For those that don’t know, Warframe is a literal looter shooter in a sense that when you kill an enemy, any enemy, they drop some sort of resource. There’s thousands of enemies, and collecting all those resources takes longer than killing them.
So for years warframe community was asking devs to add a way for resources to auto-collect somehow, and eventually came up with the idea of Universal Vacuum - when you move through the map, every drop in a 10 meter radius gets vacuumed to you. Simple and effective, but the devs would not relent - it’s not the intended design, it would break the game, it’s not happening.
It was such a glaring issue with a clear fix, so the community would post and post, discussion after discussion, until finally after at least 2 years of asking they introduced it in The Vacuum Within update. It wasn’t what people asked for, not exactly, but it was a huge step in the right direction.
Personally, I think weapon locks fall into the same category - an obviously bad design that for some reason Fatshark seems to have chosen as a hill to die on. And i don’t think this upcoming change to locks is good enough to satisfy anyone. Not being able to change conventional weapons to your heart’s content is not lore-friendly, not to mention making no sense.
All this to say - Fatshark, i implore you to please learn from other devs as well. When the community brings something up and gets ignored, you lose trust and passionate players eventually leave.
There’s a pretty big difference. Warframe was (is?) hugely successful.
Darktide’s playercount is dropping off a cliff. FatShark is actively choosing to kill the game (and potentially their studio) in order to keep a feature they know is horrifically bad. How do I know they know it’s bad? Because even a person with so few braincells that they struggle to open doors would be able to see that their entire items system and the locks is obviously bad.
It’s because they are completely out of touch with gamers.
They are focussed on retaining players by adding layers of nuissance between you and what you want to increase the time it takes to get it. That’s driving people away in big numbers.
VT2 had a terrible crafting system, but at least it was possible to get what you want fairly easily. Apparently they decided getting what you want without spending tens of hours per item was too easy.
Wow, that debate takes me back. Digital Extremes back in the day, and still somewhat currently were incredibly stubborn. Players would find ways to farm things and they would immediately nerf them. They wouldn’t budge on the universal vacuum for the longest time, then they finally folded and gave everyone a half ranged crappy version just to be spiteful. Its like dejavu with Fatshark here. The difference is Warframe has tens of thousands of players while Fatshark only has a few thousand.
I think the devs think we won’t log in if we get what we want.
They are partly right, players need goals to keep them in games, but this isn’t it. This is just pissing us off.
A constant flow of new content is the best thing to keep us in game. (which, as a player who left in January and just came back for a check I can tell you isn’t here. You’ve had months are there’s only like 2 new maps? DANG!) The next best is big drops we can work towards. RNG grinding is a trick we know, we’re sick of, and we don’t want.
FatShark has some exec somewhere who won’t let go of the idea this is going to save the game. “They will keep logging in to get that perfect ripper gun!”
The only logical justification for why Fatshark is making this decision (aside from them being insane or incompetent, which I don’t think is the case) is that they have aspirations to monetize the gear system in the future.
Its not hard to imagine that they will add “Red” items with cool weapon skins to the premium shop, and that these “red” items will have some some fixed stats and maybe won’t be subject to perk/blessing locks. They can weasel their way around the issue of paying for gameplay enhancements by saying “technically these red items are no better than what you can conceivably get through RNG”. Just like how in VT2 you could technically get a perfect orange item that’s identical performance wise to a red item.
When the communications say things like “this is just the next step in the crafting / item progression journey” they clearly have something like what I’m describing above in mind. This is also why, among other reasons, they are so cagey about stating their “design intent.” Their intent is to milk whales - but they can’t say that publicly of course.
If this is NOT their secret justification for this paltry change, then FS’s behavior is truly incomprehensible to me. Maybe they know the game is operating on a loss and they want to just kill it off and blame the players instead of their own bad design decisions? I don’t know.
At least the lack of universal vacuum is not a huge issue, since a vacuum mod can be equipped to companions, allowing players to deal with the problem.
It is stupid to have this mandatory mod as a solution for this unnecessary problem, but at least the mod is a solution and removes the issue (as long as the companion is alive).
Although DE did not add universal vacuum to the game, at least they gave players the ability to effectively play the game as if they had.
With the locks in Darktide, there is nothing that we can do about it.
No tool that we are given to work around it.
I wish FS gave the locks the same treatment that DE gave the vacuum. This would mean that locks are not simply removed from the game, but we would have the tools to remove them individually from our items.
This would be completely fine, but of course, that is not what we can expect to get, probably ever.
That ONE game designer is ready to die on the weapon lock hill says lots about the ability of fs to listen to the handful of players still playing this unfinished… “thing”.
Game design isn’t about Hubris but making fun experiences.
Eh. If this is the hill that Fatshark is choosing to die on, then let 'em die. If they really lose their studio over all this, it’s just the cycle of studios dying to their own hubris and other studios will then pick up their IPs.
If it does happen, then hopefully a more reliable studio will pick up the 'tide IPs. If nothing else the point has been proved that you can run a studio off the back of Warhammer themed horde shooters, so others might get in on it.
That might be the only choice we have. Even so, we’ll lose out if they do. We’ve seen so many good things turn sour in the last couple of decades… If that’s how it has to be, that’s how it has to be… but it’s still a sad loss for us they can’t figure this out and deliver.
It’s incredibly moronic to cling so tightly to their mobile freemium RNG hellhole design that has demonstrably driven away nearly all of their players, and been lambasted in the gaming press. It’s their choice of course though, and I can honestly say they deserve to go under.
Not only have they done literally nothing about the crafting locks, they are pretending to have done something, without actually having done anything at all. They have actually spent valuable dev time discussing and then creating a solution that retains all the horrific RNG of the locks, but might trick a few people into thinking they have eased up on it.
It’s astonishing. Instead of making a system people might actually have fun with, they have spent time making sure they do nothing at all, but appear to be doing something.
Obviously, the entire team minus a couple people have been on the port ever since the xmas break. It’s why it took forever to fix the game, to implement their first attempt at crafting, why there are no subclasses etc.
I think it’s probably time for me to take a long break from DT.
Last few times I’ve played it recently, I only managed about one mission before deciding I was bored.
The reason I was bored was because I’m staring at my items trying to decide how to mix up my builds and realizing that I’ve exhausted all my resources and don’t have anything to show for it.
I’m trying to get creative with some Eviscerator builds but I can’t get a decent Evi for the life of me with even just one good blessing. So I’m stuck playing the same thing over and over and over hoping to get something new worth trying out.
This is the core problem with the games crafting system. After 400 hours I’m still struggling to craft weapons when I desperately need to be able to try things out more reliably to keep the gameplay fresh. In the absence of being able to build tinker, the lack of content becomes that much more apparent.
the player base isn’t dropping off because of locks. the only people still playing are locks complainers.
the player base is dying off cuz theres nothing new to do and the game is super content lite.
None of my casual friends give a damn about locks. none of my hardcore friends give a damn about locks.
they all stopped playing cuz we already did everything, every penance that is a challenge. every map on hi-int damn, tricked out alt least one weapon in every variant.