Reflecting on Black Matter's stint as the game developer Now that T17 has officially taken over the game from Black Matter, it's probably a good moment to summarise and reflect upon their stint as the developer. Not so much about the game and it's direction, but the devs themselves and what kind of proverbial taste in the playerbase's mouth are they leaving. People have been concerned about T17 taking over and blowing it up, which is still a possibility but an unlikely one. And being honest, Black Matter has had a real fall from grace from early days of delivering anxiously awaited dev briefs with actual deliberations on how to improve the game, to word salad dev briefs filled in 2/3'rds with renders of helmets and community content. And a special "good riddance" goes to Sweettalker-in-Chief - Max, who's been pulling wool over the collective playerbase's eyes for years at this point and will now walk away not having addressed any of the longstanding issues. *Virtually nonexistent new player onboarding* When 1.0 was about to be released, which was 1.5 years ago at this point (let that sink in!), Monoespecial interviewed Max where the first thing they've discussed was the tutorial or rather it's absence. And despite identifying the issue, the best thing we got were... hints during gameplay. The field manual is still crap with heaps of missing information which prompted the community to make their own unofficial new player guide, but that didn't seem to make a lasting effect. *Stale, abandoned meta* One of the major excuses for not having a tutorial was the fact that the meta was in constant flux and it was no use to rework it everytime the mechanics got updated. But since that was mentioned, the meta barely changed because it just stopped being developed. In the AMA that Max did 2 years ago, it was said that *"We definitely need to refine the node system and look at expanding the build-ables. We still consider these to be in their infancy at the moment."* The next update after that saw changes that reduced nodes to their current, simplistic form and subsequently left alone for over 1.5 years. But that's just a posterchild for the rest of the game - make it good enough and leave it alone. Same goes for simplified armor gameplay or the ever unresovled recon-arty loop. *Loose and dismissive approach to historical accuracy* Just a few months ago we saw a huge uproar about the low quality of winter uniforms, which was subsequently quelled by the aforementioned sweettalking - *"I think potentially we will swap these out for the newer uniforms when ready".* And it worked - people dropped their pitchforks and stopped complaining. But that's not the first time they promised something they have not followed up on - remember that Brecourt Manor has been closed off since 1.0 dropped? Or do you rememember when people were complaining about the overabundance of automatics? *"as we introduce new weapons we'll be swapping out some of the automatics - which are overrepresented in the game at the moment.".* Did any of that happen? No. *Retention issues* Because of the above and lack of variety, the game is hemmoraging experienced players and relies on an endless waves of sales and free weekends just to keep the numbers up. The console port launched without a server browser or even infrastructure to build it's own community servers. And the console port was also not supposed to have any impact on the PC version, but that ended up not being the case as the last patch had shown. The flare gun is still being cheesed without any cooldown, which would be such a simple fix for U13. And I won't even mention QOL updates like letting you know if someone joined or left your squad or the fact that you cannot kick someone while being alive that have been requested forever but ignored. Overall, Black Matters legacy is that they delivered a quite fun, entry level tactical shooter that's severely undercooked. I think the next roadmap will say a lot about where priorities lie with T17 taking over the game and subsequent direction of the game. 原帖地址https://www.reddit.com/r/HellLetLoose/comments/11r3rn1/reflecting_on_black_matters_stint_as_the_game/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button 并不是新帖子，這是一個月前的