About updates' frequency

[Szczuku]

I didn't want to ruin the last week's celebratory vibe thus I'm making this topic right now.

JoeW himself, right before the update, had to step in and explain that the update would feel 'meh', as it is merely a 1/3 of a bigger picture.

So the question arises: Why divide 1 big update into 3 meh ones?

Monthly update scheme, that's why. I think that this way of releasing updates has outstayed its welcome and proven to be not all that effective.

Sure, the game gets a monthly spike in the activity and devs- in revenue, if they released some new skins. But other than that? I bet that there is a constant (heh) atmosphere of looming deadlines at Klei. Every month an update. Not to mention that, since all character reworks are done, there should be a content/qol update every month now, right? I mean, surely that's what should be happening from here on out.

I'm certain you- forumites and devs- can see that this will probably not be achivable by Klei. At a satisfying level, I mean. Because it'd be of course possible to just released a half-finished update every month and say that it's a part of a bigger picture. I'm not trying to insult the devs here, this is my legit prediction.

Not to mention that those deadlines don't leave much room for the devs to seriously change an update, based on beta's feedback. Take Lunar Rifts for an example. _Variant's idea of Lunar Spillage is a great way to prevent rifts from actually destroying the natural worlds of dst, while making it feel natural, as opposed to 'we'll add more stuff to the regrowth mechanic'. It is also an obvious continuation of the 'alien rifts spilling into the world' concept that the devs have taken upon themselves. In fact its so obvious that I'm surprised that it wasn't a part of the update from the get-go. What I'm not surprised by, however, is the fact that it wasn't added to the lauch version of the update. Why? Because that's a lot of work and devs don't have time to do all that, they need to release updates monthly. It does however suck that we didn't even get a 'we hear you and we will add that in the future' from the devs...

Another thing is that I feel as if the monthly update scheme is wasting Klei's resources.

Like, was it necessary for Salty Dog, Hook, Line and Inker, Troubled Waters and maybe even She Sells Seashells to have animated trailers? I mean sure, the more trailers the merrier but this stuff takes time and money. And it's not like all of those were important updates. I'm sorry RoT but you got the short end of the lore stick. All of those were ocean content, not at all related to the story. The devs should've just taken half a year or so to create a big ocean content update.

I feel like switching the timing to 'update every 3 months' would be a good thing. A nice middle ground, in my opinion. Not a drastic enough change for the community to go 'hey! where're the updates?' but the devs should be able to release more coherent, bigger updates. Maybe Klei would even be able to start expanding on existing content, as opposed to what was currently happening now: monthly update release, we're not touching that content again. Lunar Island and uses for its resources are basically the same as they were in 2019. Same thing goes for salt, malbatross and other ocean content.

What about the extra wait time? The first one would be 'rough' (though it's not like we haven't gone through months without anything interesting) but that's about it. Then you would have 3 months worth of updates to keep you preoccupied until the next update. Not to mention that bigger updates would probably warrant a beta a month in advance, basically making it only a 2 month wait between new content. Even then, Klei could always release some small in-between-type updates that'd add a new vignette (drawn purely to be a vignette, not a trailer screenshot) to give the community something nice to look at and some new skins, that wouldn't have to be a specific theme.

That's it, I think. Like I said- monthly updates scheme is showing its age and with the character reworks done, Klei should try to release bigger updates, New Reign-style

[Fill-Lips]

Where's the best option, the 'Take as much time as you need' option?

[BezKa]

Why not just decide which updates need more time and keep us updated? If they're doing a QoL update that will easily take a month and is ready to release, let us have it. If they want to work on an update in a bigger bulk and need 2-5 months we can wait. I wouldn't even be mad if they still released skins once a month without any updates to keep the profits up. 

Interest can be sustained in other ways, like weekly art streams, maybe...

[Mike23Ua]

DST isn’t a live service game.. so it doesn’t absolutely HAVE to get monthly updates.. Klei also on several occasions have missed the monthly update schedule.. so it’s not like stopping the monthly updates would be a big deal. 
What confuses me is that Klei devs had once stated that they had a busy schedule with delivering what was promised in their Roadmap, yet.. they go on to add new things to that Roadmap (such as adding a new seasonal event or even creating brand new games like RotWood to need to develop for alongside everything else.) Klei’s the one adding these things to their “To-Do List” if they were so stretched for time.. why add more to do?

Anyway, the game has finally started to gain traction & be noticed by the Xbox Community, and it sure as heck is satisfying to me to check the Xbox Events App and see DST having a new Event listed right alongside things like GTA, Fortnite, Battlefield, & Call of Duty. Having DST in this Line-Up at the very least gets peoples curiosity to look up/find out what the game even is.

I think waiting longer than 5+ months for an update however, console gamers are going to assume it’s a Dead Game & move onto something that’s getting more frequent support.

Klei also recently just finished reworking the entire character cast, which opened up room for different types of updates besides reworks.
 

 I don’t think Klei devs should be burning themselves out working too much trying to meet their own made up Deadlines, that’s how we end up with lazy, rushed, or uninspiring updates- and developers who have lost a lot of the heart & desire to truly deliver great content for the game.

[Frashaw27]

I think it's much less about how frequently the game updates and more about how the updates aren't all trying to be worth it on their own. Essentially, you have all this new and flashy content with laser sharks and awesomeness and it just... doesn't give you anything worth while. While this approach may work in some games, giving you the satisfaction for beating a hard challenge, it doesn't in DST imo. For example of what I'm trying to communicate, look at the inital update for Crab King. While Crab King is a highly contentious boss even today, I believe that his inital release was much worse because of one thing, the alter you get for beating the pearled version of him. Now we can see the full picture, this is an essential thing as to make and assemble the 3 alters to summon and make the moon angy and yada yada yada, point being that we can now see what it's purpose is and what purpose it has on the game. But back then? It seemed like a hell of a leap to do so much work for what could also be done by mining some rocks and getting crippling chronic back pain from hauling the alter pieces of the lunar island itself. With no new crafts or anything else special about it, it seemed like a wholly nothing reward. A burger that only has buns and mustard, uncooked white rice, a burrito that only has more tortilla in it, something that felt meaningless.

And that's what I'm critizing here. I believe while not every update can be some ground breaking "oh my god everything has been changed" type of update, I think every update should be complete within itself. While things can always be improved and built upon later, most of the content that the update revolves around should be apparent within the game at that moment. For another example, take salt. While salt still has a few uses today, with things like making salt spice to make dishes better and giving a passively (if slow) renewable source of thulecite for people who won't/can't fight the fuelweaver, in it's introduction all it was used for was preserving food. While other parts of that update could be argued were more or less fleshed out, I think that salt should be crowning example of what an item should be implemented like. It has a purpose in future updates, it has a purpose in it's current update, and it has purpose (if minor) in past content. While the past few updates have been good, I can't say most of the updates have been living up to this imo.

For example, let's take dreadstone. Dreadstone has one source (not counting transmuting for this argument), the nightmare warepig's pillers, but only after he smashes them himself. After that, you get the one thing you can use this new resource for, armor. While I believe that this armor does hold some value (especially as Maxwell) I can't deny that it's kinda not worth it for most playstyles when it's equal strength to gear you need to reach to access the boss itself, meaning it doesn't exactly hold up the standard that it's useful in past content unless you count day to day battles against a swarm of bees or a few hounds. It also isn't really all that important to the update itself as the Nightmare Warepig doesn't hold any special interaction or purpose to the material itself (besides the only way to get it) so it also doesn't really fit with being apart of the update's content. Now to be fair, taking root did a much far better in this regard imo as the content within the update helped contribute to other things with the update and helped improve some aspects of previous content like adding an alt way to deal with the fuelweaver minions and a new tools to obliterate the ruins with, but it shows that there needs to be some care to make sure the updates are good by themselves and not just good as a part of something bigger. And that's not something I can entirely blame Klei for messing up.

It's natural to want to make these big updates, but in that journey you'll get lost in the small things as you can only see the big picture while we can only see a small part of it. It's like how you can't blame someone for only getting a vague image of what you're describing if you only described a small portion of it. In short, it's much less about the update's frequency and more so that the content within these needs to uphold themselves instead of being good as some puzzle piece in a bigger plan of content. While I'm sure adding more time between each of these updates might alieviate some of these issues as you'll get the bigger picture sooner instead of later, I don't think it will fix the issue I'm describing. Instead Klei should take a step back and assess what about the new additions makes them not only useful to future content, but also to the current update and past content. While this question would be wasted on things like new materials to craft the new things in the update, taking the time to think about the new items in this way should help give more quality to each individual update. 

[GenomeSquirrel]

The Celestial Altar gave us an axe and a spear, more or less the same axe and spear you already made a thousand times over, they left this neglected update after update, they could have easily tossed in glass suit during sea weed update, and unique utility items would have been great, never happened

Now we have a new station with axe, spear, armor, shovel, more or less the same axe and spear and armor and shovel you already made a thousand times over

Redundancy, neglect, redundancy, neglect; two more months just aren't fixing that. 

If anything, I think the smaller faster updates give them the opportunity to look at finer details, this one new mob had a lot of fine tuning and may still need a lot of fine tuning.

I think Klei is just drastically overestimating how much I value fighting HP Sponges that give a single hat, the sum of three updates will still be meh, subjectively of course.

 

[-Variant]

I'll put a notch on monthly, since I'm very invested in what they're putting on the table with the God-war, but I wouldn't mind something every other month.

Ideally, I want them to take all the time they need, and to keep us updated. I don't mind waiting if they think they need extra time.

[Duck986]

Top commenters already said that, but... As long as the updates are of a high quality, Klei should take as much as they need. Rushing updates always was a bad decision, leaving devs exhausted and players disappointed.

[Mike23Ua]

1 hour ago, Duck986 said:

Top commenters already said that, but... As long as the updates are of a high quality, Klei should take as much as they need. Rushing updates always was a bad decision, leaving devs exhausted and players disappointed.

On the flip side of this comment: (I’m Gemini so I think of the flipside of everything often.. deal with it sorry!) even if content is RUSHED to meet Deadlines & exhausted the Developers, the reality is they’ve added the content to the game, it’s there.. most the work has been put into it- if they want to go back and tweak/patch things up several months later with something they aren’t fully satisfied with.. rather than having to build an entire update, they have something to work with & tweak, which can often even involve awesome Community based Feedback that gets incorporated because it’s a cool idea- Such as for example the Wurt and Wormwood tweaks that came out alongside the RWYS Update.

There’s Good & Bad in both sides.

[Dextops]

15 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

I’m Gemini so I think of the flipside of everything often.. deal with it sorry!)

What

[BoysenSyrup]

waterlogged 2

[sudoku]

I want main content updates to have as much time in the oven as possible.

If they still want to adhere to putting something out every month or so then maybe they should take a page from the singleplayer and have a single developer focus on QOL while they keep working away in the background. 

[lowercase skye]

2 hours ago, Dextops said:

What

Gemini is an astrology sign associated with twins, pairs, two sides, etc. You may know of the Binding of Isaac boss called Gemini that consists of two conjoined twins, or the Homestuck troll Sollux who exists in a simultaneous state of life and death. Thus Mike's comment about looking at both sides of this thing.

[Theukon-dos]

Every 3 months sounds like a good number. Though another option is big updates every 3-4 months, with smaller updates filling the gaps. 

 

What these smaller updates could contain varies. QoL updates are always popular, and don't take a lot of development time, often just being some slight number tweaks. Balance passes are always welcome, and characters could still see adjustments without needing whole refreshes; such as when Wortox got the ability to teleport from the map, And anything else that Klei wants to do but doesn't fit in a specific update.

There are tons of things that Klei could do on the side while developing the BIG bursts of content, just as an example: 

June: Update that introduces and finalizes the first iteration of end-game content, basically what we're seeing right now. 

July/Augest: Smaller update that *rolls dice* Buffs ocean fishing, improves Walter's ammo economy, and tweaks Crab King to not be cancer.

August/September: Update that focuses on the early-game and fleshing out the early game and making the end-game quests clearer. 

 

I'm pretty sure the character refreshes filled this niche while we where getting them. Smaller updates that only needed a few new assets and could be worked on by a B-team while the A-team worked on the juicy patches. 

[Szczuku]

18 hours ago, Fill-Lips said:

Where's the best option, the 'Take as much time as you need' option?

18 hours ago, BezKa said:

Why not just decide which updates need more time and keep us updated?

15 hours ago, -Variant said:

Ideally, I want them to take all the time they need, and to keep us updated. I don't mind waiting if they think they need extra time.

Well I just kind of asuumed that the devs will be able to reasonably cut up the arc into updates that fit a timing.

After all RoT could've been just a single update that took 3 years to make.

So in a similar manner, future updates could also be sectioned to fit the, let's say, 3 month scheme.

A "Take as much time as you need" isn't that constructive imo.

[Captain_Rage]

That is not how creative game development works.

[Spino43]

16 hours ago, GenomeSquirrel said:

The Celestial Altar gave us an axe and a spear, more or less the same axe and spear you already made a thousand times over, they left this neglected update after update, they could have easily tossed in glass suit during sea weed update, and unique utility items would have been great, never happened

Now we have a new station with axe, spear, armor, shovel, more or less the same axe and spear and armor and shovel you already made a thousand times over

Redundancy, neglect, redundancy, neglect; two more months just aren't fixing that. 

If anything, I think the smaller faster updates give them the opportunity to look at finer details, this one new mob had a lot of fine tuning and may still need a lot of fine tuning.

I think Klei is just drastically overestimating how much I value fighting HP Sponges that give a single hat, the sum of three updates will still be meh, subjectively of course.

 

Absolutely agree. I don't know why I should be interested in new gears at all in the Taking Roots update. A Dark Sword 3.0, a Football Helmet/ Log Suit 2.0, an useless staff, a shoevel that is literally just 2.5 golden shovel/hoe. 

While more enemies with planar mechanic will be incorporated in future updates, at this point there's no reason to use new gears. Everything else in this game doesn't have planar thing, and extra damage against shadows is laughable and pitiful. 

The only item that is actually rather unique and fun to use is the bomb.

Give us more unique crafts and not just basically reskin versions of previous items.

[Dr. Safety]

Now that the character updates are done, I certainly don't mind if they take a little longer. That was really my biggest concern considering the character updates came more infrequently than I would have wanted when they were doing monthly updates. 

[Well-met]

I don't know about you but the updates are coming out really fast nowadays

[loopuleasa]

On 5/5/2023 at 8:22 PM, Fill-Lips said:

Where's the best option, the 'Take as much time as you need' option?

Gamers demanding updates like they own the company, smh

It is their game, they do what they think is best

We are just grateful we have a good game to play

[Cassielu]

I wish they had a developer or community worker dedicated to Bug Tracker. I and many of the community members I know who are active in that section feel that Klei has shown a lack of concern for the content that has been released...

[minespatch]

I think they should focus mainly on bug reports right now and then announce big projects when they're ready. The deadlines for a monthly release must be rough on them.

[MikoFanboy]

I hope they put big update/ story act behind 6 months to 1 years to fully finished it 

while simple QoL improvement for gameplay, UI,... (anything they or the community can think of) every 1-2 weeks

I really hate when a simple QoL feature is locked behind a story act that take many months to release 

[-Variant]

19 hours ago, Cassielu said:

I wish they had a developer or community worker dedicated to Bug Tracker. I and many of the community members I know who are active in that section feel that Klei has shown a lack of concern for the content that has been released...

Being careful with my wording here, I've learned from both experience and past conversations that they really do go over the bug tracker.
I've got like, nothing concrete I can show or tell to prove it but I really do believe they go over it. There's a priority system in place and with the team being obviously human, (Or mostly?) I don't blame them for not getting to everything instantly. I don't think it's a matter of them not being concerned. 

[Cassielu]

4 hours ago, -Variant said:

Being careful with my wording here, I've learned from both experience and past conversations that they really do go over the bug tracker.
I've got like, nothing concrete I can show or tell to prove it but I really do believe they go over it. There's a priority system in place and with the team being obviously human, (Or mostly?) I don't blame them for not getting to everything instantly. I don't think it's a matter of them not being concerned. 

I mean. Developers are certainly very active on some "obviously problematic" issues, but when it comes to gameplay, they tend to be overly cautious. Many such bugs are simply forgotten and end up as part of the game, even they have a huge impact on how the player plays the game. It's almost as if the designer finished one content update and immediately moved on to the next, not having enough time or energy to fix things he hadn't anticipated after the content was released.

I don't mean cheese, but things like  Splumonkey panic or Guard Bee and Big Bernie. Or unnatural interactions between new content and the Dock in recent updates. These things deserve a higher priority.