i feel like if they really want to increase prices of premium skins where most of them are just recolor or having clipping issues
they should at least make aquilas being earnable in-game in some ways.
putting aquilas earnable still provides benefits to the company.
As in, people playing the game more, and if they are happy about certain skins, they can also use the aquila they earned for free + buying aquilas on the store to complete transactions, which would also support Fatshark.
but if we can’t even earn aquilas then, i’d never buy skins.
i’d rather buy weapons, classes, or new voice types/hairstyles to support fatshark.
(anything that is not a skin) too way easy to sell skins that don’t look that great, too way hard to implement/sell actual content. and maybe, if it is hard, it is because of this monetization imo, which may be understandable why the development may be slow, because people not buying skins since they are, not looking good. therefore not earning enough to develop constant (free) content, or even QoL updates, like map selection, being able to have more customization with free skins, etc.
That is distinctly not the issue. They are of poor quality as a matter of objective fact. Countless clipping issues and all the rest make that pretty clear. I suppose it’s subjective that they’re bad designs, but it’s a sentiment echoed by many more people than just me. There’s probably a reason for that.
The criticism is not as simplistic as “make stuff cooler”. I haven’t seen anyone put that forward as their critique. What I have seen is people asking for fewer, or no, simple retextures of the same tired meshes we’ve seen a hundred times, fewer kitbashes of already used stuff, less goofy and off-theme stuff and some respectable and faithful adaptations of models or troops from the lore (kasrkin, valhallans, a real krieg set, and so forth).
We also shouldn’t have to be repeatedly asking for models that aren’t broken when FS charges real money for them. They should be properly checked by QA to make sure their implementation is without glaring faults, which far too often they are not.
I know what your saying but this is purely subjective. You say something is respectable and someone else says it isn’t. I say something is rad someone else says it’s goofy. That’s not something an artist can work with, and while I’m sure there are a lot of superfans out there the 3D artists probably have enough art directors as it is.
Telling Fatshark what to make isn’t going to work. Make more of this… do less of this… it isn’t going to happen. The best option is to at least remove the FOMO aspect of it all. Show people what’s available, set a price, and let them decide. If it’s goofy or off brand to you, don’t buy it. If it fits your idea of the lore, go for it.
You’re right, to a point. The leaked Tempestus Scion set is a good example of what I mean. Regardless of what anyone may present as their opinion on it, it does not look like a Tempestus Scion armor set as depicted in official artwork. That’s not my opinion, that’s true. We can play the “that’s subjective” tug of war game all day long, but when a studio receives consistent complains en masse about the quality and style of their premium cosmetics, it becomes an objective fact that there’s some kind of issue with what they produce. Whether they care about that or decide to act upon that fact is another matter entirely and one I have not and will not comment on.
No, it is popular opinion not objective fact. But for the sake of argument, how would you resolve the quality issue? Submit artwork to the community for approval before releasing it? I’m not being snarky - I simply don’t see a realistic way to approach it.
gonna disagree there. Im sure Warhammer tabletop faithfuls who want strict adaptations are a sizable portion of the playerbase, and they get excited about Krieg sets (i dont get the appeal personally, it looks very Gestapo to me, which I would rather be shooting at in CoD than roleplaying as in DT). But there’s a lot of us who could not care less if something matches a tabletop game we don’t play. We love wearing Pigmar on our head as Saltzpyre in Vermintide. We find the DT aesthetic and color palette dreary and repetitive and would love some goofy and off-theme stuff. But that’s a GW constraint the DT team doesn’t have control over, and a portion of the playerbase would dislike deviating from. I hope there is a middle ground that doesnt alienate the tabletop fans. For now there is nothing appealing to purchase in the store to people like me, so they arent getting us to open our wallets.
EDIT: actually, i did buy that giant tire for Ogryn cuz it made me laugh
Presumably there’s GW oversight… at least some authorized corpo overlord is green-lighting things. I’m sure the people making the cosmetics, like most commercial artists, feel like there are too many layers of approval they have to deal with.
That it is popular opinion would itself be an objective fact. Everything corporations do to make money is based on navigating subjective consumer opinions. Let’s not do this.
Obviously not. It’s clear enough that FS has better hands on deck for their model work than whoever is making their premium shop stuff. They can demonstrably do better than a lot of what’s in there. This is made especially obvious when they rotate in themed sets, like the Elysian sets and so on. They also, presumably, have a QA department. It’s as easy as booting up the game and looking at the models to see if they have any glaring issues, most of whom are readily apparent upon first glance, like clipping or bad hair morphs etc.
This doesn’t really answer the issue you’re raising.
Like I said earlier clipping issues are something that can and should be fixed. No argument there.
The other complaints you have are things not fitting your idea of lore, or being goofy, or being off-theme. These are not things QA can ‘fix’.
My question is how could FS satisfy you that things look good enough, clipping issues excluded. They have artists, and art directors, and creative directors, and god only knows how many layers of approval that each piece goes through before release. So what happens when it doesn’t meet your expectations? Do they pull it and go back to the drawing board?
My point about subjectivity isn’t just semantic. It underlines that there isn’t a realistic way of including popular opinion in the art creation process. We can vote on how well something is executed with our space bucks and that’s about it.
First of all, I’m not arguing that they “satisfy me” or my tastes here so let’s stop with that out of the gate.
There’s clearly enough of a portion of the consumer base that buys these things for them to justify doing it. I would reasonably assume that that is mainly how it gets passed by all the layers. Again, there are clear examples of things based on specific in lore references that fail to even look like them, the Krieg set being the big and obvious example here and the Tempestus Scion one is another. Is it unfathomable to you that we should expect them to scrutinize their concept arts and first drafts a little more to make sure they’re actually staying faithful to what they’re trying to replicate? I really don’t think it is. Maybe when they hold up their finished product next to their source of inspiration and find that they don’t exactly match very well they actually should go back to the drawing board instead of selling the broken scraps of their cosmetic pipeline to people?
Warhammer fans are notoriously nitpicky but it’s not because they’re assholes, it’s because they are exceptionally passionate about the whole IP. It’s what’s helped keep it true to itself for so long. I’m not sure what FS or you or anyone else would expect when they put these things out. They are not matching expectations to a lot of fans.
And before you even go there, there will always be people around to buy anything. People bought NFT’s. To say “well some people like it” doesn’t really mean anything.
What they should want to be the case is that no major sliver of their fans have an issue with what they put out, whether they buy it or not. Currently, there is repeated outcry over their premium shop both in terms of the price but also the quality. Occasionally you’ll find a “what the hell is this” type of reaction, though those are not as common.
I ain’t interested in more of this constant back and forth. Enough people have voiced enough complaints about this whole aspect to establish that there is clearly some issue, whether some people chose to buy these things or not. FS decides if they care enough to do anything about that.
You like the original, someone else likes the new one. An example of why art by committee doesn’t work. Technical issues are one thing, aesthetics are another.
But the bottom line is as unlikely as it is Fatshark / Tencent will remove the manipulative approach to their store, it is even less likely they’ll rework art because a slice of users doesn’t think it’s good enough. Including community feedback into the asset creation pipeline as a rule is just a terrible idea. Any commercial artist would tell you the same.
There are a lot of problems with the store and FS’s approach to cosmetics but we have to pick our battles. Remove the FOMO? Allow a degree of customization? Complain about individual pieces being low effort? These are all different issues with different likelyhoods of being listened to (all somewhat unlikely imo).
Friend you keep repeating this, but I still haven’t heard a proposed solution. What do you want Fatshark to do? Pretend you’re in a meeting with their executive board - what do you realistically want them to change?
