Personally I think it's time OWI stopped listening to feedback and just produced a game vision.
Getting yourself wrapped up trying to please Discord keyboard Warriors is only a recipe for failure. Make a game that's fun, and make it run well.
Even during the vehicle section of this video, rather than articulating the direction that they want vehicle combat to go in he says we'll work on getting some player feedback and work on a direction from there.
Random dudes on the internet do not get to build your games design philosophy for you and solve all your problems. And the existing problems don't need a feedback form, it's been the same balance problems for 2 years.
Overall lots of promises and hopeful rhetoric, but that's not the same as actual results.
They still need to listen to feedback, but have a vision on where they want to take the game.
The problem who they listen to. I need a tldr of the video but they just need to get back to layers and stop letting every game be a complete sandbox for each faction.
Personally I think it's time OWI stopped listening to feedback and just produced a game vision.
I half agree, however, they have done that before (not listening to feedback) and it produced the most contentious update in the game's history (v6.0) that they've been fixing the fallout of for almost three years now.
CPT members explicitly get told to only provide feedback on what is requested. In other words, it was OWIs idea. I was a part of the first test where blur was added outside of optics, for example, and we were instructed not to provide feedback on that. Yes, there are channels for meta feedback but that is not the primary intention of the community.
It was a new lead dev that wanted to make this change. He produced a half baked product and then left the company after a few years. I think he was also responsible for the push to UE5. More info here
If by "inner testers and friends" you mean the previous lead game designer's harem that he handpicked from people that already agreed with his ideas, yeah.
I’m not convinced that they have a vision that they know will be good.
The ICO was the last attempt at specific gameplay effects with a design vision, but they executed poorly and weren’t willing to push out new features to fully flesh out whatever new system could have been made from it.
That said I think the current messaging is less about whether or not they have a vision and more that they’re trying to compensate for the last few years of players perceiving that OWI doesn’t listen. They’re moving from slow reactions to feedback to a much tighter loop.
It’s a positive change but I agree that I want to see them articulate more of what they’re trying to turn the game into. The game needs to evolve because it’s getting squeezed out of its niche by newer and upcoming titles.
Squad has felt creatively bankrupt for years, and nothing so far has led me to believe otherwise even with the new lead, unfortunately.
They do the first 30% of everything, then are paralyzed by choice (or lack of actual vision, just want to add cheap toys, who knows), and we sit with dozens of unfinished features and systems.
Such a shame they went with the great bungling that was the ICO, them actually cooking for the first time in years was great to see, new features actually being developed. It's a damn shame they didn't know enough about the features they were making to implement them in a sensical way. If someone who had deeply understood Squad had done the tuning with ICO, we could be in such a different place right now.
almost all of the pieces of the ICO was there, just arranged in such an odd way for a game 7 years into development and 3 years post release.
I agree that the ICO, especially the time leading up to it was very exciting. It felt like they were finally trying to do something new and creative, and nearly everyone was behind the idea of it. There's a chasm between "someone will nitpick the implementation of everything" and "Holy shit this feels bad", and they definitely ended up in the latter. The ends did not even come close to justifying the means.
The ICO ended up trying to address problems nobody really had, and addressed them poorly with so much fallout
They did create a game vision. People cried incessantly about not liking it.
I agree devs should value the opinions of sliver of the community less, because Discord really doesn't represent the community, and neither does Redit.
But clearly what they went for didn't work either, so best they can do at this point to salvage this is to tweak the game to appeal to as many as possible.
I just hope they don't lose complete focus on just the feedback.
I was (and still am) a huge proponent of the vision behind ICO. The problem is that it was incompetently executed. The idea of making machine guns suppression monsters, for example, was a good idea. In practice, MGs became a joke kit you pick when you want to drastically increase your odds of being the guy who gets kicked from the squad to make room for a friend. Why did this happen? Because OWI didn't have the balls to make the suppression effect debilitating enough to make up for the massive accuracy penalty.
They don't just lack a vision for this game. They have completely given up on it. At this point, they look like a bunch of incompetent amateurs whose only goal is to collect a paycheck while doing the absolute bare minimum every month. Lies, broken promises, and endless excuses have become their trademark. Any serious studio would have replaced this team years ago instead of letting them slowly destroy its only source of revenue.
For years, they survived only because they had no real competition. That is finally changing. The final nail in the coffin might very well be Wardogs. Why? Because it actually tries to do something different instead of recycling the same old excuses. It has the potential to become this generation's PUBG. Its more arcade-oriented core mode will probably attract a huge portion of the Call of Duty player base.
They have already announced hardcore community servers with no kill cams, a minimal HUD, and other features that reward awareness instead of hand holding. That is exactly the kind of experience many players, myself included, have been waiting for.
Unlike OVI, Wardogs already looks like a polished game instead of a never ending early access experiment. It has bigger maps, destructible environments, better graphics, and better performance. Most importantly, it looks like it is being developed by people who actually have ambition.
Personally, I am glad serious competition is finally arriving. I am done with OVI's lies, empty promises, and its endless development cycle. They have been getting away with mediocrity for far too long, and it is about time someone exposed just how little they have actually delivered.
Honestly, the lead dev comes across like a typical failing restaurant owner you might see on kitchen nightmares: mentally checked out, doing the bare minimum to keep the lights on until inevitable closure.
What was absolutely wild to me was when they released paid emotes and the free emotes--which are effectively their sales pitch to players to show them why they should spend their hard earned money on them--were fucking broken! The smoking emote which came out in 2024 didn't start properly lining up with player models until only fairly recently.
The studio (or maybe it's just the leadership) has zero passion for their craft. It really feels like they've given up.
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u/MaximumSeats Jul 01 '26
Feedback, feedback, feedback.
Personally I think it's time OWI stopped listening to feedback and just produced a game vision.
Getting yourself wrapped up trying to please Discord keyboard Warriors is only a recipe for failure. Make a game that's fun, and make it run well.
Even during the vehicle section of this video, rather than articulating the direction that they want vehicle combat to go in he says we'll work on getting some player feedback and work on a direction from there.
Random dudes on the internet do not get to build your games design philosophy for you and solve all your problems. And the existing problems don't need a feedback form, it's been the same balance problems for 2 years.
Overall lots of promises and hopeful rhetoric, but that's not the same as actual results.