Have the devs defined what their definition of live service entails?
I keep seeing it used as a possible explanation for missing content or future content, but it’d be nice if like most other games, we were simply told what parts of the game will be added to.
There is a lot of content missing from the game. The story/cut scenes are so detached from the rest of the gameplay that it’s more like my character daydreaming. None of the missions we’re sent on have any connection to anything else we do at any point. At least 5 of the flashier, exciting weapons aren’t in the game, but thankfully the cosmetic store and trinkets are. Chaos spawn is nowhere to be found. Classes are exactly the same as V2 careers with no deeper customisation beyond aesthetics and have a specific grenade. Still no scoreboard or news on the scoreboard.
I don’t know why Fatshark always have to do this cloak and dagger kind of community engagement. It never wins them any brownie points.
They don’t speak because not knowing is more powerful than knowing.
If you knew what you were getting for xmas, would you be as excited?
Their idea of live service is most likely to attempt a steady stream of content each week/month in order to keep the player base from leaving and always chasing something new. The best way of doing that is to hold content and release it in small chunks at a slow but steady pace so they can keep a buffer of content while making new stuff, while also making smaller adjustments based on player whine/advice.
It’s the same idea of youtubers, podcasts etc, anything that has to keep their audience hooked and coming back… and if you don’t have a buffer of content, you’ll burn out and the channel/pod will die, same thing here. Streaming services are also doing a similar thing, release new episodes per week, instead of whole seasons. Since it keeps you coming back and a season becomes 2-3 months of pay, instead of a single month of binge.
So they’ll most likely be releasing their content in smaller chunks in the near future, to keep us chasing something, while they’re building new stuff and adapting to what we actually whine about and want and seem to float towards. and that content will most likely be the first paid content expansion/season.
Content does take awhile to make, even if Fatshark is a larger team now, I think they’re only 100-150? that is still considered a smaller team. And out of those there might only be about 20 game/level designers, this means in essence you’ve actually just got 10-20 people working on the game, everyone else is busy making the behind the scenes stuff no one is whining about and simply expect to be working, or working on planned future content.
This is one of the reasons you’ll see an ever expanding cosmetic shop, because you only need a handful of artists to churn out an outfit every week and that is much quicker than trying to build and test and bug test and iterate gameplay content or levels, while also adapting to a growing mob of disgruntled players.
That would be nice. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get more penances added with cosmetics added to them, possibly even ones with weapons added to them.
If I recall they spoke about using a quest system for getting the weapons you wanted… that might be something they’re holding off on and will be released in a month or so.
Since the dwarf simulator does the same thing, as does warframe/destiny etc.
It seems like a lot of the crafting has taken inspiration from V1, if they drop a quest board to get what will hopefully be red weapons then that could be a great move. Penances and contracts leave me a little nervous about what the quests could be though.
I just have a terrible fear that they will rip a page from Call of Duty playbook and introduce us to a seasonal system where our character ranks reset at the start of each season, tied to a season pass system with snail pace progression (Double XP boosters sold separately). That is the most straightforward way to keep the playerbase chasing numbers that go up (or pay for tier skips) and given how other areas of the game have been so far with the fully functioning premium store before crafting and relatively small amount of maps and missions at launch, I just cant help but hear the Tencenthian chaos spawn scream in the distance.
Considering it seems that each subsequently released class will have to be leveled to 30 again each quarter, that seems to be exactly the picture they’re painting.