So, that letter is actually the Community Update they’ve been saving for over a month, by the way. We’re not getting any more information than this. Let’s break it down why that’s weird by looking at the letter itself and compare it to what’s been promised, but let’s make it brief by looking at the only part of the entire letter which actually has anything to do with anything here.
Nearly the entirety of Martin’s statement is 100% bland, vacuous corpospeak except for this part:
The only part of this entire letter which says anything substantive is another delay. Everything else Martin says - from “We fell short of meeting those expectations” to “We’re working on implementing a finished crafting system” to the entirety of the first paragraph - tells us absolutely nothing that offers us any information that either doesn’t matter (The Xbox port infamously lacks any launch window to begin with, man, you can’t delay something without a date) except for two pieces of the above paragraph, neither of which was anything we’d known about but could probably guess:
1.) There’s seasonal content coming.
2.) All of it, and everything else, is getting delayed.
Fatshark, you haven’t told us anything about seasonal content yet. We know, because we’ve been begging you to tell us what any of your plans are for literal weeks, and you won’t. Which means that this was supposed to be a crumb of actual content for us to learn about. Nobody advertises Live Service because they think it’s fun, they advertise Live Service because they think we’ll think it’s fun. Live Service is where all of the content is that you think people will pay for. So when you say Live Service, we can assume that you were going to sell us a new subclass every three months and additional content or a Battlepass that you basically pay a subscription for.
Of course, that’s technically all conjecture. Because what that letter doesn’t do is this:
Or this:
Or even this:
These quotes are off the offical Discord, and they’re quoted here in text instead of copied and pasted images because I wanted to highlight specific parts of them. They’re entirely different flavors of intent. What it sounds like to me is that Catfish, who doesn’t have a history that looks like Aqshy’s or even Hedge’s, was really trying to hand us something off the bat. Everything she says here sounds like she wants to give us specifics. Maybe not a specific specific, if you catch my drift, like I don’t think she’s been trying to offer us a particular piece of placating information, but she recognizes that this radio silence is interminable and that it’s gonna get worse the longer they all waffle and it’s important that we receive some kind of communication that isn’t just another Next Week nothingburger.
And then today - without any announcement or prior mention or “Look out for our patch notes later today!” or any kind of comms whatsoever, two days earlier than we’d anticipated - what we get is this letter, which tells us absolutely nothing that we didn’t already know other than that now everything else is delayed.
I don’t think this was the Community Update Catfish had planned to put out. I think they didn’t want to put their trust in, or have faith in, a new CM to handle this the way it should be handled, which is a shame. I think Catfish wanted to deliver us any actual information and got told, over and over and over again, that there wasn’t anything to offer and Martin had to step in because there literally wasn’t anything else Catfish could say.
It’s just more Nextweek, all the way down.