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It is without a shred of doubt that Phasmophobia is one of the most successful Indie games and it through and through deserves such success. I definitely love this game and am happy to support them as a player. BUT, I have to make my thoughts heard because I do have some unsettling emotions running through me post this update.
Just to be clear, I am not some new player who is making yet another "Freezing breath but no evidence" post. I started playing when Nightmare was newly released and am a legacy 30k+ and currently Prestige 8 player giving my thoughts on this update and the game as a whole.
The game released in the pandemic boom for videogames in the month of Oct 2020. You could see that the game hasn't broken its pandemic peak even now. That might change post console update. DK developed the game entirely by himself and CJ/Lav were hired somewhere in June 2021. And Skinner was hired sometime later. However we gotta remember CJ and Skinner are artists and not coders.
Phasmo is an Early-Access game, and in this era of gaming where even AAA releases are brimming with bugs, no surprise that an indie game making its biggest ever update public has its fair share of game breaking bugs as well. I know that they are working overtime and very hard to fix them. And it is here that I will make my first opinion. They need more coders and bug testers. One of the most played games having only 2 coders makes me think that they are unwilling to expand and are taking on a bigger task than they can manage. I have taken a look at their financials and they are more than capable of expanding their team. It DOES NOT mean asking them to hire 100 more developers, but they definitely CAN and SHOULD have more than 2 coders on their team for a game of this size and complexity.
Talking about the bugs, I have been VERY rudely told by Shuee and co. when asking why they don't have public beta testers that they have a fully experienced bug testing team and that a player's job is to not find bugs and to just play the game as is. While Shuee may have 7000+ hours in this game, the smudge sticks not working is enough proof for me that no amount of hard work by the small group of bug testers is gonna be enough for such a complex game. I understand that most of the "bug" reports are just players misunderstanding the ghost behavior or game mechanics. But there definitely are enough skilled and dedicated players who could help with the testing and bring the game more polish.
Coming to discord, I understand that the mods there have to deal with a lot of trolls, bigots and stupid people. But when players are voicing their genuine criticism about the update, Tier 1 stuff, lighting system etc., they are quick to gang up and either bully or outright dismiss any and all conversations regarding it. I would say that Kinetic Discord community as a whole is fairly welcoming and friendly, but they definitely do have a faction of "Discord mod" vibes in their mod team.
I also noticed similarities in the case of custom difficulty nerf and the present lighting nerf. They tend to overshoot and nerf the game pretty badly for the entire playerbase to "punish" a few using it to their advantage. I can understand the changes made to not wanting a player to hide behind doors, loop the ghost infinitely, and not play a crazy high custom with no risk. But when they did a 80% reduction on custom games, and then rolled back to a reasonable x15, it seems that they are two ways about whether they want to control how players play their game or let them play as they see fit.
I definitely agree with the sentiment of players that the game is being more and more balanced against the players and is definitely beginner unfriendly.
With the lighting bug, I see that CJ made a new post a few hours back on how they are working on it. My question to them is, why do the devs always go extremely hard on the nerfs and then after massive backlash dial it down, when they could have just communicated to the players in advance about their concerns and their plans about it. After all, it's not a competitive game requiring balance.
I will continue to play phas despite all the shortcomings because the game is truly a unique gem. There are other games either similar to or outright copying the mechanics, and adding in more wacky stuff, but Phas stands tall among every other game in this genre. I would dare say that the Kinetic team deserves to revel in their success, but also would hope that they would be more transparent and open to feedback from the community before making massive changes.
Edit - Also please be aware, Alt F4, closing through Steam or a random game crash all would make you lose progress and might corrupt your save file. It is honestly not worth risking to play the game at this moment
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