Frontier has a working, profitable formula. What incentive do they have to change what isn't broken? They aren't going to "work harder" just to make us happy and give us what we think their product "needs."It does not have to be one or the other. Life is not a dichotomy.
In my opinion Frontier can do it if modders can do it...(modders in their basements mind you, who do it without funding and resources from Frontier)
Why can't Frontier work harder? (that's not a bad word lmao, everybody treats it like disrepect, but this is a transaction, you offer goods or services (dlcs) and we give you hard currency. You want money, we want better dlcs...
Frontier could make the packs slightly larger, how much more time and effort does one animal take to make? A month? Does each animal take Frontier 4 weeks to make??? Two weeks?
To clarify I am not saying WORK HARDER (even though there is NOTHING wrong with doing that)
I work harder all the time at my job. Because that's life. Some years are leaner than others. Some years you work harder...
But for an Aquarium or Aviary expansion I think everybody across the board agrees we need more than one habitat/scenery pack. Zoos regularly have more than 20 birds/fish.
I don't want to buy 3 aquarium dlcs it feels exploitative...but I do see your perspective regarding the timeline.
Frontier could meet us half way. Doesn't have to be 24 animals, but it also doesn't have to be a 9 month wait, both seem unrealistic.
Just my two cents.
Animal pack DLC pricing.
- Thread starter tigris115
- Start date
Then, accept whatever they put into DLCs and don't complain about wasted slots.
I have bought every DLC Frontier has released and have never complained about a "wasted slot."
Giving constructive criticism and claiming people are not working hard enough is not the same thing.
What I was saying is that Frontier could give more clones than they have been doing to make both groups happy. The groups being those who want more of existing broad types and those who want whole taxons not represented yet.
But how do you know they can just do that?
because, modders.
You know there is a difference between doing something in your spare time at home and doing something as an employee on a contract right?
Why would they do that? A business doesn't care if you're happy as long as you are consistently paying for their products. And I'd be willing to bet the vast majority of people here are consistently buying the DLC, despite complaints about underrepresented animal groups.
Basically what's being asked is for Frontier to push their staff to produce dramatically more animals, potentially hurting the quality of the product and hindering the development of the regular free updates they provide such as deep diving and fixing brachiation, just because some people are impatient and want more than the 32 new animals we get in a year. That's a tough pitch.
We all want more animals. But as long as we don't know the full process behind them, it is not fair to assume the employees at Frontier are just lazy. You have no idea if they work hard or not at the moment, and neither do I. We have gotten DLCs for 3 years now, we know what size to expect of them. And it is fine to ask for more if it is done in a respectful way. But all you are doing is assuming a bunch of people are not doing the best they can at their job. I bet a lot of the people at Frontier wish they could give us more content too. But for whatever reason they can't, and I doubt they want to be forced to work extra hours for it or whatever. Give them a break.
Try to read some of the Developer Journals, then you might get a bit more understanding of the work behind the packs.
That's a terrible example. Bat-eared foxes do not behave like fennec foxes, and do not sound like fennec foxes. Straight away you run into the exact issue I am describing; an animal that only "looks" like something new, but still has the exact animations as the old baseline with nothing new attached, is a cosmetic change, not a new animal. That is what modders do.
Yes, well, your opinion doesn't really factor into things, because for the most part, the Frontier 'clones' are not just costumes. That's like saying "In my opinion the sky is green". It's just factually false. Frontier adds new animations, and where necessary apply new sounds, two things the modders can't do. Two good examples being the Arctic wolf and the lar gibbon. The former is clearly behaviourly similar to the timber wolf, but if you pay attention it has a handful of actions that the timber wolf does not. Then, the lar gibbon has its own animations, as well as a whole new soundboard since gibbon calls are very distinct between species.
A modded lar gibbon would just be a siamang that looks like a lar gibbon, not an actual lar gibbon. The difference is obvious. A good example of this is the old modded lynx that was popular before the Europe Pack came out; the modded lynx roared like a jaguar. Which is just stupid and immersion-breaking. Again, it looked very pretty and exactly how a lynx should look, but beyond that it was just a jaguar.
Obviously they aren't always perfect. The Malayan tapir is literally a reskin and the modded version is a lot better in terms of appearance, but that is why this animal is one the community has passionately and loudly been demanding action on since its release.
If you want the short answer: because it has nothing to do with how hard they work and every thing to do with the context they're working in.
If you want the long answer, it's just so much more complicated when you're working in a company. There are literally hundreds of things you don't have to care about when you do it on your own.
A modder can wake up one day and say "hey, today, I want to make this animal". The modder can just start working on it. There's no administration, no upper management, no checks it needs to pass. There's not 5 people's approval the modder needs, nope they can just start. A modder doesn't have to care about possible bad press because animal has done something in recent media that could negatively affect marketing. A modder doesn't have to go through quality control, a modder can work as long as they want on things.
Heck, I've spent more than half a year on my wall set back in the ZT2 days because I wanted to finetune it as much as I wanted. I didn't have to be pragmatic. I didn't have to care about deadlines. I didn't have to take shortcuts if I didn't want to. I was free to do whatever the hell I wanted. If I was annoyed by people who wanted me to release it faster and were being really annoying about it, I could just postpone the release out of spite, I'm very sure that's not something I can do in a professional context lol
In the context Frontier works in? All of those things I mentioned earlier are important. All those things are required. Because unlike when you're modding or essentially developing anything on your own, the stakes are so much higher and (a lot more) money is involved. All those steps are necessary, and for all those steps, you have people involved. Those people need time to work on it, those people need to get paid. Which then again turns into a whole budget discussion and you need to weigh out the amount of time and effort you put into these packs for them to still be profitable.
I've been on both sides of the coin really. If I make a website for myself and my friends, I could do it in half the time it would take me to make it when I'm doing it for the company I work at (I wouldn't at all be able to give the same quality assurance, but that's besides the point atm). Because I can skip all the steps that are mandatory in a professional context. I don't need to discuss with clients. I don't need to bother with feedback of clients. I don't need to be in meetings. I don't even have to care if there are bugs because if they don't bother me than eh.
But it goes even further than just working with clients. I don't need to write tests if I do it for myself. I don't need to write documentation. I don't need to care about future developers that will work on my code because I'll be the only one working on it. I don't have to think about leading a team when I do it on my own because I'm the only developer. I don't need to worry about whether my team-members get the chances they need to grow and become better developers. More than half of all the things that I need to keep in mind and things that I need to take care off in a professional context essentially disappear when I do it on my own.
The end product is the same, it's a website. But the context changes so much about the entire process that it takes a lot longer and there are a hell of a lot more steps along the way to get there. And I would find it very weird if someone would come and say that I'm not working hard at my company because the entire process takes longer when I do it in that context.
With all due respect, but a lot of your statements here were also very unfounded. You immediately jumped to the conclusion that the reason why we didn't get more animals was because Frontier didn't work harder. Which frankly, you can't know either.
Feedback is important. And it clearly is to Frontier as well, as there are numerous examples where Frontier actively listened to the feedback of the community (even the latest patch has a glaring example of that.)My perspective is life sucks, a lot of us play video games to escape. THIS GAME IS MY ESCAPE! So I want larger dlc for my money. That is not in any way adding too much pressure onto the good folks at Frontier, they are adults, and a team of paid, talented, highly skilled workers, now give the people what they want.
feedback is not complaining, not listening to feedback is detrimental to your product
However, not all feedback has to or can be addressed. Sometimes feedback simply does not fit within what the company wants to achieve with their game (because hey, companies do have their own vision on what they want to do with their product as well) and sometimes the feedback doesn't take into account a multitude of factors that are detrimental to the outcome that was given feedback on.
I think everyone agrees with you that we'd all love to see more animals. There's hardly anyone who would disagree with you here about that. But, they clearly have reasons why they have their current way of working. We can know some of them based on the developer journals as they give a great insight, we can make very educated guesses based on how the development cycle works ( we all work on a variation of the same thing really) but there's also tons of other reasons we don't know. So jumping to the conclusion that it should be possible "if they just worked harder", that's where your feedback just fell apart.
HeatherG
Volunteer Moderator
So, by saying its a terrible example, it would add much to the game.
So it wouldn't be a clone which I think is part of people's not wanting it in the game. To me, it is the animal I most want.