Im tired of change

[skydiamand]

Ever since the game got released in 1.0 the game has recieved a ton of updates.
each update adding new content what is super awsome.
However what im not happy about with is that those updates change already existing content. Not all the changes are bad. Like minor buffs/nerfs, life improvements and so on. What I do have a huge problem with is complete system overhauls, weapons beeing moved to different colour or getting their secondary colour removed or any content that got changed or removed that made the player able to play the way they want. Im so sick of the devs removeing content that force the player to play the devs want. Why cant we play how we want? Youre not suppose to force us to play one way, give us the freedom to enjoy our game rather then restricting our fun.
The stuff im most mad about it the removal of Sadisme (and a few other mutations), The upcomming malase changes (what really makes the game unfun to play), the removal of bosses dropping legendary weapons (The bosses drop low tier weapons that are way underlevel and this still didnt get fixed), The removal of a secondary colour to some weapons and so on.

I love this game. but all the changes and removed content really suck the fun out of it. every update I feel like im playing a different game and I have to relearn everything. It sucks the fun and my motivation out of it and i really start to regret buying this game (And i cant refund it beceaus i played over 200 hours).
I really hope the devs stop doing this and fix these issues beceaus im not planning to buy the new dlc if this keeps happening.

[d.a.elliott]

Agreed.

Unfortunately, they seem to cater to a loud minority on Reddit who thinks they can do no wrong, which in turn only reinforces their decisions. Seriously, you should see all of the 'I've come around on the new malaise' posts, as if completely ignoring the fact that this isn't early access anymore.

I originally purchased the game under the impression that it was a certain type of game. It has moved away from that significantly, and I feel like it was bait-and-switch.

[skydiamand]

they treat it like a active multiplayer game that needs to change to keep people interested so they keep buying microtransactions. The thing is this is a single player game. why are they takeing this flawed aproach

[d.a.elliott]

Drives me crazy. I've never played a game this schizophrenic around its identity. It was easily a top 5 of mine that I would play just because I enjoyed playing; that feeling has been getting eroded with every update.

The latest...

Devs: We change economy because few players vent can't buy health or weapons
--- Players start beating game because they now purchase any weapon and however much food and medicines they want
Devs: We sad malaise isn't working out anymore and so we overhaul malaise to make game harder



Do they not realize that half of the things they 'fix' were things they broke in the first place?

[FlintX]

It is all the target audience's conflicts fault. That's the problem of wanting to please everybody. It will turns into a mess if devs would to implement everything people asked.

You see people crying for the game being to hard for them, so they proceed to make changes and try to please those people by tweaking a few elements that might make things more accessible somehow in specific difficulties or in the game as a whole. But then, to compensate for the game becoming easier in some aspects, they proceed to make changes on other elements that might change how the general challenge of the game works. So you have things like: "okay, we gave you more chances to find food and more gear and better gear per area, significantly increasing your chances of surviving and sucess. But now we have to find more ways to take away your health too and keep things in a balance.". So, it starts to keep growing more and more on both sides, while they try to maintain a balance that will please the largest amount of people they can. And sell more maybe.

Let me clarify my argument better. Malaise for instance, it is only active ar 4BC. Technically a difficulty that requires high skill ceiling. But the casual little Peter don't like content locked behind difficulty. He also complains about gear being "scarse" on higher difficulties, and because of that he can't go well on said difficulty. He wants so bad to be able to beat 4BC too, without having to turn himself into a hardcore gamer.

So what the devs do? They will make tweaks that will make things a bit more easier for little Peter to like the game, or give him exactly what he wants. All good and everybody is happy now right? But here comes the second problem.

What makes a relatively short game stays relevant and not become boring? Obviously the easiest way to do that is to increase the game challenge or make frequent CHANGES to it. But how you do that If you already had to made things more easier in a previous moment? You extend or change the scope of things course. I mean, if the game don't increase in duration at all. It will increase in more enemies variety or complexity. Or it will change in a way to give the player the illusion that it has more to it than it appears to be.

Look at XCOM 2 vanilla version for example. The game has like only 5 unique story missions which resumes into researching corpses and collecting some itens that will allow you to play the last mission. The rest of the game has only like 5 different objectives spread through side missions that repeats themselves on random maps, and which their only puporse is to give you resources and xp to carry on the story missions and that's it. 5 story "missions." The game is very short in length and also have a time limit system that forces the player to rush through the objectives or it is game over. The only thing that makes up for its lack of duration and complexity is the difficulty of the game.

New content on Dead Cells and changed are always good for the game feel fresh. However, as long as they keep trying to please every kind of public at the same time, the game will keep bouncing between changes and tweaks that contradicts themselves.

They should choice just one public. Define if the game is casual or hardcore and be done with that. And just ignore the other side.

[d.a.elliott]

Very well said.

The "content difficulty lock" argument annoys me too. Wonder how Little Peter would've felt about not being able to access the final boss in Super Ghouls n' Ghosts without a second playthrough at a higher difficulty? As you said, just define the essence of the game and be done with it.

Was spending some time reading tonight and didn't realize that the lead developer for Dead Cells left in late 2019. For me, that kind of explains a lot of my misgivings, as they coincidentally started shortly afterwards. Initially, I attempted to be trusting of each overhaul, but as I witnessed it continuing ad nauseum every update, it became increasingly difficult to talk myself into thinking it was a good idea to make changes X, Y, and Z.

I would've been elated with new content, including paid DLCs, even if for little things like weapons and skins; I even would've been fine with just occasional patches to fix bugs. It's the sweeping core changes to what feel like basic gameplay principles and mechanics that gets me. As a result, they're leaving me behind. Logged nearly 400 hours and am fast losing my desire to play a game that I considered an all-time top 5 over a year ago. I've never experienced such a 180 before.

[Awakened Gamer]

Originally posted by d.a.elliott:

Very well said.

The "content difficulty lock" argument annoys me too. Wonder how Little Peter would've felt about not being able to access the final boss in Super Ghouls n' Ghosts without a second playthrough at a higher difficulty? As you said, just define the essence of the game and be done with it.

Was spending some time reading tonight and didn't realize that the lead developer for Dead Cells left in late 2019. For me, that kind of explains a lot of my misgivings, as they coincidentally started shortly afterwards. Initially, I attempted to be trusting of each overhaul, but as I witnessed it continuing ad nauseum every update, it became increasingly difficult to talk myself into thinking it was a good idea to make changes X, Y, and Z.

I would've been elated with new content, including paid DLCs, even if for little things like weapons and skins; I even would've been fine with just occasional patches to fix bugs. It's the sweeping core changes to what feel like basic gameplay principles and mechanics that gets me. As a result, they're leaving me behind. Logged nearly 400 hours and am fast losing my desire to play a game that I considered an all-time top 5 over a year ago. I've never experienced such a 180 before.

Man that is just really sad, I really think it is low when indie devs sell out to, on the plus side many are seeing the issue with greed as a whole lately.

[Soup]

I've played this game since basically day 1 of early access, back when it was still actually in the state that's supposed to be unbalanced and making major changes to the game's systems, ontop of countless bugs and glitches, and I remember that being more enjoyable than some of the changes recently. I easily have over 2000 hours in-game across platforms since I have no life and it's been my favorite rouge game since the day I first played it over 3½ years ago, and it really pains me to say that I agree with almost everything in this thread and that the game will have lost that title for me if a lot of things in the alpha go through to this next update. I personally didn't have a problem with the economy rework, I thought it was really unbalanced being able to only get 2-3 things from the secret area's shops if you save every piece of gold throughout the whole run. The problems for me started when they reworked the crossbows. They shouldve made new crossbows for 2 handed weapons, not alter existing ones people are used to and integrate into a lot of their builds, and render them unable to be used in those builds anymore. Now they're just completely severing almost any and all loadout customizability by removing dual stats from the majority of weapons and funneling everyone down into speedrunning every biome with the new malaise system, basically reducing the number of valid playstyles on 4/5bc from seemingly limitless down to like 2. Like sky said, this all just removes the player's freedom to play how they want, which goes completely against the original intentions & purpose of dead cells. Ive seen someone mention in another thread that now that the devs added the legacy versions, they feel like they have the freedom to experiment however they want since if the player doesn't like it, they can just go back to the version they do like. This is no excuse since they're still adding a lot of new good things, like new biomes and weapons like the katana and stuff in the fatal falls dlc, but a large portion of the playerbase won't be able to access them now cause they don't want to put up with changes to systems that revoke their freedom in gameplay. This isn't early access anymore, overhauls and reworks of integral systems in the game should not be being made at this point. I'm tired of change too.

[d.a.elliott]

That's correct. Sounds like they fancy themselves some auteurs and are taking pages out of Roland Barthes:

The Legacy Update is something that we’ve been wanting to do for a long time. As we moved towards regular updates and iterations on the game, we were always bugged by the fact that we were drastically changing the experience that a lot of people had come to love (something that you all have vocally reminded us of on occasion).

From here we always wondered whether it would be possible to dig up the old versions of the game and store them somewhere, so that interested players and future generations of developers could look back at how our little game developed and grew into the Action Game of the Year 2018.

So, now you can load up every major iteration of the game from the first build of Early Access right up to present, and we will of course make sure that we stock all of our future major updates in there too. This way, the nostalgic, the ragers and the “it was better before” crowd will always have the option of playing the version of the game that they loved.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/588650/announcements/detail/1696100248017690442

In the past, we worried about making sweeping changes to Dead Cells. That’s not to say we didn’t, as anyone upset about balance passes or legendary drop rates can tell you. Major updates were stressful though, especially ones we thought might fundamentally alter the game or prove contentious. Should we make the “right” choice for Dead Cells, even if in doing so we made a lot of our players angry? (See: The hornet’s nest we kicked over by locking achievements for certain custom mode setups.)

The Legacy Update doesn’t completely remove that stress, but it does diminish it. Players are no longer shackled to our vision, which in turn means we can experiment with elements of Dead Cells that before seemed untouchable—or at least volatile. There’s a creative freedom that comes from knowing any change we make can be easily reverted by naysayers.

https://venturebeat.com/2020/02/12/not-so-dead-cells-why-maintaining-an-archive-of-your-game-is-good-for-both-you-and-your-players/

I personally find it a little off-putting to refer to your early adopters who helped create the success as 'ragers,' 'nostalgia players,' and 'naysayers.'

I can't remember who mentioned it above, but I'm also becoming increasingly convinced that these elaborate justifications around 'artistic freedom' are hogwash to justify gaming the Steam platform to increase sales and remain relevant. After all, alienating your original players would be a magnificent waste of investment if they're not playing anymore... unless it wasn't a waste of investment because it was newly profitable. They're ultimately just churning their fanbase to keep the income steady around the base game. Odd strategy, but it's not my business.

[skydiamand]

Originally posted by Soup:

I've played this game since basically day 1 of early access, back when it was still actually in the state that's supposed to be unbalanced and making major changes to the game's systems, ontop of countless bugs and glitches, and I remember that being more enjoyable than some of the changes recently. I easily have over 2000 hours in-game across platforms since I have no life and it's been my favorite rouge game since the day I first played it over 3½ years ago, and it really pains me to say that I agree with almost everything in this thread and that the game will have lost that title for me if a lot of things in the alpha go through to this next update. I personally didn't have a problem with the economy rework, I thought it was really unbalanced being able to only get 2-3 things from the secret area's shops if you save every piece of gold throughout the whole run. The problems for me started when they reworked the crossbows. They shouldve made new crossbows for 2 handed weapons, not alter existing ones people are used to and integrate into a lot of their builds and render them unable to be used in those builds anymore. Now they're just completely severing almost any and all loadout customizability by removing dual stats from the majority of weapons and funneling everyone down into speedrunning every biome with the new malaise system, basically reducing the number of valid playstyles on 4/5bc from seemingly limitless down to like 2. Like sky said, this all just removes the player's freedom to play how they want, which goes completely against the original intentions & purpose of dead cells. Ive seen someone mention in another thread that now that the devs added the legacy versions, they feel like they have the freedom to experiment however they want since if the player doesn't like it, they can just go back to the version they do like. This is no excuse since they're still adding a lot of new good things, like new biomes and weapons like the katana and stuff in the fatal falls dlc, but a large portion of the playerbase won't be able to access them now cause they don't want to put up with changes to systems that revoke their freedom in gameplay. This isn't early access anymore, overhauls and reworks of integral systems in the game should not be being made at this point. I'm tired of change too.

I like the economy change aswell. It was a good change beceaus you atleast can buy something to keep up your build with the monsters hp. And shop rerolls are free what is great beceaus you waste all your monney to try to get something good. And with the saved up monney you can actually rerol your weapon mutations in case you dont like them (while in the past you woulnt have the monney to do it).
I like how the crosbows work but the devs indeed should have just made them as a new weapon instaid of reworking the old ones

We atleast got the luxery to load up the older versions on the game. But to do that we need new savefiles beceaus savefiles on a newer version of the game dont work on the older one + we dont get to enjoy all the new content.
But if you play it on switch or any other concole you dont have that feature either. Youre just stuck useing the newest one.

[Soup]

Originally posted by d.a.elliott:

That's correct. Sounds like they fancy themselves some auteurs and are taking pages out of Roland Barthes:

The Legacy Update is something that we’ve been wanting to do for a long time. As we moved towards regular updates and iterations on the game, we were always bugged by the fact that we were drastically changing the experience that a lot of people had come to love (something that you all have vocally reminded us of on occasion).

From here we always wondered whether it would be possible to dig up the old versions of the game and store them somewhere, so that interested players and future generations of developers could look back at how our little game developed and grew into the Action Game of the Year 2018.

So, now you can load up every major iteration of the game from the first build of Early Access right up to present, and we will of course make sure that we stock all of our future major updates in there too. This way, the nostalgic, the ragers and the “it was better before” crowd will always have the option of playing the version of the game that they loved.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/588650/announcements/detail/1696100248017690442

In the past, we worried about making sweeping changes to Dead Cells. That’s not to say we didn’t, as anyone upset about balance passes or legendary drop rates can tell you. Major updates were stressful though, especially ones we thought might fundamentally alter the game or prove contentious. Should we make the “right” choice for Dead Cells, even if in doing so we made a lot of our players angry? (See: The hornet’s nest we kicked over by locking achievements for certain custom mode setups.)

The Legacy Update doesn’t completely remove that stress, but it does diminish it. Players are no longer shackled to our vision, which in turn means we can experiment with elements of Dead Cells that before seemed untouchable—or at least volatile. There’s a creative freedom that comes from knowing any change we make can be easily reverted by naysayers.

https://venturebeat.com/2020/02/12/not-so-dead-cells-why-maintaining-an-archive-of-your-game-is-good-for-both-you-and-your-players/

I personally find it a little off-putting to refer to your early adopters who helped create the success as 'ragers,' 'nostalgia players,' and 'naysayers.'

I can't remember who mentioned it above, but I'm also becoming increasingly convinced that these elaborate justifications around 'artistic freedom' are hogwash to justify gaming the Steam platform to increase sales and remain relevant. After all, alienating your original players would be a magnificent waste of investment if they're not playing anymore... unless it wasn't a waste of investment because it was newly profitable. They're ultimately just churning their fanbase to keep the income steady around the base game. Odd strategy, but it's not my business.

so what Im getting from this is instead of taking criticism on unfavorable changes they make, they just belittle people that don't like it, even if it's the majority of the community, even if it's the people that have supported them since the beginning, completely reject their thoughts & opinions on said changes, and say they'll do whatever their team of 11 people wants and not what the community with thousands of people that play the game daily want?

wow. just, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ wow. I mean, if they like these changes so much, couldn't they just make their own personal builds of the game itself to play instead of forcing this stuff down the player's throat if they want the good new content? Like seriously, who asked for them to remove the variety in builds by taking dual stats from 90% of the weapons? who asked them to make 4/5bc a speedrun fest?

Originally posted by skydiamand:

We atleast got the luxery to load up the older versions on the game. But to do that we need new savefiles beceaus savefiles on a newer version of the game dont work on the older one + we dont get to enjoy all the new content.
But if you play it on switch or any other concole you dont have that feature either. Youre just stuck useing the newest one.

I didn't even realize how the legacy versions are only available to people playing on pc. This just further reinstates my point about forcing changes on the player.

Im trying not to get worked up here but learning that the devs just see me and a large faction of the dc community as naysayers or nostalgia players really pisses me off

[kermat_]

Originally posted by Soup:

so what Im getting from this is instead of taking criticism on unfavorable changes they make, they just belittle people that don't like it, even if it's the majority of the community, even if it's the people that have supported them since the beginning, completely reject their thoughts & opinions on said changes, and say they'll do whatever their team of 11 people wants and not what the community with thousands of people that play the game daily want?

The thing is, I highly doubt that we're the majority of the playerbase. The majority of the playerbase probably consists of new and semi-new players who are playing on lower BC difficulties. People who probably have not been with the game long enough to experience all the changes and who praise the (now only 2) devs for "any" change they make because they don't know better. From their perspective, the game that they've been so invested with recently is still getting updates two years after its release. The devs have already gotten their money's worth out of you and me. Us continuing to play their game doesn't provide them with any extra income. Not trying to defend them, but just looking at it from a business perspective, and I'm sad to use those words.

Another thing I wanted to mention just in general:
People including myself have been using the "Just roll back to a previous version" or "Just use custom mode [to enable double items or whatnot]" argument. I've changed my stance on this. I think it's a non-argument. Telling people to "just roll back" when they provide criticism on how certain changes made the game worse in their opinion does nothing to invalidate their argument. It's more of a way to give people a broken solution. It's not a counter-argument that invalidates their arguments/criticism.

[d.a.elliott]

From the latest 21 beta patch notes...

Taking it slowly or dodging enemies was never something we wanted to incentivise, let alone reward. That’s why the new Malaise essentially treats time as a balancing factor (our previous post explains the new mechanic) - if you take your time, you’ve got less chance of being hit by enemies and the game is essentially easier for you, so we're increasing the difficulty the longer you spend in a level - this balances with the players who are spending less time in a level by going full hog on groups of enemies and putting themselves at greater risk of being hit. So you can still complete your runs with a slower playstyle, but you now get rewarded by actually playing the game and killing enemies, instead of ignoring them.

[...]

Unfortunately, letting both types of Malaise co-exist would have been really complex, so, the 'old' Malaise won’t be playable now or with future updates*.

*For Steam players, you can always choose to keep Dead Cells with the old Malaise mechanic by choosing Update 20 in the beta tab of the game settings.

tl;dr -- Playing slow is 'cheating,' and if you don't like the new malaise, roll back and play the game you want.

[Soup]

Originally posted by kermat_:

The thing is, I highly doubt that we're the majority of the playerbase. The majority of the playerbase probably consists of new and semi-new players who are playing on lower BC difficulties. People who probably have not been with the game long enough to experience all the changes and who praise the (now only 2) devs for "any" change they make because they don't know better.

That was bad wording on my part. When I said the majority of the playerbase, I meant the people that have been with the game long enough to have a good understanding of the systems and mechanics being overhauled/reworked.

On the note of changing the game based on a business standpoint, I would say it's not out of the question that the devs still make money off of people who already bought the game. If someone recommends the game to someone else, that's potentially another sale for them, but if theyre gonna do ♥♥♥♥ like this, what incentive is there for me to recommend the game anymore?

Also seriously? Only 2 devs? I know they were only a small team of like 15 people when dead cells first released, but I didnt know thats all that was left. A lot of the things mentioned in this thread make more sense knowing that.

Originally posted by d.a.elliott:

From the latest 21 beta patch notes...

Taking it slowly or dodging enemies was never something we wanted to incentivise, let alone reward. That’s why the new Malaise essentially treats time as a balancing factor (our previous post explains the new mechanic) - if you take your time, you’ve got less chance of being hit by enemies and the game is essentially easier for you, so we're increasing the difficulty the longer you spend in a level - this balances with the players who are spending less time in a level by going full hog on groups of enemies and putting themselves at greater risk of being hit. So you can still complete your runs with a slower playstyle, but you now get rewarded by actually playing the game and killing enemies, instead of ignoring them.

[...]

Unfortunately, letting both types of Malaise co-exist would have been really complex, so, the 'old' Malaise won’t be playable now or with future updates*.

*For Steam players, you can always choose to keep Dead Cells with the old Malaise mechanic by choosing Update 20 in the beta tab of the game settings.

tl;dr -- Playing slow is 'cheating,' and if you don't like the new malaise, roll back and play the game you want.

I dont even know what to say about this. Im at a complete loss for words here.

[Sajonji]

I am very happy to have spent my main hours playing slightly before 1.0 . Back when you could upgrade individual items in the forge. Back when an S-item had stats on it.
Tried to get back into the game a couple months back. Hard to describe, but it just wasn't feeling like the game i enjoyed at all anymore. The fun element was just gone, patched out.
And now with turning the game into a speedrun entirely, it sounds like negative fun values are put into the game. Very sad.

[d.a.elliott]

Originally posted by Sajonji:

Tried to get into the game a couple months back. Hard to describe, but it just wasn't feeling like the game i enjoyed at all anymore. The fun element was just gone, patched out.

Know the feeling all too well... It's far and away the strangest experience I've had with a game.