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As a preface, let me first say I'm loving the content updates, and everything they add (Thalamus is cool af). Almost of the QoL updates are great too. However, it's the QoL updates that I take issue with. This is an opinionated post, so not everyone will agree but I wanted to air my grievance to see if anyone did. Recent updates have started removing consistency or realism for the sake of convenience. For example, Silky Smooth nerfed weapon damage to players. Which makes sense for standard play but made everyone into CoD protagonists if you were playing in a nonstandard way. And recently but less egregiously the New Frontiers update removed power drain from headsets meaning that's one less thing to take care of. However, in a game that revolves around solving problems, removing problems from the equation means a simplification of the game. And, yes, these are minor issues (the second more than the first). However, if this trend continues, I fear the game will feel more game-y than it used to, and less of a gritty underwater test of survival (it still makes for a servicable murderbus). I'm not sure if I've explained my point well enough, but I hope I got my message across. Does anyone agree or disagree?

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over 3 years ago - /u/Regalis11 - Direct link

Thank you for the feedback! We were well aware that both of these changes would not be liked by all of the players. However, griefing is still a big issue on most servers, and we feel the small nerf to weapon damage was all-in-all a positive change, despite making the game a little less realistic. And I would argue that we're still long way from CoD protagonists who can shrug off a ton of gunshot wounds - if you get shot, you're still very likely to die if you don't get treated quickly.

Not having to worry about bots running out of battery was actually just one of the reasons why we removed the battery consumption. In my view the most important reason was that the feature was confusing to new players: usually they wouldn't know they need to watch the battery before it runs out, and once it did run out, many players would think the game was bugged when they noticed they can't communicate with others or give orders to the bots. I also feel it didn't really add that much to the game: recharging the battery just an uninteresting, menial task you have to remember to do every now and then, and running out of battery very rarely resulted in interesting situations or gameplay.

In any case, we definitely don't want to turn "casualize" the game too much or throw realism away for the sake of convenience. We do however want to keep the game approachable to new players and make sure they won't have a frustrating experience even if they don't know all the the ins and outs of the game. It's not always easy to find the sweet spot, and I think we still have a quite a lot of work to do to find it, but even though we have simplified some things, we do have plenty of plans for additional features that add to the challenge, complexity and realism of the game as well.