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(Warning; Wall of Text!) Random various feedback

Aze

Grizzled Veteran
Mar 19, 2010
1,428
521
I guess I'll just get straight to the (many) points, starting with the good stuff:

POSITIVES:

Graphics and gore:
I generally don't think graphics are the most important thing when it comes to videogames. How "pretty" it looks, isn't as important as how "detailed" (or, interactive) it looks. Those are to me two entirely different things. KF2 has more than enough "pretty" graphics for me personally, but it importantly does pay attention to "detail/interactiveness", or to be more specific, the M.E.A.T. engine and its gore (and weaponhandling, but more to that later). Gore is something which I find to be a REALLY important aspect in games like this. And the gore is probably one my favourite parts about this game!

Atmosphere:
Related to graphics, I really feel the atmosphere feels nice in KF2. Each map can give off such different vibes; Zed Landing gaves me strong vibes of Dead Island. The spacestation map gave me strong vibes of Dead Space. Both games I really like, mind you. I also like the more varied approaches to some of the maps:
* Nightmare and its "psychadelic" style.
* Nightmare and a few others have this small and "stagechanging" kind of design, which is interesting.
* The various traps! While they aren't all that useful most of the time (sadly), they do bring a nice flavour and interactiveness to the maps. If you could buff some of the traps to be more powerful to use against ZEDs, that'd be lovely though!
* Environment destroy-abliity! Sure, it's really limitted, but it's very noticeable in some places; Black Forest's house has walls that can be entirely destroyed (was a nice surprise to me the first time I semi-camped in there!), and various tiles and debris can be moved around. If you can, please, more of this please!

Gunplay and zedtime:
Similar to the topic of attention to detail/interactiveness; The weapon handling is topnotch! (Just like in KF1, really). Thanks for keeping the weapons feel so ... meaty. And it's all the more glorious in zed time! Speaking of zed time...

Perk talent trees:
I'm so happy that there is a more customizable approach to how you play each perk! Sure, there's some flaws here and there, but still; I love that you can customize for your own style. I feel there is JUST the right amount of choice. 1 per 5 levels feels, imo, just right. And some of them are a lot more fun than I thought. When I got Spartan for Berserker... oh boy. That talent was just too much fun (first perk to prestige though, and I instantly started missing that badass talent haha!).

New perks, compared to KF1:
* Gunslinger being an official part of the game got me REALLY happy!
* At first I disliked the SWAT perk, you know, just in general, thinking that it could just as easily been merged with Commando by taking the best of both. But it grew on me as a seperate perk. It's basicly the Machine Gunner that so many people crave for (not me though, never liked LMGs much), but with its own cool (and more easily balanceable) twist to it.
* The idea behind the Survivalist is really nice. It has quite a few odd and/or bad choices, but I find it salvagable at least. Can't wait to have it rebalanced (which I heard is happening, no?)
* I'm sad that you didn't add the Urban Ninja (known as the Martial Artist to most others). Would've liked a more agility-focused melee perk. If you found it hard to get ideas for, did you ever see the Ninjurai suggestion, for new inspiration? It's really well made, I highly recommend to check it out:
https://forums.tripwireinteractive.c...ncept-ninjurai
* I hope you one day add the often suggested Scientist perk too. When I have searched around some more now, I've seen that there have been many, MANY suggestions for it (myself included *cough cough*, pre-researching its popularity though, to my defense), so there's definitely a want for it. And yes, there are new roles still to fill; Offensive support, for example (which only the Hemogoblin and Freezethrower really fills as roles right now).

New enemies:
One thing that felt a little boring / silly, was the overwhelming amount of Clots in KF1. Early waves could feel really bland due to that. Enter the Cyst and Slasher! Honestly, while their differences aren't huge, I still feel they bring in a lot of variety to the "basic cannon fodder" type enemy. The Cyst is the typical slow "zombie", the Clot has a more "determined" / "straightbacked" walk and feel to it than in KF1, while the Slasher brings a more crazy and aggressive personality. Love it!

The EDARs also bring much needed ranged diversity. I like the general idea, although they do have some problems (I'll cover that in the "negative" segment). With some polish, they are definitely keepers, in my opinion.

Quarter Pounds are also nice. Faster and much less defensive versions of the FP makes for a very "reasonably meatspongey" type of enemy, which are fun to just pump tons of lead into.

Seriousness and/or humour:
KF1 already mixed both of these together. KF2 does too, and I'm glad to see it kept. Sure, I would probably still prefer a more overall serious tone to it all, but I have to admit that some humour here and there is actually rather nice (Many games does the "pure seriousness" anyway). I've outright chuckled at a whole bunch of things in the game, so, I'm not suffering from it :p

Classic and/or futuristic weapons and gadgets etc:
I might be the odd guy around here, but I'd prefer if you also added WAY more futuristic/hi-tech/brutal weapons. There's just more unique potential with those weapons, with quirky effects and varied alternate fires and such. So many games does very basic "everyday" weapons, and they often tend to get kinda samey (cuz there's not much to actually differentiate with). Not saying you should stop adding those, as many people like those too, but please; DON'T FORGET TO GO A LITTLE CRAZY! :D

To explain with some more details:
* The SWAT suffers a bit in this regard. They are all a mix of auto/burst/semi, with or without scopes. If you took in more futuristic designs, there could be a plasma SMG with a plasma shotgun altfire! And there could be an SMG with a frontal energyshield altfire (to give it a new approach to the whole "riot shield" idea in a more balanceable way)!
* Both the Gunslinger and Commando suffers a bit here too, but the underslung nade launchers and healing dart allows you spice things up at least for the Commando.

Imo, the most interesting weapons are the more odd/unique ones: The Eviscerator, Pulverizer, Static Strikers, Bonecrusher (not exactly futuristic, but I like that you have what looks like a SEWER LID as a shield!), Doomstick, Hemogoblin, Seeker Six, Microwave Gun, Husk Cannon, Railgun and Freezethrower. All of these really feel DIFFERENT and are all fun to use (ok, Husk Cannon needs some major QoL upgrades, but still. And a flamewave altfire please!)!
More of that kind of stuff please! And more + new stuff with the altfire key, that usually brings a whole lot of "new feel" to the game.

NEGATIVES:

Semi-useless / overly niched perk talents:
There are some talents that are just... not great. The ones I dislike the most fall into two different categories:

1) Starter talents only / Money only talents: SWAT is the most guilty of this with 3(!) talents that are usually only picked as your starting talents, because they give you free items (armor and dual 9mm). Beyond using them for the items, only one of them I feel is nichely useful (the clot antigrab isn't too aweful imo). These talents need to be redesigned to be more generally useful (like I said about the first armor-talent, it's not too bad). And honestly? Non of them should give such DIRECT economical advantages. Feels wrong, to be honest.

2) Useable talents, but only for SOME of your perk weapons: There are a bunch of these; Hicap mags for Boom/Doomstick. Firestorm for non-beam Firebug-weapons. Ground Fire for Mac10. These are fine, IF they had more stuff to them, so they are useable (not necessarily amazing) talents, regardless of what weapons you pick.
For example: If Firestorm also increased AoE (even for Molotovs), increased projectilespeed (good for Husk/Spitfire/Dragon) and, say, increased the afterburn DoT-damage by 20%, that'd make it a semi-niched pick; Better for certain weapons, but never entirely useless. Heat Wave might still be considered the meta-pick due to its amazing CC, but now Firestorm actually doesSOMETHING, and for ALL your perk weapons.
And Ground Fire could be made better for the Mac10 if ALL Firebug weapons produced groundfire, inclduing the Mac10 ofc. WITHOUT RNG wether groundfire spawns or not. Which leads me to my next point...

Combat RNG:
There's just too much RNG, imo. RNG is fine to some extent, as it can make things exciting and give that feel of "keeping things fresh", but there is such a thing as too much RNG. Some examples which I feel are just a bit too much:
1) Certain enemies, Fleshpounds for certain, should NEVER spawn raged. That's just RNG trolling.
2) Groundfire from Firebug weapons, why is it RNG-based wether they spawn or not on certain weapons?
3) Enemies teleporting. Urgh. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they even spawn in midair where you JUST had looked a second ago. Even enemy movement speed has some randomization!
There's likely more I could mention, but I'd rather move on to my next point, related to enemy movement...

Overall game pace:
I feel the game is a BIT too fast overall. KF1 was, to some, maybe a bit on the "too slow" side, so I don't mind KF2 being faster. But I felt it was overtuned in this regard. Certain perks, since they have no movementspeed increasers, WILL die if certain enemies breach a teamformation. But the faster ones? They can survive basicly anything. Either overall movementspeed of us, the players, needs to go up (and then tune down some of the talents/passives), or enemies need to chill down a tiny bit.
While KF1 was slower, it also had this more "surgical precision" kind of feel that KF2 doesn't. In KF2, things get chaotic WAY too easily. At least, the Sharpshooter isn't nearly as overpowered as in KF1, due to this though. But I feel it went to the extent of making the Sharpshooter almost TOO difficult to use on higher diffculties, feeling like I get pidgeonholed into using the M14 most of the time (since it can handle some chaoticness a bit better than the slower rifles).

Single pistols vs Dual pistols:
Generally, these are slightly better handled than in KF1, but there is still one (imo big) issue, same as in KF1:
Ammo.
Buying two pistols already has both ups and downs; You get higher RoF and 2x magsize, but with slower reload, dual weight and twice the initial cost. But why is ammo kept the same? If buying one pistol weighs X, to account for the weapon and its ammo, should buying ANOTHER weapon weighing X also account for its weight and ammo? Personally, if it weren't for the fact that all pistols stack on #2 for selection, I'd only buy single pistols due to that. It's just way more cost-efficient, without too much of a loss anyway, as the higher RoF is generally only useful in super-panic-spam-in-your-faces-modes, which is arguably not how you should be playing the perk anyway.
Now, I can see an issue with having an 1:2 ratio between singles and duals. So, how about a 2:3 ratio, or something along those lines?
Hypothetical example:
Deagle / Dual Deagle currently has 112 total. What if we got 84 for the single (12 total mags), and 126 for duals (9 total mags)? That's exactly a 2:3 ratio, and they still have completely even magazines in regards to spare ammo. This gives a true incentive to buy dual guns, and honestly feels more fair considering the costs and weights.

EDARs:
Honestly, I don't mind these overall. They give value to perk passives that otherwise would be kinda useless or overly niched (like bullet resistance, and explosive resistance outside of selfharm). So, from that pov it's all good. But I have 3 other complaints, related to EDARs:
1) Daily EDAR kills. PLEASE make it count ANY EDAR! They are rare enough by themselves, but splitting them up just makes this daily far worse than it ought to be.
2) The Trapper. Please redesign this one in some way. It's one of the most indirectly lethal enemies around if you can't find something to block line-of-sight! Sure, it's still semi-rare for them to trap you (at least for me), but at least once it has been the (rather unfair) reason for my death. It just feels like a troll enemy.
3) Their pure-roboticness. Now, I don't mind this per se, but there is very little gore in them, due to this. If you could make them more "gibbable", I don't mind them being purely robotic. But if necessary for them to be part of the M.E.A.T-engines goreyness, maybe make them more like cyborgs; part robot, part flesh. I think most people would like that (as the gore is a huge plus for this game).

Melee ranges:
Testing out the melee weapons, I'm kinda baffled by their ranges (as in FORWARD range, not their swing arc). I wanted to compare the weapons' ranges, by swinging at a wall and pinpointing when you start missing. And I realized that the knife actually has longer range than the Katana, and even longer range than the Crovel! Only the Claymore had longer range. Sure all the range-differences are quite minimal, but that's probably the bigger problem I had with them; I barely notice any difference in their ranges. I'd except the Claymore to reach out WAY more forward than what it does currently (it's currently like a pixel in difference). Is this intended, or bug-related?

Fleshpound vs Scrake "introduction screams":
While I've gotten to understand their differences now, I still find their (non-event) introductions scream to be a bit too similar. Their both too gutural. In KF1, the Fleshpound in general had a bit more "electronic" kind of voice, which made it much more distinguishable. Dunno if that's an appropriate approach to change its voice, but I'd personally would like SOME kind of clearer differentiation.

Healing syringe:
Something I thought was completely omitted from the first game was the "heal self = 100 syringe energy cost, heal others = 50 syringe energy cost", thus thought this game was gonna be more "selfish" than the first one. But, then I noticed that the recharge time is much faster (twice, I guess?) when you heal others. Basicly the same effect as in the same game, but has the risk of bringing the selfish mentality since it's less noticeable. Lo and behold, I have DEFINITELY noticed that other players have a more selfish style in this regard, as they almost never ever heal others (even MEDICS, but that also has the right side of the talent tree to blame, along with how you level it up the fastest, which are additional flaws on their own).
If nothing else, could this maybe be something that's taught in the tutorial? It could really be nice to have all healing-related things mentioned there, so it at least has a better chance of teaching the newcomers that healing others is generally strategically smarter than healing yourself.

Gunslinger's Quickdraw:
Just something I found odd (not a huge issue, more like an observation); If you pick Quickdraw, you apparently have less recoil when hipfiring, than if you aim down sights. I understand that QD is supposed to make you use the guns from the hip more, but I still find it weird. I'd thought they AT LEAST would have equal recoil from the hip vs ironsighting.

Monetization:
While I'm not all too crazy about cosmetics, I still felt that some of the "moneygrubbingness" of introducing lootboxes made me kinda disappointed. I don't mind the RNG of getting drops TOO much, but what I really DO dislike; "Here, have this usb/crate! Oh what's that? You want to open it? THEN PAY UP!"
That. That REALLY rubs me the wrong way. It's just such a filthy tease.
At least have some more non-RNG non-Vault loot, that still requires gameplay in various ways. Like, from achivements. The "find 10 items" ones could be good for this, for example.

Gunsounds:
For a company that takes such pride in their gunplay, I'm honestly surprised that there is a whole bunch of weapons that are just aweful-sounding (Medic SMG, I'm looking at you). Or even copy+paste ones! Or full auto vs semiauto sounding different! Or even changing sounds in Zed-time (yes, while you can hear that through the time-distortions, and you can definitely tell this is true with the "shoot in realtime speed" perks). I guess you guys are rushed or something?

Healing darts:
I don't mind them to have homing features. But I've noticed, on several occasions, if I manually aim at an ally and hit them with a dart before the "homing sounds" has appeared, the dart WON'T DO ANYTHING. That just feels wrong. Is it a bug or something? Also, with all the homing-shenanigans, can the darts PLEASE penetrate allies and/or ZEDS that get in the way? It can get unnecessarily hard to heal sometimes due to others bodyblocking your darts.

NEUTRAL / SUGGESTIONS:

Music list:
I'd love to have an ingame music list of the current ingame music tracks. Not just to be able to listen to them there, but maybe also to make a "please don't play this song" kind of feature. Some songs are amazing, some songs... are not so amazing. (And yes, I do know that some songs are map-related, but that's still kept in mind with this feature. You won't be able to play Xmas songs on non-Xmas maps, for example).

Survivalist:
While there are, obviously, a bunch of issues with this perk's passives and talents, I feel there are two passives that felt like missed opportunities here:
1) You have implemented traps in most maps which deal (often neglible) damage. Why not have it so Survivalists deal more damage with them towards ZEDs? It fits, imo, for a survivor-oriented perk to be good at using the environment, with traps and whatnot.
2) Likewise, reduced falling heights. Bit of a stretch, but I'd argue that this would be due to knowing and/or handling the various environments better, as a seasoned survivor.
 
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