pricing, really. One issue around subclasses as separate paid entities is that balance changes can nuke their usefulness and waste your money. A skill tree like this makes it less likely that your whole investment is going to be nuked because you can reroll your skills (and hope that the part that nuked it wasn’t fundamental to all builds), but whether that works out better than having separate subclasses will depend on what they charge for it.
To piggyback on your take, thus your sub-class comes from tinkering with the skill tree to create an entirely different way to play said class.
Yeah, I like the change, but if it’s two months out, we’re getting no major patches until then, Fatshark maintains it’s usual level of QA, and the various other problems still aren’t being solved…this is too little too late.
The fact that they apparently decided to bypass the Community Managers entirely is also moderately annoying. Catfish deserves better.
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Exactly. I think it’s generally a preferable option to separate paid subclasses.
Balance and pricing are going to be the key points to nail down, imo.
It’ll also possible that it’ll alleviate a little of the anxiety around gear and crafting - This change would effectively mean that your gear is available to a set of potentially very different class playstyles. I.e, right now you really have to switch classes if you want a different playstyle or game experience, which sometimes means crafting up multiples of the same piece of gear for each class. This sort of talent tree should give a similar level of variety within a single class, but with the advantage that you don’t need to craft up the same piece multiple times.
It’ll also help monetisation, since the likelihood to engage with mtx systems is proportionate to the time you’re exposed to things you can buy - If you’re always on the same root class because you don’t need to switch classes to get that variety in gameplay that people are after, you’re more likely to do that.
Anders’ role makes him is the appropriate person to be the face of this sort of news through this sort of channel. It’s a different job to that which the CMs do.
Yeah, the more I simmer on this, the more annoyed I am.
It shows a clear disconnect between the playerbase and the upper management of FS. Anders De Geer, Darktide Game Director, seems to be entirely disinterested in communicating with the Darktide playerbase.
Instead of making a forum post himself, or even delegating it to the CM’s, he’s chasing media attention for himself, and not even great media attention at that. PCGamer is hardly the first avenue I’ll take to find gaming news. There are much better websites out there. Hell, I’ve gotten more of my gaming news from Penny Arcades blog posts than I ever have from PCGamer.
Bottom line, FS need to really pull their finger out and hire a capable media strategist. This hodgepodge approach is just embarrassing to watch at this stage.
Either make Catfish the face and name of all things Darktide, or Anders needs to step up an own that role himself and take the good with the bad instead of self indulgently attaching his name to media only press releases.
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This was involves us getting the sub class content for free which we likely wouldn’t with the individual sub class model. Regardless the content value of the base game increases significantly even if paid archetypes are somehow overpriced garbage. Increasing base game content this much massively trumps any monetisation advantages of doing it as individual subclasses IMO. I don’t know how there can even be any argument about that.
I’m of the opinion that adding bad content is the same as (or sometimes worse than) not adding more content at all. Content isn’t good just because it’s there.
Like, if a class archetype or subunit is bad (or is made bad through future balancing), that’s not content I’m going to engage with, so it might as well not exist. Buying either of these is going to be lost investment if they’re bad and it’s going to hit me harder if I’ve spent more money and expect to get more out of it.
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Sure. If it’s done in conjunction with communications releases by the community managers.
The PC Gamer article was a comm-link masquerading as a press release, but without the good grace of being communicated with the playerbase directly.
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