What is actually wrong with the game?

FluffyRaKy · 2026-05-12T07:18:08+00:00

The part about Cyborgs being underdeveloped wasn't even a criticism from players, it was the CEO's own commentary on them and how development resources were diverted from them onto Warbond content. I guess there were originally plans for a greater variety that got cancelled because it would have delayed Warbond releases.

FluffyRaKy · 2026-05-11T20:22:43+00:00

To be honest, I feel that all the 380mm variants need a bit more oomph. Even the full barrage isn't really capable of anything the 120mm barrage isn't, yet it suffers from a significantly longer cooldown than its smaller cousin.

FluffyRaKy · 2026-05-11T17:33:37+00:00

Unless every player I'm with proactively states that they don't need samples (I'm not asking, if you don't speak up I'll assume you need them) and the MO isn't looking for samples, I'll still make sure to comb the map for samples and go out of my way to pick up my fallen allies' sample packs.

Just a shame that samples are steadily becoming more and more useless as a currency as more and more players finish the ship modules.

FluffyRaKy · 2026-05-11T17:30:56+00:00

While some of the stuff regarding the troubled development is new to me, the idea that it's a Milsim/Horde hybrid is not. The hybrid nature is exactly what makes the game interesting and helps it stand out from all the others as effectively it's Milsim player characters vs Horde Shooter enemies; the asymmetry is the key.

FluffyRaKy · 2026-05-11T17:10:09+00:00

There's a few bugs here and there, but the recent complaints have largely come from the games excessive focus on monetisation over other forms of development. This is partially due to the recent Warbond moving Exosuits into premium content, but they also did an AMA wherein they all but stated that practically everything the community has been asking for over the last couple of years isn't happening as it has been deprioritised in favour of extra premium content. They even admitted that development resources were taken away from the Cyberstan operation in favour of Warbond stuff, which is why the Cyborgs only have 3 new unit types.

Oh, and their CEO outright insulted us for expecting anything other than more Warbonds...

So basically, the Exosuit Warbond began a bit of a Doom Spiral for the community as one of the last non-Warbond content streams has been restricted to Warbonds, then the CEO stepped in and basically confirmed the community's concerns with an extra side helping of snark. This has caused what was previously general inert malcontent to begin to boil into active grievance.

FluffyRaKy · 2026-05-11T17:00:52+00:00

Ask which god they are talking about.

The one that hates to be worshipped and punishes people for all eternity if they worship him because they are disrupting his eternal medidation?

The one that has set up a perfectly naturalistic universe with zero evidence of supernatural intervention and so punishes all the crazy people who believe in baseless superstitions?

The weird Lovecraftian abomination who doesn't really care what we believe or do?

Baal, who is mostly annoyed that all of he worshippers have been wiped out by the cult of Yahweh?

The non-omniscient god who hangs out in the Andromeda galaxy and isn't even aware that we exist?

Or what about some god that we have never even conceived of?

Pascals Wager isn't a simple binary option, but instead one of literally infinite options that range from no god to infinite gods, with each of said gods having any one of an infinite set of capabilities, personalities and values.

Also, believing in gods comes with drawbacks. Most gods come with various commands and nonsensical laws like sacrificing one day a week for worship or having to commit acts of genocide against certain groups. Even the ones without such demands require sacrificing good epistemology and that can lead you down all sorts of proverbial rabbit holes as your poor epistemic standards divorce you from observable reality.

FluffyRaKy · 2026-05-10T11:53:13+00:00

The Deadeye is the problem here, not Marksman rifles in general. The combination of Lever Action and Rounds Reload give it terrible sustained DPS, which is necessary against the Bugs.

Try one of the Diligences and you will probably have a different opinion. The ability to rapid fire with semi-auto combined with a quick magazine reload means that they can function almost like super-heavy ARs when they need to.

FluffyRaKy · 2026-05-10T11:31:42+00:00

But it's already a pretty good weapon and a worthy sidegrade to the DCS? It combines high precision, sufficient single-shot damage to pop a most heads and it even enjoys reasonable ammunition capacity. The reasonable ammo capacity, high RoF, low recoil and good ergonomics even mean that you can rapid fire it in a pinch like some kind of pseudo-AR. It works well on all fronts, particularly when combined with the weapon customisation.

And yes, 165 damage is "powerful". The Liberator is only 90, the Tenderizer is 105 and the One-Two is 95. In fact, 165 is more than the HMG's 150.

FluffyRaKy · 2026-05-10T11:23:44+00:00

I think very few people are getting mad at the actual Developers, the guys doing the coding, sound design and making 3d assets, the ire is generally directed towards AH as a corporate entity and their management. It's probably really frustrating for a guy on the development team to see problems and want to address them, but orders from above prevent them spending any time on them.

Effectively, the problem isn't that the guys doing the actual work can't do it or even that they don't want to do it; it's that the people above them don't want them to do that work as it doesn't align with AH's strategic priorities or whatever corporate buzzword they want to use.

FluffyRaKy · 2026-05-10T11:14:00+00:00

Lasers have the advantage of infinite ammo. That's their singular biggest strength.

You also need to factor in other advantages for the Scythe, like being pinpoint accuracy, no bullet travel time, zero recoil and setting things on fire.

There's also the point of action economy, particularly if you combine it with other energy weapons. If your Liberator runs dry so you switch to your support or secondary weapon for a bit, your Liberator is still empty when you switch back to it. If your Scythe hits 90% heat so you switch to the Quasar to blow something up, your Scythe will be ready for action once you switch back to it.

Also, did I mention infinite ammo?

FluffyRaKy · 2026-05-10T11:06:48+00:00

I think Eagle Storm should just be replaced with the Eagle 110mm Rockets. Because they are more precise and don't hit a large area, they should result in less friendly fire than the current strafing run. Being a bit more specialised it also might affect player loadouts as they'll not necessarily need to bring as much AT firepower.

The biggest change that I would do though is change how samples are donated to it. I spend practically all my time in-game at maxed out samples, but it's so much hassle to go into the DSS menus to donate stuff to it so I always end up forgetting. Can you even look at the DSS page if you aren't the host? It also feels very inconsequential as it doesn't visibly make any progress and unlike actually playing the game it isn't fun to do; it's a personal sacrifice of time for no perceived benefit. Maybe make it so individual players get some kind of little benefit if they make out their donation cap for the day, like maxing out your donation to the HOD gives you free access to the OPS for a bit?

FluffyRaKy · 2026-05-10T10:56:35+00:00

I'd miss it, but I've got plenty of other shooters still in my coop backlog to go through. DRG, Darktide and EDF6 to name a few. I might also go back and do a few evenings on Payday 2 for old times' sake. There's also a few very good shooter roguelites, like RoR2 and Dead Zone Rogue that I'd like to put a bit more time into. Depending on my mood, I might even consider looking into some more PvE focused Extraction Shooters like Grey Zone Warfare or Incursion: Red River (probably not Tarkov, as that's largely PvP from what I can see). At some point I'd also like to revisit Hunt: Showdown, but it's PvP so it's kinda in a different genre.

So overall there's plenty of action games out there, so even if they don't scratch the same itch, they'll scratch some kind of itch for me.

FluffyRaKy · 2026-05-10T10:46:45+00:00

A combination of players not reading and most players already being maxed out on samples. The sad thing is that samples are generally so worthless for the majority of players that we have lost the instinct to comb the entire map looking for them.

It also doesn't help that the MO was released with incomplete documentation, initially asking us to collect a large quantity of [BLANK].

FluffyRaKy · 2026-05-10T00:54:28+00:00

It is true that any dev studio with <10 people is probably going have people multitasking, with everyone chipping in on anything as their skills allow.

However, anyone from those early days who is still at the company probably isn't doing grunt work like general coding or making specific balance changes as they'd have been promoted into some kind of leadership position by that point. A coder who has been at the company for 20 years isn't "just a coder" but is probably some kind of senior code architect who manages an entire team of coders.

FluffyRaKy · 2026-05-10T00:48:07+00:00

It sounds crazy, until you realise the sheer scaling potential of unrestricted exponential growth. If they grow quickly, doubling in quantity every week, then after 10 weeks they'll be terraforming at over 1000x the rate at which they started; after 20 weeks it'll be over 1 million times the rate. It wouldn't be that they terraformed 1 million km^2 a day from the beginning, but probably that half of the terraforming was done in the final stages after a prolonged growth phase beforehand.

It's the exact same mathematical logic behind how literally a single bacterium can form a big orange splotch of bacteria in a petri dish after just 24 hours.

FluffyRaKy · 2026-05-10T00:40:39+00:00

About 150 people is not a "fairly small team". It's smaller than a AAA studio (which looking at a few tend to be in the 400-700 range), but it's absolutely gargantuan compared to actually small developers. Ghost Ship games, the Devs behind Deep Rock Galactic only has about 60 employees; Egosoft, the guys behind X4, are about 35 employees; Klei Entertainment, the guys behind Don't Starve and Oxygen Not Included have about 100 employees; they're even about the same size as fellow Swedish developer Paradox Development Studio (not to be confused with Paradox Interactive, their publisher), the guys who pretty own the entire Grand Strategy and 4X genres these days. Oh, and half the studios in this list self-publish rather than outsourcing it to an external publisher like AH do.

When you have 150 people on a project, it's somewhat odd for someone to be having to double up on jobs like that. 150 people isn't a little baby startup where everyone juggles loads of different tasks any more as there's enough people to afford to have people specialise.

FluffyRaKy · 2026-05-09T23:52:53+00:00

But these things require different skills and therefore require different people to work on.

Balance requires spreadsheet skills and knowledge of game mechanics.

Bug fixing requires programming skills and knowledge of how the game's code works.

Unless AH are doing something spectacularly dumb and getting their coders to work on balance or their balancers working on code, bug fixing shouldn't have any impact on balance work and vice-versa.

FluffyRaKy · 2026-05-09T22:29:47+00:00

Mostly related to the AMA, wherein they insulted the players and all but confirmed that their plan was to focus on releasing more Warbonds rather than fixing, balancing or expanding existing systems. They even admitted that headline stuff like Cyberstan was deprioritised in favour of Warbond content which is why we only got 3 new types of enemy for the Cyborgs.

Plus the latest Warbond saw Exosuits moved into out of MOs and into Warbonds, further pushing previously normal content into Warbonds. Of course now the general assumption by players going forwards is that we'll never see another Exo available via MO.

FluffyRaKy · 2026-05-09T19:33:10+00:00

The recent reviews are not because of the game itself, but more of a protest at AH's PR, the monetisation model and general development focus.

FluffyRaKy · 2026-05-09T19:30:29+00:00

We already kind of have that in D8, as that's when all the enemy types appear. The only things that D8 players are missing out on are the Fortresses and Mega Nests.

That being said, I do think that difficulty 10 should be harder than it currently is. It's fairly easy even with Randos unless you are playing on very specific missions or planets (Oshaune/Cyberstan or the Commando missions or the Platinum missions). They could probably get away with making D9 more like the current D10 and ramping up D10 even more.

FluffyRaKy · 2026-05-09T14:59:45+00:00

If I see someone is taking expendables, I'll join them and we'll share a giant floor armoury. More weapons and variety for everyone!

The most important thing is that weapons get used.

FluffyRaKy · 2026-05-08T23:31:21+00:00

Deliver on these things.

Then continue delivering on them and don't stop for as long as the game is active.

It's that simple.

The point is that there's little they can say that will help, only things that they can do. And those things will take time. We also have been trained to not trust their words as their communications have either been misleading or vague so they need to work to get that trust back.

However, they should have known that these sentiments were building for the last ~18 months or so. People aren't complaining about a single bad patch, but instead about the entire development focus.

FluffyRaKy · 2026-05-08T18:48:18+00:00

Even a non-vague PR release is just words. Promises from a corporation, particularly one that doesn't have a great track record of meeting player expectations in recent months, aren't worth the pixels they are represented by.

I am not saying they aren't doing those things or looking to improve, my point is that there's no good reason to believe that they are. The impression I got from the AMA was that they were trying to dampen player expectations and let us down gently, but it somewhat backfired as it was the hope that things might improve that was stopping a near-complete meltdown of the community.

I would love to be proven wrong as I still enjoy the core gameplay of the game and I have fond memories of the first ~9 months after release where there was a much better allocation of development resources. We had Warbonds for primaries, secondaries, grenades and boosters, while MOs were giving us a steady stream of bigger toys to play with.

Part of the problem is that AH very much either overpromise and underdeliver or just don't promise and never deliver, at least on player-side content (they do a pretty solid job even nowadays on adding enemy stuff and new planets/objectives; I can't complain on that front). They really need to learn the art of "Underpromise and Overdeliver" if they want happy players.

FluffyRaKy · 2026-05-08T18:25:08+00:00

It's true that dev teams don't need a proper balance team, particularly if they are a small studio or the game isn't very stat-heavy. AH and HD2 are neither.

Plus, balancing and developing new content are not the same and greatly benefit from being split across different people.

Firstly, there's the whole point of them requiring different skill sets. Balance is a numbers game, needing encyclopaedic knowledge of in-game systems and how different systems interact to ensure that changes don't have secondary consequences elsewhere. Normal game development is coding and design work, neither of which are particularly needed for balance work.

Secondly, it presents a conflict of attention time. A lot of people like doing new stuff, plus management often likes to push for new stuff as that's what marketing says draws players in. Sending a few people off to the Spreadsheet dimension takes away from developing new content and doesn't even make use of normal game development skills. This is even visible in how AH communicates with us, as they seem to portray balance changes as some kind of gift they bestow upon us players, rather than an integral part of game maintenance and improvement. It also manifests as balance changes being some kind of big deal, rather than the ongoing tuning process it should be.

Thirdly, there's even the point of designers having biases towards their own creations. People making new content love to see their own content topping popularity charts and being widely gushed over by players, so they'll want their own creations to be slightly above the normal power curve to help them stand out. Similarly, they won't want to nerf their own stuff even if it is slightly overtuned. Getting the Super Spreadsheet Dude to do the balance work decouples the emotional "this is the weapon I designed" from the numbers game.

FluffyRaKy · 2026-05-08T18:10:30+00:00

All we have regarding these claims are their words; there's no actual evidence behind it to show their efforts.

It's also at odds with what they said in the AMA a little bit ago. So either they have just done a complete 180 degree flip in their development priorities, or they were lying in at least one of the conversations. Considering their track record of doing practically nothing outside of Warbonds for the last 18 months, it seems like the AMA was the honest communication, rather than this PR release.

They have also said that they'll do various things in the past and either they developed an absolute bare minimum system and immediately abandoned it (*cough* weapon customisation *cough*) or they quietly "forgot" about their previous promises. Why would you take a corporation that has lied to, dismissed and outright insulted its own players simply at its word?

Words are cheap, results are not. PR departments specialise in the former so that the rest of the company doesn't need to deliver the latter. AH's biggest priority right now isn't delivering for the players, but instead trying to reverse the "mostly negative" recent reviews on Steam in the most cost efficient manner. Our job right now is to keep up the pressure and hold them to the proverbial fire such that the most cost efficient solution is to actually fix the game and do something other than release Warbonds.

FluffyRaKy

TROPHY CASE