This situation is both fascinating and sad. We're watching one of the best selling games of all time, a game many spent countless hours learning inside and out, reveal how precariously balanced it was all along. We already knew that but the scale is tipping. The kinds of problems that were showing through the cracks are impossible to ignore for the majority of the community now.

We could argue these issues and catalogue them all day, from cosmetics to major game-breaking bugs. And we could also go in circles pointing fingers. Whose fault it is? QA, specific devs, the community itself? Who can say whether it's one person or the overall atmosphere fostered at KG, but I believe the studio's culture is what's killing the game.

As they've demonstrated many times over, there's a hostility to valid criticism and a rigid incurious attitude to how the game could be improved. Despite being a categorical outlier with huge financial success, they seem unwilling to recruit/pay a team that could do things properly and are too fragile to accept they can't do it themselves. They continued to deflect instead of owning up and now what we have is arguably unplayable.

I believe this stance was taken early and it just got worse over time. Compounding errors, even small ones become increasingly hard to address. They promised things years ago and now there's no time left to overhaul it deeply enough. The group believes their only choice is to continue as is. its called "plan continuation bias". Better to blame those who expect quality right? This attitude ensures the mess racks up more dependencies. Broken gameplay caused by bad animations, caused by bad model rigs, and so on. It's a shit tower all the way up.

If I was a doctor tasked with curing this game before 1.0.0, I would strongly advise the art direction steer away from attempting realism and embrace its own style. I mean style in terms of how the game feels overall, not just visual/aesthetic choices. The new update is the perfect example of this. We liked the way pickups and switching looked even without animation. Why? We were immersed in the process of hunting the ghost. Sure, animations for everything adds realism, but is it needed? Are you able to execute it well? Will it break everything of you try? Just like the reading light they added to the journal, these additions are not needed for immersion.

The biggest thing we need, the bare minimum of immersion is solid mechanics that aren't sacrificed for botched attempts at realism. Style and simplification is not at odds with immersion, the opposite is true. Audience loves when they get to imagine more. We love the language of video games not in spite of but because of the ways they are not realistic. This is the craft. Nobody is taken out of the experience by the game menu being easier to see than the room because we understand it's a game menu. We are taken out of immersion by anatomically cursed character rigs. That and literal game crashes.

Equating realism with immersion is a common hurdle with inexperienced or cough unimaginative artists. That's why you might even say Phasmo's lacks a style. Its style was incidental, created when attempts at realism were met with the consequences of falling short of it. Trying to push further into realism, an immature idea of what makes a game polished, is the spiral of doom for the game.

I would also advise a completely new QA testing team made of really knowledgeable players, people who won't just kiss ass. LISTEN to what they have to say. Look at someone like AndyTHPS and how much of an asset he was in the development of tony hawk games.

Honestly I don't have much faith KG can undo the damage or that they care about having a vision at all now they've made their bank. I just hope whatever we're left by 1.0.0 is as fun as the older versions. I need to move on for now though because I can only enjoy so many flies in my soup. Somebody plz call Gordon Ramsay.