Dread Hunger Review (Calypso)
Dread Hunger: the game we never had or how armory apologists polluted quick thinking
- "I was still thinking in a 'I am a hardcore modder person making hardcore mods for hardcore people' mentality — which didn’t mesh too well with
Online:
` As I'm writing my review, out of 28500 concurrent players, there are only 22 across just 4 english-speaking lobbies (both started and not). In just 3 months average online dropped by whole 63%. 2 minutes of gameplay cost you 1 minute of waiting.
Major bugs, glitches and exploits:
` Persistent VoIP failures, occasional game crashes, inconsistent rejoin functionality, connection problems, occasional faulty hidden role assignments, UI glitches, getting stuck in meshes, out of bounds exploits, no sounds for taking damage when freezing and many more.
Anticheat:
` Works almost as if there was none.
Actual experience:
` Just 3 maps of drastically different difficulty levels, ranking them as "boring", "less boring" and "playable" respectively. Needless to say it gets very repetitive and stale. What about the new content? Just look at DLC packs, put all of that on top of single significant update.
Community and staff:
` Besides having plenty of griefers, cheaters, sexists and racists, you'll encounter people wanting to get you kicked from any lobby just for the reason of being "too noob" or "too sweat". Not only that, the same people have devepolers' recognition (as some of them were given community roles in the official discord).
` Their deputy community manager brags about his role in public games, promotes his friend that has no real interest in playing the game (like 150h in a year), derails serious conversations by making complete mockery out of any criticism.
` Another deputy community manager that wrongfully mutes you for 7 days because of his own illiteracy, never says sorry, was trying to justify warning for the rule that was announced after the actual violation.
` Xion is a one guy who contributed a ton to both the community and the game. What does the developer say to him when he asks about particular issue? Nothing! Instead, they ask another developer to shut the guy from DM'ing him for the reasons of anxiety/too busy/etc., whilst chatting with other people in general chat, the amount of disrespect is disgusting.
` They tried to use my arts without giving any credit whatsoever after I already have been purged from their discord. I handled them updated arts just to have a talk with them, they accepted arts, but refused to have any further communication outside of writing to their public email - wha-te-ver.
Moderation:
` You'll meet the same bad actors over and over, as nothing stops them from changing the name and/or profile picture. It clearly takes some time for reports to get through, but even then, first-time griefing offences only grant them entire 2 days of ban. For example, Matty1Monopoly kept appearing in lobbies for months just to drown himself in water the moment the game starts. Airhats and Sblades are still griefing from their original accounts since the october of 2021, whole 10 months later.
` Some people still get wrongfully banned and no clear reason is ever given, my favorite is the "YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DID, YOU KNEW YOU WOULD BE BANNED" like c'mon, not to mock you for being this unprofessional or committing logical fallacies, but you could at least try (ah, right, you had to come up with 3 different bs stories to get there).
` Actual moderation abuse! During the last summer ya__ryadom got streamsniped midgame by a deputy community manager from the same lobby and was banned for "griefing", even though all kills happened with reasonable suspicion or in a self-defense. In another case zer0h only got his permanent ban lifted after his review gained hundreds of likes.
` In another instance group of griefers, impersonators, ban evaders, slander makers and all around wonderful people was banned from game's discord (the catch is, not before they started hacking, for months one of them was proven to do all that, but they never banned him, because he was boosting the server (as he himself admitted, to get fake credibility)).
` Discord moderators that have history of harassing other members, calling them asshats, assholes, dickweasels, morons, children, etc. without being called a single name back.
Development vision vs the reality:
- "Our hope as developers had been that Dread Hunger would be more of a social / party game to play with friends, but we wanted to have some level of challenge to differentiate it from the ultra casual SD games like Among Us." — the same character.
` The problem is, you failed to create experience casual enough, but you also failed to balance the game for many long-term supporters. I don't have to ask another 50 veterans to shove the common agreement in your face, you refuse to listen and that is why you don't gain many new players while keep losing many old ones.
` This game is popular in China at the moment and their lobbies are much more competitive than you ever wanted. Because of the hackers and tryhards, in the current balance it's enjoyable neither for casuals or sweats, some of them escape to dying english lobbies or drop the game entirely. You are completely out of touch with the real situation. You never do polls, you discard any criticism, you terminated a single channel for public suggestions, you track the wackiest statistics across matches and never share these numbers, you blame review scores on racists.
` On your own discord there are now 3h gaps between messages and almost all participants have activity roles (because they are all who remained).
` The best highlight for your delusion is the armory. Chinese players don't open armory in their games because of how broken it is, Russian players don't open it for the same reason, english-speaking players now also don't do it very frequently. But you keep listening to the few armory apologists, keep feeding yourself with those tiny bits of affirmation in echo chamber you created. You loved to call your true followers a loud minority. The real loud minority is now you.
` This project was never about passion, was never about people, it all came to ripping as much money as you can. You always tell people that "it's impossible to make anything enjoyable forever", "just move to other games", "it's not our job to satisfy you, it's your job to find fun in what we do". You don't care if people will stay or not, you refuse to even try to keep people invested, you keep releasing paid cosmetics for the cummulative cost of 2 copies of game itself, you update lobby just to put goofy merchants to sell said cosmetics, each update there are critical and apparent bugs that give away your astonishingly poor testing (hanging bears, pacifist cannibals, doppel coal wipe, etc.), you settled with all the known for ages issues, you settled with your garbage lobby backend, you settled with the failure.
` Ah, yeah, they were quick to say this review is a part of the infamous "recent review bombing from nasty folks (bigots) targeting them personally". Your damage control is so poor, my arts are still partially used uncredited, all you do is deny and pretend.