"Dear Community Members,
we are truly grateful for your feedback! We have received plenty of comments and we’ve found a lot of truly useful and valuable ideas among your observations – we must admit that some of you even pointed out ideas we haven’t considered yet. The essential part of WH40K: Inquisitor – Martyr is the progression system and we want to create a system that could be hugely enjoyable for the majority of the players.
After reading through the feedback, we realized that the following issues seem to be the most problematic for the community:
- Daily Fate limits (and hard limits in general): it’s becoming very clear that you don’t want any restrictions on grinding and mostly you don’t want any limitations on the pace of the grind.
- Daily quests: you seem to dislike daily quests; some of you feel that a daily quest is nothing but a useless limitation, not to mention that it has some unfortunate connotations since it has become a general feature in FtP games
- The general feedback indicates that the community doesn’t want to see any hard and soft limitations, and the majority of those who sent feedback thinks that such limitations affect their gameplay style, which they don’t like.
- Many people started to think that Inquisitor – Martyr will be a pay-to-win game: the reasoning behind that seems to be that if you can buy Fate points and if some of the gameplay elements are similar to the ones used in FtP MMOs, then it’s clear that we will sell Fate for cash (we won’t – see below)
- Many people find the lack of the tier end gameplay elements problematic.
- Some people think that it’s unwise to plan out chapters and expansions until the core game hasn’t been finished.
- A lot of people think that crafting takes too long, others find the whole concept of required crafting time useless and they think that simple resource restraints could be enough.
- Many people find the speed of leveling very slow at the moment.
We spent the last couple of days with rethinking the desired pace of the progression system and exactly how necessary the current limitations are. Eventually we came to the conclusion that we can rework the system and come up with a better one. The current progression system was designed 3 years ago, but the game has changed tremendously since then, and this is the first time that we put it to the significant gameplay test. You have convinced us that there are plenty of elements that would need a thorough change – and don’t forget, this reaction is exactly the reason why we decided to launch the game in Early Access. We are counting on you, the members of our community to provide valuable feedback, and if you have been following the development since the beginning of the Founder Campaign, you must be aware that we are willing to make drastic changes in the core system when the test results prove that these are necessary.
We know that there are developers who use the Early Access as a simple pre-release launch, but we are devoted to sticking to the original meaning of the term: during Early Access you can tell us what you find problematic, and if you can convince us that these issues truly need to be changed, we will do so. We are making this game for you, the players, after all. Sadly we can’t promise to comply with each and every request: reality sometimes exceeds desires, and let’s face it, it is impossible to create a game that could satisfy all needs, but we are honestly trying to do everything we can. We are only asking you to understand our standpoint on the matter and don’t let your negative experience based on other Early Access games influence your notions about what we say, why we say it, what we’ll do or won’t do – you can judge us based on what we do.
All in all, we’ve come to the following conclusions:
- Daily Fate limits will be gone and the Fate point rewards for missions will be higher. We can totally accept the reasoning that a game mechanic that forces you to play in a set time is simply not okay. This modification has one consequence, though, namely that hardcore players will charge ahead very soon in their progression – hopefully they will find the tier end gameplay modes enjoyable; or they can always return when we unlock new content.
- The Daily Quest system has divided the NeocoreGames team as well. These missions feel like formalistic segments and some of us felt thought that segments like these simply don’t fit the WH40K universe. We have realized that daily quests can be omitted and instead we’ll put in more story-based mission with stronger ties to the Subsector.
- End tier gameplay will play a more significant role in the future. We’ve already had plans for incorporating warzone planets and endless mission types that could satisfy the hardcore players until we unlock the next tier and release new content, and we are going to add gameplay elements that offer new challenges and allow progression. These gameplay modes are not ready yet, but they will come in the future.
- You simply cannot buy Fate points for money. Our community managers have explained this on numerous occasions, but we can’t stress that enough. It was always one of the fundamental principles of the design, we’ve never even contemplated the idea, and what is more, we have made this very clear in the early stages of development. Our goal was to include a player-friendly monetization system which supports the overly dedicated players, and this is exactly the reason why we want to make even the DLCs available by grinding. If this decision gives someone the false impression that this is going to be a pay-to-win game and we will definitely introduce the purchase of Fate points sometime in the future, then it’s really unfortunate – because it is not true –, but all we can do is to confirm that Fate can’t be bought for money.
- DLCs and Chapters: as we frequently explained in the past, we are planning to create a living, continuously expanding world in WH40K: Inquisitor – Martyr and keep it alive for a long time. It means that we need to plan in advance: a world that requires fresh content patches for years requires a long preparation phase. Currently we are focusing on the core game and we are not developing anything else besides, and trust us, even the first two tiers require tremendous effort from the whole team. To put it very simply: we are working very hard to finish the game and we don’t have time to focus on DLCs. It doesn’t mean we don’t know what we are going to release in the future, we have some rough ideas about the Chapters and DLCs that will come later. We don’t have DLCs and Chapters contents stashed away on the hard drives only to cut them from the game. Still, we are creating a long, slowly unfolding storyline here that only begins in the core game: we need to know what’s to come.
- Crafting time: we will balance the various crafting periods and in several cases we’ll cut the time restrictions – although we’ll also keep them in cases where we consider them important. We would like to ask for your patience and give us a little time: two extra layers are still missing from the crafting system, which will allow you to craft items more precisely so they can fit in with desired builds. If you find the balanced time restrictions useless even after all these changes, we’ll offer some potential solutions and give you a chance to vote on those.
- The speed of leveling will be rebalanced as the current XP tables are skewed. The 2B XP gap between Account Level 50 and 51 will be ironed out and the Inquisitor Rank XP table will be refined as well to allow smoother and faster leveling.
We truly hope that you will like these changes – the bad news is that they require significant amount of work and also affect the test Chapters and the next milestones, so we can’t promise these changes before the promised huge update in early November (we hope that you can test the new mechanics after the November update, but as we don’t want to release small patches, we’d rather wait and implement all the changes in one go). We are asking for your patience and in case you don’t want to play the current version, we suggest that you should return after the big November patch. That brings another bad news, unfortunately: a modification of this scale can only be implemented and tested after a fresh start, therefore it will require a character and an account level reset as well.
We are really grateful for your feedback and your help. Hopefully you’ll keep on playing and testing and sending us your ideas – we want to create a great game with your help."
Zoltán Pozsonyi
Producer
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