Interesting point. I haven’t posted lately, in part because I haven’t played in weeks - too annoyed by balance issues - and in part because I think I’ve veered from “criticisms” to “embittered insults.”
But I find it er, … comforting … to think that, in an accelerated manner, the ‘tide games are simply following TT’s own descent from an imaginative, surprisingly solid minis-wargame to a bloated, over-priced mess.
Seen that way, FS’s only mistake is that they haven’t made the for-pay cosmetics so detailed and customizable that we all happily spend the majority of our DT time “painting” our characters.
A little off-topic and super biased but I deeply resent the notion that Souls games are targeted to young tryhard gamers. MOBAs were the low-hanging fruit here imo, and there are plenty others. Precious, beautiful, Souls though?
I’m not sure that most of FS’s problems couldn’t be mitigated with proper management. Best guess is they’ve got a mountain of tech debt wrapped up in an engine past EoL and stacked on years of development and no dev ops to speak of. We’ve seen bugs the equivalent of typos go unaddressed for months. Years, perhaps (remember Close Range? @gpkgpk remembers).
Their community presence is basically zero if not negative. The cash shop is a whale-butchering operation. Meta-progression has gotten better the more they strip away their initial RNG-infested vision, although I can’t help but notice that the achievements are extremely basic now. Content padding that doesn’t take much coding I guess.
Somehow there’s an incredible and unique game wrapped up in all this, or nobody would care. I see it more as some mad scientist’s fever dream rather than a deliberate attempt to cater to any audience whatsoever. Some shadowy cabal of Fat Sharks making arbitrary decisions and damn the rest. It’s the only way this whole beautiful mess makes sense to me…
In that case nerfing the plasma gun’s cleave won’t actually impact the casuals experience. Tbh though I actually don’t care about the plasma gun I never see anyone using it in auric which is what I play.
There’s gotta be data out there, collated or not, that shows something to the tune of reviews not really mattering much, if at all, at this point in a game’s life. Right? Let them cry as they still play through DS-less tears.
The backlog of broken things increase at faster rate than they can actually balance when they add new gear, new class, rework
So it is like always 2 steps behind because not days, weeks but months. They’ll fix one OP thing, but another one or two pop up in same duration depending what else they add/change.
Almost like I want to say stop adding new weapons, new class, new rework until backlog looked at first, otherwise they’ll just add more to play catchup.
Good management can solve pretty much any issue that isn’t purely technical. Pity that good management is rare as few people want - and fewer still able - to walk the line of encouraging and supporting their subordinates while keeping discipline sufficient that all the grunt work gets done the right way.
Pretty much. Though I doubt its shadowy at all. Just the usually case of some head of a team becoming too emotionally invested in something to be able to see a problem with their ideas and doing everything possible to shove their “Vision” onto the game at all costs. Basically the same thing that gutted the Everquest franchise. Hence why I find this whole mess laughable - its literally repeating the same mistakes all over again.
It is always the same road these multiplayer games travel. Constant power creep with some power jumps when new classes/weapons are introduced. Balancing is done by adding “harder content” which will be obsolete after a year of power creep. Quite frustrating…Especially the old content becoming obsolete part.
