Fans of Pokémon-inspired MMO Temtem are arguing with the developer about what MMO means after Crema CEO says it's 'not feasible' to keep adding content forever
Fans of Pokémon-inspired MMO Temtem are arguing with the developer about what MMO means after Crema CEO says it's 'not feasible' to keep adding content forever
The announcement of Temtem: Swarm earlier this week did not go over quite as Crema expected.
the small detail is forgotten that those MMOs have a subscription model or are free but with pay-to-win practices. They are sustainable in that way."
horizontal progression mmos like ESO or GW2 that arent subs arent either of those.
You could call ESO pay-to-win to fit this definition, because there is new content added as subscription or paid. There will be new gear sets offering effectively an advantage for many builds and some new skills.
in horizontal progression, changes in things are typically sidegrades in progress, as you trade off one thing for another, compared to having a higher level equipment with higher stats in a vertically progressed MMO. New builds can be created via patches, but they aren't necessarily straight upgrades from the existing ones.
GW2 has a huge cash shop of cosmetics, to the point you can barely get any by just playing.
if that's your definition of "winning" then you have a different way of playing mmos.The most expensive cosmetics in the game are ridiculously low drop rate infusions that surpass the cost of virtually anything in the shop directly.
Big surprise that Crema has stepped in it again. They've been pretty awful since this game started. I can still remember when they first rolled out the bans and insisted their would be no appeal because their ban process was never wrong. The CEO aggressively defended it, and it wasn't very long before community managers were walking that back admitting some people had to be unbanned.
Their discord was run by dictators as a meme that cropped up around a botched patch resulted in the mods going nuts and banning anyone who mentioned it, and the steam forums were the same. They had a gaggle of fanboys who'd attack anyone who said a bad word about the game, and if anyone talked back to them one of the developers would come along and ban them.
It was such a great idea ran by absolutely awful people.
My partner and I just played through this together in co-op and had a great time. We thought it was a good game.
I read the whole discord drama stuff, and I'm more on Crema's side. I think they've made the mistake of trying to talk to a fanbase like they are just a group of reasonable people that will understand and empathize if you just lay out the facts. But they aren't. They're just going to pick apart anything you say and relentlessly shit on you because they are, collectively, not able to be reasoned with.
They released an MMO in its final state, minus some Kickstarter promised stuff, that they have said they will deliver. They tried to monetize the game how they felt was best, it didn't work out, so they've moved on and left a functioning, small-scope MMO. You can argue the quality of it or whether you agree with their decisions, but they made what they said they were going to make.
And they are still releasing small updates to a community that is, frankly, awful. The subreddit is just a hivemind of asshole armchair developers.
Honest question: can you name an asshole gaming community that isn't tied to a live service game? Because I feel like the shitty community comes from expecting everything to be continually improved, and lots of those improvements are subjective, so someone's improvement is someone else's regression. I'll happily revise my hypothesis with some good counter examples though.
It's because the fanbase is a bit tired of the developers.
The developer already set the tone very early on by being a pompous prick over the whole ban nonsense. No one could prove it but it seemed like certain key remappers (like for joysticks and things like that) were causing the anti cheat to trip even if they weren't being used, just running in the background. The CEO was a real jerk about it on twitter when people asked why there wouldn't be any appeals.
That kind of arrogance and behaviour came out several times. There isn't any reason for the community to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Oof. Sounds like TemTem and Planetside have that in common.
Unfortunately Temtem is a terrible game entirely due to Crema's incompetence.
It's actually impressive how consistently they make horrible decisions. If I had to summarize their attitude, it's that you can't criticize them because "Hey, we're human, we make mistakes and when you criticize us it hurts our feelings". And when I say you can't, I mean it literally. They will suspend or ban you from whatever platform it is for saying anything they perceive as negative.
They take an "us vs them" attitude with their player base which results in the equivalent of Crema stuffing their fingers in their ears saying LALALALALA YOU'RE WRONG WE'RE RIGHT.
It's a shame, because the foundation of the game, the battle system, is genius and a huge improvement over Pokémon. The game showed real promise for a long time. But Crema has been dropping the ball with every update for years and it's long since entered its death spiral.
Yup. Played it in early access for a bit and enjoyed it, then I played it on release and hated it. There are so many promises they completely ignored, including an option to make battle animations faster (their response was "it would change the economy if everything was faster")
They added a battle pass
They made everything you can buy with in-game money outrageously expensive so you buy it from their FOMO rotating cash store
Their definition of "MMO" is making the game so insanely grindy to try to keep players around for hundreds of hours despite obviously not being worth spending that much time in...
And so on and so forth. Crema are so unbelievably greedy and dumb it still hurts that I gave them money.
There are dozens of those fans. Dozens!
A Massively multiplayer online role playing game does not mean the game is a game as a service. It's a route of finance just like some shooting games are and some aren't.
Doesn't this game not have an offline mode?
Yup
I really enjoyed the game when it was first released in early-access on steam. The ability to play through the story with a friend was unique and fun. Unfortunately the Crema team stopped having innovative ideas and just released their version of Pokémon systems. At the time it was nearly impossible to communicate any negative criticism because of rabid fans on the subreddit and devs who seemed to have no interest in communicating with their player base.
I just started playing with 2 friends. I'm not too upset there won't be more content (though I know that going in unlike the OG players). What really bothers me is there are easy updates they can make to create a better user experience. The UI doesn't feel crisp & the animations can be sped up (or skipped) for starters.