Last year, TripWire announced that they’d spend 2019 with less of a focus on content and more of a focus on fixing gameplay and balance issues with Killing Floor 2. This was desperately what the game needed, but not exactly what it received. A lot of big issues were fixed, but many still left unattended. Perhaps this is because those issues aren’t known, or because there simply wasn’t enough time in a year to get to all of them, as well as understanding the reason why.
So I’ll take this opportunity to hopefully get ahead of some things and say what’s needed to be said for a while: Killing Floor 2 is suffering from feature creep.
What is feature creep? It’s when too many features are added to a game or software to the point that it starts causing problems and reduces overall efficiency or enjoyability.
Almost every major update Killing Floor 2 over the years has had includes some new feature. Recently, it was Objective Mode, and before that was Weapon Upgrades, etc. However, most of the time, these features seem to be rushed out with little testing or development, and then they’re left that way with only minor changes over the span of years. They’re never very deep features, and often have some major flaws that shouldn’t have happened.
The intent seems to be to make each new update seem exciting to bring back old players and intrigue potential new players, thus driving player engagement and sales. However, at the rate things are going, this rushed course will become unsustainable, as the amount of shallow and flawed features will instead alienate and drive away both current and potential players alike, frustrating people with how shallow these features are.
Many of these features are introduced in beta only a month or so before the update they’re meant to ship in, which is often not enough time to change things if there’s something seriously wrong. If the playerbase reacts negatively to an introduced change or feature, that doesn’t prevent it from being pushed into the game, even if it’s not ready and the general playerbase dislikes it, since by then it’s already slated to ship with the update. This is, quite frankly, irresponsible, given that the next update always takes several months to come out, so TripWire has occasionally left their playerbase in a state of dissatisfaction and frustration for months, all because of a nonexistent demand to push these features out immediately instead of when they’re ready.
Unlike a lot of people, I try to be sensitive to the nature of game development and the relevant studio and project at hand. I understand that some of these changes and features would take a lot of time and manpower to develop to its fullest potential, and with a small game and studio like this, that’s not easy. However, some of these features could be fixed with just small changes—changes so small but so glaring it’s hard to believe they’ve been overlooked for a year or more—and for the changes/features that would take longer to implement, there’s no excuse for rushing them out before they’re in a state the playerbase is happy with when there’s no demand for it. There are solutions to this issue and putting the game in a frustrating state for months or even years is not the answer.
I bought the game the day it was released in Early Access, and have played about 500 hours since then, so I feel somewhat qualified to give commentary on this issue. Every time I play the game, I’m confronted by these features and how they interfere with the enjoyability of the game, and I worry that they’ll stay that way forever, while new features are added that are just as flawed.
So I post this in the hopes that TripWire can see it and understand what the issues are and how to rectify them in the present and avoid them in the future. And, if others disagree with my assessments, to discuss and come to a consensus about the state of the game.
I won’t touch on balance or difficulty issues, since those aren’t features, though those topics are worthy of discussion. This post is dedicated solely to the additional features laid on top of the core game that are causing feature creep.
I’ll be addressing each relevant feature in order of its introduction, from oldest to newest.
**Zedconomy (December 2015)**
I personally detest RNG/lootbox/crate unlock mechanics on principle and see them as manipulative and cynical attempts at money and player retention, but that’s not what I’m going to talk about. In fact, I have very little to talk about the Zedconomy, because it’s already been fixed somewhat fixed.
That is, you cannot get duplicates from opening crates/redeeming tickets, meaning that it’s not complete RNG and you can feasibly unlock everything a particular crate or event has to offer. However, it took *three years* for that to happen. Three whole years. And for people on consoles, it was even worse of a situation, because they don’t have a Steam Marketplace to buy items directly, even at stupid prices.
There still are issues. Like the fact that the market is flooded with the same Woodland skins and basic hats because for some reason those are the only items you earn through gameplay, even now. Or how recycling them requires ten recycles for one new item, which seems extreme.
I’d say the core problem is that the system copies Counter Strike: Global Offensive’s system without being nearly as popular to sustain it. Most games that copied that system, e.g. Rocket League, have since moved on to newer, better systems that don’t require large sums of money to unlock cosmetics and deter players from ever using them, especially on consoles that don’t have markets or trading.
The result of this inattention is that it seems the Zedconomy has no longer become profitable, and now Tripwire is relying on expensive new weapons to support the game. This drastic measure and backtracking on earlier promises wouldn’t have been necessary if more thought and attention went into the system than none at all.
I’m sympathetic to the need to finance the game when it’s being sold at a low price and big updates are free. Money doesn’t grow on trees. But, it’s hard to be too sympathetic when the system has been broken for years and never revised in any attempt to avoid this.
**Elite Zeds (January 2016 onwards?)**
Of all the features on this list, this one’s probably one of the least flawed. Likely because it was added so early, and it’s one of the most demanding of attention, since it’s enemies you get thrown at you every single game.
Elite Crawlers, for the longest time, had the graphic for their gas clouds be larger than the actual hitbox, which only made things confusing and unclear. They finally fixed this, but many players still want a counter to their gas. The gas is meant to push players back for a period of time (a longass period of time), which is fair, but many players have proposed having Firebug’s flame weapons “burn up” the gas to neutralize it. I don’t see why that can’t be implemented, especially since Firebug is already the natural counter to Crawlers (as it gets bonus XP for Crawler kills), but so far I haven’t heard anything about this possibility.
Rioters seem to cause some people to riot, but I think they’re fine. Depending on the perk and weapons, go for headshots, otherwise aim for the legs. They’re not hugely threatening and not super tanky, though they are sometimes hard to deal with in early waves depending on the situation.
Gorefiends are cool and many times perfectly fine… yet sometimes they’re inexplicably hard to kill. I don’t know why they’re so inconsistent, but sometimes they go down quickly, and sometimes they’re unnecessarily tough. Maybe someone else has the answer to this, but overall, they’re not too big of an issue. However, they used to be way worse, when their spin attack couldn’t be stopped at all. Now you can bash or use other attacks to interrupt it if you react, but for a very long time there was nothing you could do.
So really, this feature isn’t much of a problem nowadays, and was never too major a problem to begin with. However, it took months or years for the aforementioned Elite Crawler gas and Gorefiend spin attack issues to be addressed, and arguably there’s still more discussion to be had about this feature, but it’s not as pressing a concern as some other issues.
**Versus Mode (April 2016)**
Most of us forget about this mode after we try it once to get the associated achievements, if even. Most have completely forgotten about it after Versus Mode challenges were taken out of the daily challenge rotation because the mode was so bad that certain types of attacks/Zeds would crash the game 100% of the time. That about sums it up.
Since I haven’t played the mode too much myself, especially not within the past year or two, I can’t recall any other major issues except for one: I believe that the player who gets to control the boss is decided at random. This means that sometimes a really bad player can be the boss, turning what should be the most challenging part of the game into a joke as the player struggles to even attack the human players while they just whale on him.
Inherently, though, it’s not a bad idea. In fact, it could be a lot of fun. Left 4 Dead 2 has the same kind of mode, and that was done well as far as I can remember, so Killing Floor should be able to do it, too. And I’ve seen some crafty players as the bosses before, showing how there could be an interesting dynamic between human players and player-controlled Zeds. The problem is, it was added during Early Access, when there were more important fixes and content to be worked on, and it should’ve been saved for later. Sharpshooter wasn’t even in the game yet, but Versus Mode was.
Perhaps it’s because of how early it was introduced and how unpopular it became that Versus Mode has been abandoned by both players and TripWire. But if it had been released later, with more changes and improvements made to it, it could probably be a much more popular and enjoyable experience. But, like many features and content added to the game, it’s simply abandoned and ignored. At least this one is separate from the main game, so its delinquency doesn’t hurt the rest of the game like most of these other features.
**Weekly Outbreaks (June 2017)**
There was nothing wrong with this system when it was introduced, save for some bugs/issues with some particular challenges, so in that sense it’s unique among the list. The challenges were all new and exciting, and offered unique rewards that the player could earn rather than gamble for. It was a refreshing and creative twist on the gameplay, made possibly by relatively simple tweaks that wouldn’t expend that much time or money. Great!
But then they ran out of new challenges and items. And they never made more. Almost three years later, there hasn’t been a single new weekly challenge or reward. What’s the point of having a challenge for every week if you’ve already done that challenge a dozen times by now? Why add the feature in the first place if you weren’t going to continually add onto it when it’s designed to be added onto?
I’m not saying there should be a new and different challenge for every week of the year. But after two years, you think they’d add at least *one*. Instead, for the past two years, there’s only been 8 challenges and 8 rewards.
Given how many of the cosmetics they can pump out for each update multiple times a year, you think they could at least have more cosmetic items to add, if not at least a new challenge or two, but I guess we’re just going to be stuck with the same challenges and rewards for the rest of time.
**Dosh Vault (October 2017)**
The Dosh Vault isn’t inherently a bad feature. Instead of asking the player to gamble money, it requires the player to complete challenges in order to earn money towards a crate, which is then an RNG unlock much like the paid ones. It’s possible for it to be a waste of time, but at least it’s not a waste of money.
You’d think that you would instead earn “Vosh” the same way you earn XP by killing Zeds and completing games… and you’d be right, because that is a feature. But it was added much later, and not part of the initial release. And when it was added, the rewards per-game were so meager as to basically be nonexistent. And they still are.
Perhaps TripWire is afraid of players abusing Vosh earned in regular gameplay through some exploit and somehow getting dozens of crates illicitly, so they set the earning so low that they don’t matter. Then why add it in the first place?
Furthermore, why would exploiting Vosh earnings be any worse than exploiting XP earnings, which is implicitly condoned through allowing custom maps to earn XP? Especially when prestiging a perk gives you enough Vosh to buy four whole crates?
What makes even less sense about it is the fact that there have been Vault crate bugs in the past where players would somehow get hundreds of crates for free, and then wind up with every Vault item and crates to spare. Sometimes, it wasn’t even an intentional exploit and happened to players accidentally.
And then a lot of the time, the opposite happens and genuinely-earned crates just disappear. I’ve witnessed this countless times myself. What’s the point of working to earn a crate if the system is so buggy that it will just take it away from you? E.g., I’ll prestige a perk, get 2,000,000 Vosh, which is four crates, open three, and the fourth one disappears somehow. Wonderful.
Lastly, the pajamas. And the facepaints. And all the other ugly items that pad out the crates intentionally so that stuff that’s actually cool is harder to come by. And by harder to come by, I mean a ratio of 10 ugly facepaints/pajamas and 5 other miscellaneous boring items for every 1 cool item. This wouldn’t be an issue if you didn’t earn duplicates, like with Zedconomy crates now, but TripWire has stated that they have no intention of preventing you from earning duplicates from Vault crates meaning that it’s entirely possible to invest thousands of hours into the game and never complete your collection or even receive a single item you want.
The Vault has probably received the most direct attention of any of the features on this list, yet somehow despite that, it hasn’t really become any more improved as a result.
**Endless Mode (April 2018)**
With such a simple concept, how can this have issues? By adding unnecessary and poorly designed/tested curveballs into the mix that can bring down the entire experience. A perfect metaphor for this whole problem.
As a way to keep things from getting dull, Endless Mode randomly makes some waves “Outbreak” or “Special” waves. Special waves only have one type of Zed spawn, while Outbreak waves are just one of six recycled Weekly challenges. Sometimes the effect is negligible or even beneficial (has anyone died to a Bloat or Siren only wave?), but many times it can completely kill a run.
Special waves had issues early on. Scrake only waves, depending on the situation, would go on way too long, until they toned things down. There used to be Fleshpound-only waves, too, until those were removed for obvious reasons… six months after the fact.
Outbreak waves haven’t been touched, as far as I’m aware, and are the real problems. “Boom” in particular is a real run killer, since it’s so dangerous and at higher waves you’ll be fighting off way more Zeds than the original Weekly was designed for. BobbleZeds and Beefcake can also be the end of the game sometimes.
Overall, Endless mode isn’t that bad for what it is, but these unique waves do more to hinder the experience than enhance it, and what improvements were made to it came very slowly, leaving the mode frustrating for a very long time.
**Weapon Upgrades (June 2018)**
This was a feature that, when it was announced, I was actually really excited for. One of my gripes about the core game is that weapon/loadout variety is hindered by the weapon tier system. Like the MP7 or AR-15? Too bad, they’re all but unviable by the end of a game, you’re supposed to buy the weapons with arbitrarily better numbers instead.
In theory, the upgrade system can fix that by allowing you to arbitrarily increase the arbitrary numbers to be competitive with any other gun, and thus allow any weapon to be viable.
In practice, it’s mostly a big money sink and doesn’t do enough to make some weapons viable, because it only affects one number: damage.
Some people want the upgrade system to add attachments or do other crazy things to weapons, but that’s impractical in terms of development, because that requires new models, animations, and a whole extra layer of weapon balance. But why it’s also impractical to spend any amount of time to study and balance weapons in a substantial manner is beyond me.
Take the AR-15 for example. What it would need to be comparable to other Commando weapons is not only better damage, but a larger magazine, faster fire rate, and less recoil. But since all that’s increased is damage, and not by a whole lot, it’s still just as unviable, except now you spent way more money on it.
Do you know how much money it takes to upgrade the AR-15 to Tier 5? $3300. On that note, it takes $3500 to upgrade the 9mm to Tier 5. You could buy both a Tier 4 *and* a Tier 5 weapon at the same time for that much. So why on Earth would you ever invest that much into making a trash weapon slightly less trash when you could buy some actually effective guns?
It’d make more sense if to, say, upgrade the 9mm under the current system, it’d cost maybe $1000, maybe $1200. Enough to be a sizable investment, but not enough to be completely stupid.
But to upgrade a Tier 4 weapon to Tier 5, you basically have to buy the weapon a second time by paying $1500. Why does an upgraded Tier 4 weapon cost $3000 when a regular Tier 5 weapon costs $2000? Maybe $2200 or $2300, but a full thousand more expensive? Especially for what’s often such little gain?
I understand the reasoning for why the payments are so steep. You don’t want people to just buy cheaper weapons and upgrade them because it’s about as effective and more economical in the long run. But beyond that, there’s not much more thought put into this feature. Some weapons have gotten minor tweaks and adjustments, since they were a little too powerful when upgraded, but that’s it. That’s all that’s been done since this feature was introduced. Very few neglected weapons have been made viable by this feature, and often it’s the weapons that are already Tier 4 that are made even more dominant by upgrading to Tier 5, defeating the purpose somewhat.
One issue people bring up, which is exacerbated by the pricing, is that now players are less incentivized to share money with other players. Now, if you have excess money, you may want to hold onto it yourself to upgrade your weapons instead of sharing it with someone that might need it. That extra $1500 you have could’ve bought ammo and armor for some teammates, or it can bring your weapon up a tier that might not even be necessary.
What this feature needs is a group of people to really study the weapons and perk balance and determine what unviable weapons need in order to be made viable, test it out, and tweak accordingly. It’s not something you can just throw into a couple of betas, make some small tweaks, and then leave it forever. This is something way more involved than that.
I’m sure there’d be dozens of people in the community willing to spend hours of their time testing this stuff for Tripwire, if time and manpower are what’s lacking here. A lot of players are really passionate about the game’s weapon and perk balance. I understand that having a small demographic of a game’s population determine major changes can be devastating if the majority of the population doesn’t like it, but Battlefield pulled it off rather well with their CTE servers that exclusively helped test new content/features in addition to informing balance changes for everything. And after all, isn’t that what the beta tests for this game are like in the first place?
This isn't really rocket science. It's not changing AI or animations or large, complicated elements of programming. This is just changing singular values like prices, but for some reason this hasn't been touched at all in over a year.
Time will tell how this feature pans out. In a year or two, it could finally become what it was meant to be and make currently bad weapons viable for Hell on Earth at a reasonable price. But I have a dread that things will instead become worse somehow.
**Stand Your Ground (April 2018)**
SYG is a feature that pisses me off more than any of the others on this list because it’s the one that inherently fails at its intended purpose and could be fixed with one small change, yet in the 15+ months since its introduction, the only changes made have been to weight the rewards according to difficulty and to give it a marker (the exclamation point) with the Objective Mode update, which are good improvements but don’t fix the core problem.
What’s wrong with it? Its location is completely random and there’s no warning or heads-up to the players before it spawns. And then immediately after it spawns, a very short countdown ticks before the size of the reward starts to diminish. It’s not “Stand Your Ground.” It’s “Here’s some ground over there, run your ass off to get there in time or we dock the reward, and on your way there you’re probably going to have to fight off a bunch of Zeds while on the move to try and get there in time, which is the opposite of standing your ground.”
The example that prompted me to finally write this post months ago, I was playing on Infernal Ground when a SYG spawned all the way in the complete opposite corner of the map. I ran over to it, and on the way there, 2 Gorefasts, 2 Alpha Clots, 3 Cysts, 3 Crawlers, and 3 Slashers spawned directly in front of me. And by the time I got there, the reward had decreased from 250 to 155. That’s half the wave gone before I even get there, and almost 40% of the reward, all because the SYG is sprung randomly and I had no time to prepare.
Is that fair or fun game design? No. There’s nothing rewarding about a reward system that penalizes the player because it’s physically impossible for them to make it to the reward in time, let alone dangerous.
In most cases, especially with more than one player, it’s actually a death sentence to attempt it, since it requires a whole team running across the map to get into a less defensible position with way more enemies, and hope that everyone on the team is skilled and equipped enough to manage, all for a reward that’s probably already been lowered by the time enough of them get there. In public games, sometimes half the team runs towards the objective while half the team stays put, splitting them up for no reason and endangering the chances of success because some players are newer and don’t know any better, foolishly trusting that the feature is a good idea. On Hell on Earth, it’s completely wasted, but I’ve seen people in public games try and attempt it with a 100% failure rate.
This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if it was possible to toggle it off so that it could at least be completely ignored and forgotten about, like Versus Mode. But instead, it was forced into Survival mode with no toggle, meaning you’re always going to be taunted with rewards that can be impossible to achieve and have teams sometimes split up and get killed for nothing.
How to fix it? Just notify the players of the location during the preceding trader wave. That’s it. That’s all you have to do. That way, in the 60 seconds of the trader wave, the team can be aware of it, perhaps discuss whether or not they can do it, and then get there and position themselves for the following wave. It’ll be less of a scramble to figure out what to do and where to go as soon as enemies start spawning, and instead it can be deliberated safely and effectively. That’s how it should’ve been from day one, and it makes more sense so that players can prepare and get ready to “stand their ground,” right?
Thank God, the system was improved in late 2019 by making it so the objective no longer counts down when players are outside, but rather it’s about the percentage of kills from within the zone. That’s way, way better. In fact, make it so the location of the zone is announced in the preceding trader wave, and it’d be perfect. Because there’s still the issue of it spawning across the map, making it a dangerous trek there, and Zeds having already spawned and possibly being in the way, leading you to kill them and not get the full reward for being in the zone.
**EDARs (June 2018)**
EDARs are where the fault in TripWire’s production/update system is made most apparent. During the betas leading up to the update, players consistently voiced concerns about their design. These concerns ranged from conceptual (some didn’t think their aesthetic design matched the rest of the Zeds, others didn’t think their attacks fit the gameplay) to concrete (they were too tanky and their weak point way too small). There was also the issue that these were a completely new enemy type, but apparently Tripwire has no way to add a spawn for them individually, so they’re tacked onto Stalker spawns, meaning you get both an EDAR and several invisible enemies coming at you at once.
With so many concrete and conceptual issues, you’d think their release would be delayed so more testing could be done and more feedback could be received. But instead, the focus of the production is less about the experience and more about how many shiny new things and features can be added into the game, no matter how detrimental it is in the short or long term.
So they were added, improved through testing but still not finished, and caused issues for the game experience for months until they were improved upon, with some of those improvements still being made over a year later.
They’re much less of a nuisance now than they were in 2018, and I’m not completely opposed to their inclusion like some people. Even then, there are still issues with them (their spawns are still tied to Husks and Stalkers, and they can sometimes spawn in numbers too large to manage due to their durability). Everything about their introduction and the way they were put into the game is a clear sign of how Killing Floor 2 is suffering from feature creep, as the experience and gameplay is a secondary concern to how much content can be added.
**Perk Prestige (June 2018)**
For all the poorly implemented features added in the first half of 2018, the Prestige feature… is actually fine.
Some people want there to be a gameplay component to it (e.g. more damage or something), but given the extra work it’d take to balance things for that, it’s good that it’s just cosmetic.
In addition, with each prestige, you get a new unique weapon skin for one of that perk’s weapons. If only there were more items you could actually earn instead of acquire by luck.
**Objective Mode (June 2019)**
There’s nothing technically wrong with Objective Mode. It’s basically the same thing as the gameplay of Santa’s Workshop from last year, which was actually fairly well done in terms of map design and Gary Busey Santa, so no problem there.
However, despite being the headline feature of this latest update, it doesn’t really add anything substantial to the game. Like I said, it’s basically the same thing as Santa’s Workshop, just a separate mode now for other maps. It only added one new objective over Santa’s Workshop: carry something from Point A to Point B. Not exactly the most riveting gameplay.
There is one major issue I’ve noticed especially on higher difficulties, though, that I like to call “cascading failure.” In Survival, when teammates die, it’s still reasonably possible sometimes to survive the wave because you’re only fighting a finite amount of enemies. In Objective, since enemies are infinite until the objective is completed, that means if a teammate dies, the game might as well be over already. Especially on waves where you have to carry something, since you’re slow and can’t even use your weapon. The game becomes an uphill battle where the hill continually gets steeper and ammo is limited.
In isolation, it’s not a big deal, since it’s not flawed by design like the above features on this list. But Objective Mode was added to the original Killing Floor six years ago, and it was a little more creative. We got psychopath Colonel Sanders in a yacht and Rachel Clamley giving us some story/lore for the second and third Objective Mode maps in KF1, which was new and interesting. I recall Fright Yard had a couple of interesting objectives, like collecting Bloat bile and playing slot machines. Not exactly groundbreaking, but it was imaginative.
For KF2, we get the same steampunk guy from KF1 and last year in KF2, as well as the Trader in the two retrofitted maps, meaning we don’t get any new characters at all. Since we got Gary Busey Santa for the unofficial Objective Mode last year, this isn’t that big of a deal, but I personally find the Trader to be a really boring character and didn’t enjoy whatever story was supposed to be going on in her two maps. In addition, there aren’t any functionally new objectives, so from a gameplay perspective, it’s less of a step forward than KF1’s Objective Mode.
Hopefully we get more unique characters and objectives for the mode as time goes on.
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So, a conclusion then.
I love Killing Floor 2, and it’s been the one game that I’ve played consistently for about four to five years now. The base gameplay is so fun and engaging, with the perks, zeds, weapons, and maps all being amazing content that doesn’t lose its charm. But all these extra features and additions that have been made to them are so incredibly lacking in comparison that it’s bogging that experience down.
If the game is to survive for a few more years, or for a sequel to be successful, this needs to be addressed. Players may show up to see new features, but they won’t stay if those features are shallow or poorly designed. New content can be exciting, but it has to be content people want to play instead of just something new for the sake of being new.
Hopefully 2020 and the following years can turn things around and bring all areas of the game up to the par that the basic gameplay sets, and the game can become something truly polished and spectacular. As it stands now, though, there’s a lot of rough edges that are only getting smoother at a snail’s pace.
So I’ll take this opportunity to hopefully get ahead of some things and say what’s needed to be said for a while: Killing Floor 2 is suffering from feature creep.
What is feature creep? It’s when too many features are added to a game or software to the point that it starts causing problems and reduces overall efficiency or enjoyability.
Almost every major update Killing Floor 2 over the years has had includes some new feature. Recently, it was Objective Mode, and before that was Weapon Upgrades, etc. However, most of the time, these features seem to be rushed out with little testing or development, and then they’re left that way with only minor changes over the span of years. They’re never very deep features, and often have some major flaws that shouldn’t have happened.
The intent seems to be to make each new update seem exciting to bring back old players and intrigue potential new players, thus driving player engagement and sales. However, at the rate things are going, this rushed course will become unsustainable, as the amount of shallow and flawed features will instead alienate and drive away both current and potential players alike, frustrating people with how shallow these features are.
Many of these features are introduced in beta only a month or so before the update they’re meant to ship in, which is often not enough time to change things if there’s something seriously wrong. If the playerbase reacts negatively to an introduced change or feature, that doesn’t prevent it from being pushed into the game, even if it’s not ready and the general playerbase dislikes it, since by then it’s already slated to ship with the update. This is, quite frankly, irresponsible, given that the next update always takes several months to come out, so TripWire has occasionally left their playerbase in a state of dissatisfaction and frustration for months, all because of a nonexistent demand to push these features out immediately instead of when they’re ready.
Unlike a lot of people, I try to be sensitive to the nature of game development and the relevant studio and project at hand. I understand that some of these changes and features would take a lot of time and manpower to develop to its fullest potential, and with a small game and studio like this, that’s not easy. However, some of these features could be fixed with just small changes—changes so small but so glaring it’s hard to believe they’ve been overlooked for a year or more—and for the changes/features that would take longer to implement, there’s no excuse for rushing them out before they’re in a state the playerbase is happy with when there’s no demand for it. There are solutions to this issue and putting the game in a frustrating state for months or even years is not the answer.
I bought the game the day it was released in Early Access, and have played about 500 hours since then, so I feel somewhat qualified to give commentary on this issue. Every time I play the game, I’m confronted by these features and how they interfere with the enjoyability of the game, and I worry that they’ll stay that way forever, while new features are added that are just as flawed.
So I post this in the hopes that TripWire can see it and understand what the issues are and how to rectify them in the present and avoid them in the future. And, if others disagree with my assessments, to discuss and come to a consensus about the state of the game.
I won’t touch on balance or difficulty issues, since those aren’t features, though those topics are worthy of discussion. This post is dedicated solely to the additional features laid on top of the core game that are causing feature creep.
I’ll be addressing each relevant feature in order of its introduction, from oldest to newest.
**Zedconomy (December 2015)**
I personally detest RNG/lootbox/crate unlock mechanics on principle and see them as manipulative and cynical attempts at money and player retention, but that’s not what I’m going to talk about. In fact, I have very little to talk about the Zedconomy, because it’s already been fixed somewhat fixed.
That is, you cannot get duplicates from opening crates/redeeming tickets, meaning that it’s not complete RNG and you can feasibly unlock everything a particular crate or event has to offer. However, it took *three years* for that to happen. Three whole years. And for people on consoles, it was even worse of a situation, because they don’t have a Steam Marketplace to buy items directly, even at stupid prices.
There still are issues. Like the fact that the market is flooded with the same Woodland skins and basic hats because for some reason those are the only items you earn through gameplay, even now. Or how recycling them requires ten recycles for one new item, which seems extreme.
I’d say the core problem is that the system copies Counter Strike: Global Offensive’s system without being nearly as popular to sustain it. Most games that copied that system, e.g. Rocket League, have since moved on to newer, better systems that don’t require large sums of money to unlock cosmetics and deter players from ever using them, especially on consoles that don’t have markets or trading.
The result of this inattention is that it seems the Zedconomy has no longer become profitable, and now Tripwire is relying on expensive new weapons to support the game. This drastic measure and backtracking on earlier promises wouldn’t have been necessary if more thought and attention went into the system than none at all.
I’m sympathetic to the need to finance the game when it’s being sold at a low price and big updates are free. Money doesn’t grow on trees. But, it’s hard to be too sympathetic when the system has been broken for years and never revised in any attempt to avoid this.
**Elite Zeds (January 2016 onwards?)**
Of all the features on this list, this one’s probably one of the least flawed. Likely because it was added so early, and it’s one of the most demanding of attention, since it’s enemies you get thrown at you every single game.
Elite Crawlers, for the longest time, had the graphic for their gas clouds be larger than the actual hitbox, which only made things confusing and unclear. They finally fixed this, but many players still want a counter to their gas. The gas is meant to push players back for a period of time (a longass period of time), which is fair, but many players have proposed having Firebug’s flame weapons “burn up” the gas to neutralize it. I don’t see why that can’t be implemented, especially since Firebug is already the natural counter to Crawlers (as it gets bonus XP for Crawler kills), but so far I haven’t heard anything about this possibility.
Rioters seem to cause some people to riot, but I think they’re fine. Depending on the perk and weapons, go for headshots, otherwise aim for the legs. They’re not hugely threatening and not super tanky, though they are sometimes hard to deal with in early waves depending on the situation.
Gorefiends are cool and many times perfectly fine… yet sometimes they’re inexplicably hard to kill. I don’t know why they’re so inconsistent, but sometimes they go down quickly, and sometimes they’re unnecessarily tough. Maybe someone else has the answer to this, but overall, they’re not too big of an issue. However, they used to be way worse, when their spin attack couldn’t be stopped at all. Now you can bash or use other attacks to interrupt it if you react, but for a very long time there was nothing you could do.
So really, this feature isn’t much of a problem nowadays, and was never too major a problem to begin with. However, it took months or years for the aforementioned Elite Crawler gas and Gorefiend spin attack issues to be addressed, and arguably there’s still more discussion to be had about this feature, but it’s not as pressing a concern as some other issues.
**Versus Mode (April 2016)**
Most of us forget about this mode after we try it once to get the associated achievements, if even. Most have completely forgotten about it after Versus Mode challenges were taken out of the daily challenge rotation because the mode was so bad that certain types of attacks/Zeds would crash the game 100% of the time. That about sums it up.
Since I haven’t played the mode too much myself, especially not within the past year or two, I can’t recall any other major issues except for one: I believe that the player who gets to control the boss is decided at random. This means that sometimes a really bad player can be the boss, turning what should be the most challenging part of the game into a joke as the player struggles to even attack the human players while they just whale on him.
Inherently, though, it’s not a bad idea. In fact, it could be a lot of fun. Left 4 Dead 2 has the same kind of mode, and that was done well as far as I can remember, so Killing Floor should be able to do it, too. And I’ve seen some crafty players as the bosses before, showing how there could be an interesting dynamic between human players and player-controlled Zeds. The problem is, it was added during Early Access, when there were more important fixes and content to be worked on, and it should’ve been saved for later. Sharpshooter wasn’t even in the game yet, but Versus Mode was.
Perhaps it’s because of how early it was introduced and how unpopular it became that Versus Mode has been abandoned by both players and TripWire. But if it had been released later, with more changes and improvements made to it, it could probably be a much more popular and enjoyable experience. But, like many features and content added to the game, it’s simply abandoned and ignored. At least this one is separate from the main game, so its delinquency doesn’t hurt the rest of the game like most of these other features.
**Weekly Outbreaks (June 2017)**
There was nothing wrong with this system when it was introduced, save for some bugs/issues with some particular challenges, so in that sense it’s unique among the list. The challenges were all new and exciting, and offered unique rewards that the player could earn rather than gamble for. It was a refreshing and creative twist on the gameplay, made possibly by relatively simple tweaks that wouldn’t expend that much time or money. Great!
But then they ran out of new challenges and items. And they never made more. Almost three years later, there hasn’t been a single new weekly challenge or reward. What’s the point of having a challenge for every week if you’ve already done that challenge a dozen times by now? Why add the feature in the first place if you weren’t going to continually add onto it when it’s designed to be added onto?
I’m not saying there should be a new and different challenge for every week of the year. But after two years, you think they’d add at least *one*. Instead, for the past two years, there’s only been 8 challenges and 8 rewards.
Given how many of the cosmetics they can pump out for each update multiple times a year, you think they could at least have more cosmetic items to add, if not at least a new challenge or two, but I guess we’re just going to be stuck with the same challenges and rewards for the rest of time.
**Dosh Vault (October 2017)**
The Dosh Vault isn’t inherently a bad feature. Instead of asking the player to gamble money, it requires the player to complete challenges in order to earn money towards a crate, which is then an RNG unlock much like the paid ones. It’s possible for it to be a waste of time, but at least it’s not a waste of money.
You’d think that you would instead earn “Vosh” the same way you earn XP by killing Zeds and completing games… and you’d be right, because that is a feature. But it was added much later, and not part of the initial release. And when it was added, the rewards per-game were so meager as to basically be nonexistent. And they still are.
Perhaps TripWire is afraid of players abusing Vosh earned in regular gameplay through some exploit and somehow getting dozens of crates illicitly, so they set the earning so low that they don’t matter. Then why add it in the first place?
Furthermore, why would exploiting Vosh earnings be any worse than exploiting XP earnings, which is implicitly condoned through allowing custom maps to earn XP? Especially when prestiging a perk gives you enough Vosh to buy four whole crates?
What makes even less sense about it is the fact that there have been Vault crate bugs in the past where players would somehow get hundreds of crates for free, and then wind up with every Vault item and crates to spare. Sometimes, it wasn’t even an intentional exploit and happened to players accidentally.
And then a lot of the time, the opposite happens and genuinely-earned crates just disappear. I’ve witnessed this countless times myself. What’s the point of working to earn a crate if the system is so buggy that it will just take it away from you? E.g., I’ll prestige a perk, get 2,000,000 Vosh, which is four crates, open three, and the fourth one disappears somehow. Wonderful.
Lastly, the pajamas. And the facepaints. And all the other ugly items that pad out the crates intentionally so that stuff that’s actually cool is harder to come by. And by harder to come by, I mean a ratio of 10 ugly facepaints/pajamas and 5 other miscellaneous boring items for every 1 cool item. This wouldn’t be an issue if you didn’t earn duplicates, like with Zedconomy crates now, but TripWire has stated that they have no intention of preventing you from earning duplicates from Vault crates meaning that it’s entirely possible to invest thousands of hours into the game and never complete your collection or even receive a single item you want.
The Vault has probably received the most direct attention of any of the features on this list, yet somehow despite that, it hasn’t really become any more improved as a result.
**Endless Mode (April 2018)**
With such a simple concept, how can this have issues? By adding unnecessary and poorly designed/tested curveballs into the mix that can bring down the entire experience. A perfect metaphor for this whole problem.
As a way to keep things from getting dull, Endless Mode randomly makes some waves “Outbreak” or “Special” waves. Special waves only have one type of Zed spawn, while Outbreak waves are just one of six recycled Weekly challenges. Sometimes the effect is negligible or even beneficial (has anyone died to a Bloat or Siren only wave?), but many times it can completely kill a run.
Special waves had issues early on. Scrake only waves, depending on the situation, would go on way too long, until they toned things down. There used to be Fleshpound-only waves, too, until those were removed for obvious reasons… six months after the fact.
Outbreak waves haven’t been touched, as far as I’m aware, and are the real problems. “Boom” in particular is a real run killer, since it’s so dangerous and at higher waves you’ll be fighting off way more Zeds than the original Weekly was designed for. BobbleZeds and Beefcake can also be the end of the game sometimes.
Overall, Endless mode isn’t that bad for what it is, but these unique waves do more to hinder the experience than enhance it, and what improvements were made to it came very slowly, leaving the mode frustrating for a very long time.
**Weapon Upgrades (June 2018)**
This was a feature that, when it was announced, I was actually really excited for. One of my gripes about the core game is that weapon/loadout variety is hindered by the weapon tier system. Like the MP7 or AR-15? Too bad, they’re all but unviable by the end of a game, you’re supposed to buy the weapons with arbitrarily better numbers instead.
In theory, the upgrade system can fix that by allowing you to arbitrarily increase the arbitrary numbers to be competitive with any other gun, and thus allow any weapon to be viable.
In practice, it’s mostly a big money sink and doesn’t do enough to make some weapons viable, because it only affects one number: damage.
Some people want the upgrade system to add attachments or do other crazy things to weapons, but that’s impractical in terms of development, because that requires new models, animations, and a whole extra layer of weapon balance. But why it’s also impractical to spend any amount of time to study and balance weapons in a substantial manner is beyond me.
Take the AR-15 for example. What it would need to be comparable to other Commando weapons is not only better damage, but a larger magazine, faster fire rate, and less recoil. But since all that’s increased is damage, and not by a whole lot, it’s still just as unviable, except now you spent way more money on it.
Do you know how much money it takes to upgrade the AR-15 to Tier 5? $3300. On that note, it takes $3500 to upgrade the 9mm to Tier 5. You could buy both a Tier 4 *and* a Tier 5 weapon at the same time for that much. So why on Earth would you ever invest that much into making a trash weapon slightly less trash when you could buy some actually effective guns?
It’d make more sense if to, say, upgrade the 9mm under the current system, it’d cost maybe $1000, maybe $1200. Enough to be a sizable investment, but not enough to be completely stupid.
But to upgrade a Tier 4 weapon to Tier 5, you basically have to buy the weapon a second time by paying $1500. Why does an upgraded Tier 4 weapon cost $3000 when a regular Tier 5 weapon costs $2000? Maybe $2200 or $2300, but a full thousand more expensive? Especially for what’s often such little gain?
I understand the reasoning for why the payments are so steep. You don’t want people to just buy cheaper weapons and upgrade them because it’s about as effective and more economical in the long run. But beyond that, there’s not much more thought put into this feature. Some weapons have gotten minor tweaks and adjustments, since they were a little too powerful when upgraded, but that’s it. That’s all that’s been done since this feature was introduced. Very few neglected weapons have been made viable by this feature, and often it’s the weapons that are already Tier 4 that are made even more dominant by upgrading to Tier 5, defeating the purpose somewhat.
One issue people bring up, which is exacerbated by the pricing, is that now players are less incentivized to share money with other players. Now, if you have excess money, you may want to hold onto it yourself to upgrade your weapons instead of sharing it with someone that might need it. That extra $1500 you have could’ve bought ammo and armor for some teammates, or it can bring your weapon up a tier that might not even be necessary.
What this feature needs is a group of people to really study the weapons and perk balance and determine what unviable weapons need in order to be made viable, test it out, and tweak accordingly. It’s not something you can just throw into a couple of betas, make some small tweaks, and then leave it forever. This is something way more involved than that.
I’m sure there’d be dozens of people in the community willing to spend hours of their time testing this stuff for Tripwire, if time and manpower are what’s lacking here. A lot of players are really passionate about the game’s weapon and perk balance. I understand that having a small demographic of a game’s population determine major changes can be devastating if the majority of the population doesn’t like it, but Battlefield pulled it off rather well with their CTE servers that exclusively helped test new content/features in addition to informing balance changes for everything. And after all, isn’t that what the beta tests for this game are like in the first place?
This isn't really rocket science. It's not changing AI or animations or large, complicated elements of programming. This is just changing singular values like prices, but for some reason this hasn't been touched at all in over a year.
Time will tell how this feature pans out. In a year or two, it could finally become what it was meant to be and make currently bad weapons viable for Hell on Earth at a reasonable price. But I have a dread that things will instead become worse somehow.
**Stand Your Ground (April 2018)**
SYG is a feature that pisses me off more than any of the others on this list because it’s the one that inherently fails at its intended purpose and could be fixed with one small change, yet in the 15+ months since its introduction, the only changes made have been to weight the rewards according to difficulty and to give it a marker (the exclamation point) with the Objective Mode update, which are good improvements but don’t fix the core problem.
What’s wrong with it? Its location is completely random and there’s no warning or heads-up to the players before it spawns. And then immediately after it spawns, a very short countdown ticks before the size of the reward starts to diminish. It’s not “Stand Your Ground.” It’s “Here’s some ground over there, run your ass off to get there in time or we dock the reward, and on your way there you’re probably going to have to fight off a bunch of Zeds while on the move to try and get there in time, which is the opposite of standing your ground.”
The example that prompted me to finally write this post months ago, I was playing on Infernal Ground when a SYG spawned all the way in the complete opposite corner of the map. I ran over to it, and on the way there, 2 Gorefasts, 2 Alpha Clots, 3 Cysts, 3 Crawlers, and 3 Slashers spawned directly in front of me. And by the time I got there, the reward had decreased from 250 to 155. That’s half the wave gone before I even get there, and almost 40% of the reward, all because the SYG is sprung randomly and I had no time to prepare.
Is that fair or fun game design? No. There’s nothing rewarding about a reward system that penalizes the player because it’s physically impossible for them to make it to the reward in time, let alone dangerous.
In most cases, especially with more than one player, it’s actually a death sentence to attempt it, since it requires a whole team running across the map to get into a less defensible position with way more enemies, and hope that everyone on the team is skilled and equipped enough to manage, all for a reward that’s probably already been lowered by the time enough of them get there. In public games, sometimes half the team runs towards the objective while half the team stays put, splitting them up for no reason and endangering the chances of success because some players are newer and don’t know any better, foolishly trusting that the feature is a good idea. On Hell on Earth, it’s completely wasted, but I’ve seen people in public games try and attempt it with a 100% failure rate.
This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if it was possible to toggle it off so that it could at least be completely ignored and forgotten about, like Versus Mode. But instead, it was forced into Survival mode with no toggle, meaning you’re always going to be taunted with rewards that can be impossible to achieve and have teams sometimes split up and get killed for nothing.
How to fix it? Just notify the players of the location during the preceding trader wave. That’s it. That’s all you have to do. That way, in the 60 seconds of the trader wave, the team can be aware of it, perhaps discuss whether or not they can do it, and then get there and position themselves for the following wave. It’ll be less of a scramble to figure out what to do and where to go as soon as enemies start spawning, and instead it can be deliberated safely and effectively. That’s how it should’ve been from day one, and it makes more sense so that players can prepare and get ready to “stand their ground,” right?
Thank God, the system was improved in late 2019 by making it so the objective no longer counts down when players are outside, but rather it’s about the percentage of kills from within the zone. That’s way, way better. In fact, make it so the location of the zone is announced in the preceding trader wave, and it’d be perfect. Because there’s still the issue of it spawning across the map, making it a dangerous trek there, and Zeds having already spawned and possibly being in the way, leading you to kill them and not get the full reward for being in the zone.
**EDARs (June 2018)**
EDARs are where the fault in TripWire’s production/update system is made most apparent. During the betas leading up to the update, players consistently voiced concerns about their design. These concerns ranged from conceptual (some didn’t think their aesthetic design matched the rest of the Zeds, others didn’t think their attacks fit the gameplay) to concrete (they were too tanky and their weak point way too small). There was also the issue that these were a completely new enemy type, but apparently Tripwire has no way to add a spawn for them individually, so they’re tacked onto Stalker spawns, meaning you get both an EDAR and several invisible enemies coming at you at once.
With so many concrete and conceptual issues, you’d think their release would be delayed so more testing could be done and more feedback could be received. But instead, the focus of the production is less about the experience and more about how many shiny new things and features can be added into the game, no matter how detrimental it is in the short or long term.
So they were added, improved through testing but still not finished, and caused issues for the game experience for months until they were improved upon, with some of those improvements still being made over a year later.
They’re much less of a nuisance now than they were in 2018, and I’m not completely opposed to their inclusion like some people. Even then, there are still issues with them (their spawns are still tied to Husks and Stalkers, and they can sometimes spawn in numbers too large to manage due to their durability). Everything about their introduction and the way they were put into the game is a clear sign of how Killing Floor 2 is suffering from feature creep, as the experience and gameplay is a secondary concern to how much content can be added.
**Perk Prestige (June 2018)**
For all the poorly implemented features added in the first half of 2018, the Prestige feature… is actually fine.
Some people want there to be a gameplay component to it (e.g. more damage or something), but given the extra work it’d take to balance things for that, it’s good that it’s just cosmetic.
In addition, with each prestige, you get a new unique weapon skin for one of that perk’s weapons. If only there were more items you could actually earn instead of acquire by luck.
**Objective Mode (June 2019)**
There’s nothing technically wrong with Objective Mode. It’s basically the same thing as the gameplay of Santa’s Workshop from last year, which was actually fairly well done in terms of map design and Gary Busey Santa, so no problem there.
However, despite being the headline feature of this latest update, it doesn’t really add anything substantial to the game. Like I said, it’s basically the same thing as Santa’s Workshop, just a separate mode now for other maps. It only added one new objective over Santa’s Workshop: carry something from Point A to Point B. Not exactly the most riveting gameplay.
There is one major issue I’ve noticed especially on higher difficulties, though, that I like to call “cascading failure.” In Survival, when teammates die, it’s still reasonably possible sometimes to survive the wave because you’re only fighting a finite amount of enemies. In Objective, since enemies are infinite until the objective is completed, that means if a teammate dies, the game might as well be over already. Especially on waves where you have to carry something, since you’re slow and can’t even use your weapon. The game becomes an uphill battle where the hill continually gets steeper and ammo is limited.
In isolation, it’s not a big deal, since it’s not flawed by design like the above features on this list. But Objective Mode was added to the original Killing Floor six years ago, and it was a little more creative. We got psychopath Colonel Sanders in a yacht and Rachel Clamley giving us some story/lore for the second and third Objective Mode maps in KF1, which was new and interesting. I recall Fright Yard had a couple of interesting objectives, like collecting Bloat bile and playing slot machines. Not exactly groundbreaking, but it was imaginative.
For KF2, we get the same steampunk guy from KF1 and last year in KF2, as well as the Trader in the two retrofitted maps, meaning we don’t get any new characters at all. Since we got Gary Busey Santa for the unofficial Objective Mode last year, this isn’t that big of a deal, but I personally find the Trader to be a really boring character and didn’t enjoy whatever story was supposed to be going on in her two maps. In addition, there aren’t any functionally new objectives, so from a gameplay perspective, it’s less of a step forward than KF1’s Objective Mode.
Hopefully we get more unique characters and objectives for the mode as time goes on.
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So, a conclusion then.
I love Killing Floor 2, and it’s been the one game that I’ve played consistently for about four to five years now. The base gameplay is so fun and engaging, with the perks, zeds, weapons, and maps all being amazing content that doesn’t lose its charm. But all these extra features and additions that have been made to them are so incredibly lacking in comparison that it’s bogging that experience down.
If the game is to survive for a few more years, or for a sequel to be successful, this needs to be addressed. Players may show up to see new features, but they won’t stay if those features are shallow or poorly designed. New content can be exciting, but it has to be content people want to play instead of just something new for the sake of being new.
Hopefully 2020 and the following years can turn things around and bring all areas of the game up to the par that the basic gameplay sets, and the game can become something truly polished and spectacular. As it stands now, though, there’s a lot of rough edges that are only getting smoother at a snail’s pace.
