That reminds this one of some kerfuffle around Genshin Impact, where all of the much requested quality of life upgrades and such are instead implemented in Honkai Star Rail (new game, some studio) while Genshin keeps pulling in the cash with few new features (but they do get map expansions constantly).
In short, is this one of those “industry standard” practices that this one finds obnoxious?
This chapter leaves me unexcited for the most part. The Jhebbel Sag storyline is boring and I’ll skip it. The fatality system I could do without. I’m glad they’re giving the option to use chapter 2 combat, but they shouldn’t’ve changed it in the beginning. The UI change is just a straight “no.” I like most of the follower AI changes except for getting rid of “stop.” I regularly use it to hold my thralls back including while building. I am excited for the Yamatai onsen in the bazaar. The rest of the bazaar and battle pass items are “meh,” at best.
In regards to Sword of Crom, it’s time to let other weapons take the spotlight.
Chapter 4 is a significant improvement for gameplay, with added gore, an event with new rewards, new battlepass with more stuf and the finishers which are a game changer in PvE. Overall a very good update.
As for the new purge variants, It’s a good addition, but I was hoping to add some new rewards as well. A very easy to do change to the purge rewards would be to just go all in with eldarium and all recpies from Siptah. That would give endless grind value to the whole system and make a lot of ppl happy.
I was also expecting to be able to place crafters as fighters and dress them up, which makes all the wait for Chapter 4 a bit underwhelming.
There is much truth in this video, unfortunately.
If they make this ‘new content’ just to justify another battle pass then they should stop.
Just sell us the battle pass, please don’t re-balance anything, add new items, events etc, but don’t try to re-balance game that you don’t play guys.
In the next age I would like to see all the re-balancing of thralls and combat system to go back to pre-Age of Sorcery state. Why fix something that was not broken.
Fixing what wasn’t broken seems the general theme of this Age - Combat, Stamina, NPC health/armour, Crafted weapons, Repairs etc etc
No. That is precisely how they should do it. If the battlepass keeps them financially afloat, then by all means they should continue to introduce content with battlepasses. The battlepass is fair and cool. I am often against several over-the-top monetization schemes, but Conans scheme is fine.
In the future battlepass we are getting wallpieces for the first time. I like it.
ps. I still fail to understand the opposition to the battlepass as it currently is. Its like getting multiple DLCs worth of content for the price of one. Why are people complaining about the ability to pay less?
It’s not the the BP as a means of revenue necessarily, it is the focus on it to push updates.
Precisely. I think there are very few players who would have been upset if chapter 4 was a new battlepass and a few bug fixes and nothing else. The reason the battlepass tends to get brought up in these contexts (IMO) is because Funcom seems to feel they need to add a bunch of half-implemented ‘new ideas’ and poorly considered changes to the game in order to justify the battlepass. They don’t need to, but for some reason they keep doing it.
(The other reason it gets brought up being, of course, players generalised dislike of BP and in game store versions of monetisation. These tend to be unpopular across many games. They’ve saved me money, because now I buy far less from Funcom than I did before they implemented this system. Not convinced that worked out as Funcom intended, but that’s what you get for listening to ‘monetisation consultants’… To be fair, CE’s battlepass has, up to now, been the least egregious example I have encountered - but we’ll have to see if that is still true after the update releases, given that they are changing the way it works.)
Love ya but no. If they did that everyone would come out of the woodwork and claim ‘CE is no longer being developed and going into maintenance mode.’ ‘Dune is taking too much dev time.’ 'Why play a dead game? ’ ’ etc etc etc. The publicity fall out for not creating new content would drive players away much faster than people leaving due to game direction.
But the BP is creating new content. I think most of us assumed the choice to make it 4 chapters was to focus on general bug fixing.
Instead we’re getting half-cocked new features and complete revamps to well received systems that are unneeded and unwanted.
It feels like padding chapter 4 instead.
And like with the last few chapters they implement these changes based on work already being done/decided without warning.
The Q/A did little to explain. Mostly confuse and infuriate further.
Just read my next sentence after the one you quoted 
Fair. Perhaps my ‘very few players’ was a tad optimistic - I’ve seen those claims many times too - but I do think it would be fewer than are upset by the addition of half-baked content and removal of basic QoL features, with no real reasons offered, just claims that it’s for ‘User Experience’…
Here I’m not so sure, however. I think the game being a ‘poor experience’ (whether due to broken/unfinished features, QoL fails, bad directional decisions or just bugs not getting fixed as fast as players might like) is more likely to drive away more players than the same old people shouting from the rooftops that the game is dead. Does anyone even listen to those people? (That may be why I think of them as ‘very few’…) And what publicity does CE even rely on? It isn’t advertised, little ever seems to be done to promote it at all.
As you say, not including some new nonsense in chapter 4 would probably have given the doomsayers something to latch onto (and a new BP alone might not count in their minds), but surely Funcom doesn’t care about that. When did Funcom last show any meaningful sign of caring what players say? (Certainly not this recent Q&A thread…). And I don’t really think the majority of players listen to the doomsayers… 
But they never claimed that. Den said in chapter 3 there was more to add that still needed to be fleshed out.
Now this whole JS champion storyline and how is that connected to AoW…big stretch.
Ballista addition. Yep that’s war.
All the complaints about the dye bench…I understand where that is coming from but how is it any different than the tanners table inclusion or pretty much most of the economic update? It adds a reason for that dye bench and Im willing to see where it goes. I actually hope that trend continues and we get function for the rest of the benches that have really no function anymore.
Agreed they never claimed it. They also didn’t do anything to correct the assumption that was made by the community on the forums and social media though.
The dye bench is painful in so many aspects which I think most can agree on. It’s size is just… ridiculous. Someone mentioned I think above or in another thread that making it smaller would have been a much more welcome justification for changing it. I agree.
I hope also there is continued development in function of the benches… this just seems completely backwards. It was fine even with the size, why complicate it and make it harder for some players? If it is to create immersion or survival, that isn’t really hitting the mark.
I will say the inventory thing seems a 180 from where they were going. I don’t see the function of the specialized storages as much if we can natively quick stack any of the storage containers. The specialized chests were a godsend to quickly unload resources and not run around asich finding your right container and add to it manually. Now we have alternate ways to just select one type of resource and quickly add to the chest that resource. If that’s the case, then just open the specialized chests to any resource and let use use it as a reskinned large chest. It’s no longer saving us time anymore.
The economy update was -deleted string of explitives- too for a large part.
You ask how is this wretched annoyance worse than a previous annoyance?
Well, for starters, this moves a function that previously existed in the player’s menu to a bench. The economy update shuffled recipes between benches but didn’t strip much from the world of hand crafted.
Now, as a bonus, it level locks when people can use dye.
Then, as the radioactive cherry on this your banana is getting split with a rusty chisel, the word from on high is that the choice was partially to force players to waste time running back to base. It is deliberately obtuse. It is meant to be a hassle.
But then again, you are the exact person this is made for. You “hope that trend continues”…
Do you even use dyes?
You hope more jank is baked in to force people to use things they don’t like, to waste players time.
Ayesh.
No.
Just no
The only DLC that the BP has content even close to is “Debauchery of Derketo”
A half dozen build pieces and a couple outfits is not “multiple DLCs worth of content”.
That having been said…
From what this one spied of the BP it looks like this coming one will have a solid amount of good items.
Unless you are trying to put all Battle Passes together as one purchase. Which is impossible. All past BPs are gone. Also, they require drudgery. They are bought with coin and work.
This one doesn’t know how cheaply you sell your time, but an hour of this one’s effort is worth more than the largest bundle of Crom Coins. That’s just the numbers.
Now… Depending upon how their modifications to the BP progression, it may well be incidental to typical play…
But it still isn’t evenly vaguely equivalent to the ability to drop coin and have a full set at that moment.
Especially one that is available even if Funcom’s live services are taking a nap.
This is exactly why I always just buy my way thru the bp each chapter; which is fine by me. I only wish we had a single click buyout feature since 59 levels means I gotta do a bunch of extra clicking. I spend most of my time in the devkit, which sadly doesn’t count as game time. Wish it did.
I watched the complete live stream myself and have to say he is right with most of his points.
And i also wanted to share his video, but i got silenced again. 
Thx for stepping in 
(If i was this toxic i wouldn’t be “out of love” all the time, would i @staff?)
That dye bench is so big …
That dye bench is so big, Mitra’s enormous kid just stuck a peg in it and yelled “You sank my Battleship!”
That dye bench is so big I put it out on my roof and a Giant-King X-Wing landed on it.