I despise this trend in gaming where games are designed to eat as much of your time as humanly possible, why is this considered a positive direction to push your development? Nobody wants to come home from a crappy job and then jump into another crappy job to farm your melk bux.
8 Likes
well if you read this forum you will see plenty of evidence that actually that is exactly what a lot of people do want. its sad times out there but extrinsic reward treadmills that live services used to generate engagement now seem to be the whole point to a subset of gamers.
3 Likes
“Suffer not the Simp to exist in your fandom”
-Unknown Based Brother of the Black Templar
1 Like
Well, that trend is dying. I recommend looking at recent YT “Live Service games are dying” vids as market got enough and trend died, nobody wants another “gear score looter shooter, rng grind for Power level” game. Hence why single player/pure fun games are selling like crazy again.
Fatshark like many other not-so-bright studios started to work on their model when live service game were thought to be future of gaming, but couple of years is eternity in video games, trends will change 2 times before you release your product. Fatshark (same as Rocksteady with their new Suicide Squad which is already downvoted to hell for being gear score live service) is just one of those “late lads” that now releasing game too late as market moved forward.
It was the same with Battle Royal when suddenly every studio was releasing Battle Royale game years after trend achieved peak (Battlegrounds, Fortnite, Warzone) and all those games were failing becasue trend alrady died, market was over-saturated, who likes BR already has big games to chose from, don’t need more. But those that chase trends instead of trying to make good games that may even become a trend will always lose as they try to be just mere copy cats.
And before Battle Royal if you all remember it was MOBAs that everyone was releasing and they all died too becasue why people would need another MOBA if they already had LOL, DOTA 2 and HOTS?
And now it’s time for “Live Service Gear Score Looter Shooters” to die. That’s sadly how untalented studio leaders try to chase trends not realizing they are way too late for party.
7 Likes
This doesn’t have to be a “live service” at all. There’s so much game that players are restricted access to and content that was simply cut from the game.
Simply allowing players to have fun at their own choosing clearly isn’t what Fatshark wants, I’d much prefer having the whole game be accessible when I choose to play it and have it receive updates every now and then.
5 Likes
It´s just a mindgame, nothing else.
There are indeed games which lock even content and other stuff behind huge grind (e.g. Lost Ark), but DT isn´t one of those games. You can jump in, kill stuff and jump out.
As i´ve said from beginning, in this case the armory was / is even insance casual-friendly. No matter if you lose a run, no matter how much time you´ve , no matter which difficulty you play. It´s up there every hour with new stuff on a level you can beat even damnation with.
Everything else about min/max and so is just long-time stuff. It is a thing for ages in the gaming-industry, because there is no chance the devs can release content faster than players will beat it. So they bring a bit of sidestuff to keep players, who wants to spend dozens of hours into the game anyway, engaged with something. (Achievements don´t do anything else in dozens of games.)
It´s just the players themselves that are like “meeeeh i´m forced to play”, “meeeeh FOMO”, etc… It´s all about the own attitude.
“Player Retention”.
The “graph” says the longer you can keep players on an infinite chase for a thing the less likely they are to jump ship and play something else. Even then I still feel like Darktide does a terrible job of even that just entirely from the perspective of other games that do similar stuff.
Generally with a lot of other coop game with a similar system it’s find thing you like / works > tweak thing you like / works > get to next breakpoint > try harder stuff > funnel resources into next thing you want to try > play new build with new abilities when you get bored. This exists in a lot of places MMOs especially because it’s slow improvement but it’s usually steady improvement.
The thing is the rate of item acquisition is still painfully slow and not exactly satisfying (and varies wildly because the range of items is wack. Don’t talk to me about high end curios for example because I’ve found 1 god dam +21% hp and it rolled +xp on my vet. I’m convinced 17% toughness doesn’t exist) and the crafting system doesn’t help this.
Crafting is still rolling the dice multiple times rather than tweaking towards something and I think people are brain poisoned into taking only the good data points on the crafting and item system and not even acknowledging the sheer amount of crap you need to throw out. Never mind that the reroll button is a stupid design since past a certain point the item is free to reroll (shout out to mods for somewhat fixing this travesty)
I would have less of a problem with this if the resources aren’t siloed and I could actually work on other characters with resources that are just sitting there (you know work I already did, time already sinked going nowhere because I got the gear kind of to where I want it, etc) but everything is character locked.
People put a lot of suggestions out to make things even slightly nicer (hell combine blessings would solve a few problems but they scrapped it) but at this point it’s kinda a circular argument with one group saying it’s five and another saying it’s not when a new person asks “why is this like this?” every few days.
The most goated video games in recent history have been live service (lol, fortnite). They don’t have crappy progression.
They are a bit easier now than they where before. 25 mission on the old rotation was a bit much for instance, now its like 8 I think?
Your question assumes the average gamer has a job. Those days are long past my friend.
Oh for malks it’s 100% a welcome improvement. It’s still random stuff on basically a 24 hour rotation (tho slightly better i guess?) but i can actually get the missions done in a reasonable amount of time ( a little over 2 hours to complete 8 missions vs 6) and just better mission rewards in general.
It’s far from the over 12 hour hell grind i went through just to get 1 item i wanted.
But that’s the thing, all the systems in the game should be like that. It should maybe take 50 hours to end game gear a character (talking 1 set of gear not all weapons) and not a randomized grind between 30 and 120.
I think vermintide had the good balance on this, with orange item that had all you needed, were easy to come by and easy to personnalised. And red one that were pretty hard to get by if you weren’t fond of legend and above. But didn’t mean a lot of change in the end compared to a good roll on an orange.
With Darktide I feel like getting 370+ item should be the grinding part while getting the good blessings/perk should be the easy part.
Because the first one is just a feeling of completion while the second is about being able to play multiple options.
1 Like
Title of OP sums up my sentiments behind a majority of the decisions made around this game’s supporting systems.
This topic was automatically closed 7 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.