I was just four hours shy of racking up 2,500 hours in KF2, so I'm happy to say that I think the game has represented fantastic value for money and provided plenty of entertainment over the last 5 years. I've now uninstalled the game, sold my inventory and decommissioned my servers.
The last year of the game has, by my perception, represented a significant decline in quality, which doesn't tally with the message that things would be improving due to the income from the controversial DLC weapons. Had I purchased the DLC weapons, I would be even more annoyed at the lack of meaningful updates since they were introduced but I've always felt they were overpriced for what they were so elected not to make that investment.
Before it was announced, I decided that this summer's update would be the last chance I'd give the game to see some sign of positive development but the Perilous Plunder update has fallen very short of my already low expectations. The days of themed updates appear to be long gone, to the point where the seasonal updates are just plain confusing; a pirate-themed update with circus zeds, set in a jungle? For summer? At its absolute best, it just comes across as cynical and lazy; a loosely cobbled together package of unrelated content. I'm confident a similar result could be achieved by blind-folding a monkey and getting it to click on things in the Steam Workshop for twenty minutes.
I have enormous respect for those in the community who take the time to produce incredible maps like Desolation, Biolapse, Sanitarium et al but you must realise that a lot of heavily-invested players will have already been playing these maps for a long time before they were made into official maps, which significantly reduces the novelty value - if not the replayability - of them by the time they're official. It would've been nice to have seen a themed map for this update, continuing on from the Airship and Steam Fortress maps. It almost feels like there should have been a continuation of this theme but it was abandoned due to... reasons?
I won't talk about the HRG weapons, except to say they're a briefly fun sideshow achieved by taking a weapon model and making it behave like a different weapon is not a game-changer. They feel like a mod, not like a development.
Disappointing updates aside, I'm not sure why so many development paths became seemingly dead-ended. The weekly outbreaks were a novel idea but they haven't been taken anywhere, years after their introduction. The upgrade system was an unnecessary idea that was poorly implemented and then abandoned. PvP? Endless modes? There's very little going on apart from the occasional balance tweak every now and again, which appears to be designed to make every perk feel that little bit more generic and seemingly actively dissuade people from realising there's a need for co-operative play.
Maybe I'm a little jaded after 2,500 hours but the game really feels like Old Yeller now and perhaps the kindest thing to do would be to take it into the barn on KF-Farmhouse with a Boomstick and do the necessary.
The last year of the game has, by my perception, represented a significant decline in quality, which doesn't tally with the message that things would be improving due to the income from the controversial DLC weapons. Had I purchased the DLC weapons, I would be even more annoyed at the lack of meaningful updates since they were introduced but I've always felt they were overpriced for what they were so elected not to make that investment.
Before it was announced, I decided that this summer's update would be the last chance I'd give the game to see some sign of positive development but the Perilous Plunder update has fallen very short of my already low expectations. The days of themed updates appear to be long gone, to the point where the seasonal updates are just plain confusing; a pirate-themed update with circus zeds, set in a jungle? For summer? At its absolute best, it just comes across as cynical and lazy; a loosely cobbled together package of unrelated content. I'm confident a similar result could be achieved by blind-folding a monkey and getting it to click on things in the Steam Workshop for twenty minutes.
I have enormous respect for those in the community who take the time to produce incredible maps like Desolation, Biolapse, Sanitarium et al but you must realise that a lot of heavily-invested players will have already been playing these maps for a long time before they were made into official maps, which significantly reduces the novelty value - if not the replayability - of them by the time they're official. It would've been nice to have seen a themed map for this update, continuing on from the Airship and Steam Fortress maps. It almost feels like there should have been a continuation of this theme but it was abandoned due to... reasons?
I won't talk about the HRG weapons, except to say they're a briefly fun sideshow achieved by taking a weapon model and making it behave like a different weapon is not a game-changer. They feel like a mod, not like a development.
Disappointing updates aside, I'm not sure why so many development paths became seemingly dead-ended. The weekly outbreaks were a novel idea but they haven't been taken anywhere, years after their introduction. The upgrade system was an unnecessary idea that was poorly implemented and then abandoned. PvP? Endless modes? There's very little going on apart from the occasional balance tweak every now and again, which appears to be designed to make every perk feel that little bit more generic and seemingly actively dissuade people from realising there's a need for co-operative play.
Maybe I'm a little jaded after 2,500 hours but the game really feels like Old Yeller now and perhaps the kindest thing to do would be to take it into the barn on KF-Farmhouse with a Boomstick and do the necessary.
