So my most played game of the past few years, Vigor, is dying. I've posted a fair bit about this game and often praised it, and still believe at the core of things there's a good game in here. The problem is that there's a great game underneath the good game and for some unclear reason the Developers are resistant to letting it exist, and instead seem to be doing everything they can do make the user experience annoying and frustrating while also trying to get them to fork over cash more readily than ever.
The release of Season 13 has been a disaster. Plagued with bugs and introducing the game's most boring content since Season 8 ([link to previous article]), increasing the amount of microtransaction opportunities and offering little to keep long time players engaged. Also they nerfed encounter XP as well as Battlepass XP Boosters, so the grind is worse than ever.
To give some details- First, the bugs. I was fortunate to not be hit by these as hard as others (seems fairly random), but here's several of them:
Second, the content. Most of the content here is just ported from one of their other games, and is all boring military stuff. The backpacks that have remote radios and telephones on them are cool, but otherwise this stuff is dull as dishwater. It's even less exciting than the Trapper gear. The new consumable is fun but only really serves to exacerbate the existing problem of zig-zagging machine gun headshot machines flying across the battlefield to kill you with a single bullet while they're jumpshotting. I like the Adrenaline Shot but to implement it after receiving loads of feedback and complaints about how obnoxious the current meta is seems like they're just fucking with the playerbase now. The new gun is ok. It's really not exciting, it's just an SMG. It's ok.
Seasonal Challenges are something that seems like it should have been in the game a year ago given that many modern games *launch* with these in place, and their launch has been so completely botched that for many players these are just a bad joke.
There's no new maps, no new game modes, no new points of interest. It's a fucking boring, stale season.
Third, the increase in microtransaction usage. I've previously praised Vigor for being extremely gentle in it's monetisation and less obnoxious than most other F2P games in this sense, but it's bleeding through to more and more systems now. You can re-roll Seasonal Challenges, which suggests they know many of these are shit and nobody is going to do them (like killing 25 Outlanders with a crap gun, or spending hundreds of Crowns boosting lobbies), and as previously noted hopefully you didn't re-roll any before they "fixed" the challenge bugs, because they're probably back now. Also now you can pay for Instant Weapon crafting. Now this honestly is mostly pointless, but still there's another way to throw your Crowns down the drain again. Also there were claims that the benefits of Boosting the Crate in an Encounter were buffed, but reports on the Vigor Subreddit suggest that this doesn't work either! Waste. Of. Money!
Finally, the grinding. Encounter XP has been nerfed, meaning that the most fun part of the game is less profitable and if you want all these crap cosmetics and the plans for the new gear you have to do lots more of it, making a fun thing to do a couple of times a day into a boring chore through sheer repetition (see lack of new content). Battlepass XP Boosters also got nerfed so you get worse boosts now even when you've paid for them. Consumable crafting got nerfed *again* to make many things even slower to craft, although some of the high level stuff crafts a little quicker now, but not on a scale that actually matters.
The Battlepass is 75 levels, I didn't finish the last one and have zero expectation of finishing this one. Why would I? The cosmetics are mostly shit, the new Consumable is at best okay. I don't care about the gun, and honestly I'm losing my ability to care about the game itself.
For years now there's been this brilliant game in Vigor that shines through every so often, flashes of brilliance during the encounters. The vibes have been good and the atmosphere a weird combination of tense survival and goofy jank combat, it's been mostly very fun and as a player base we've been looking forward to how it's going to develop and progress over time. We had faith that the developers had a plan and solid ideas on how to move forward, and would be able to deliver on this. They even laid out a roadmap at the start of this year, explaining that they would be using the extended season time (4 months each instead of 3) in order to work on stabilising the game, fixing bugs, and providing a higher quality experience. As evident from the disastrous launch of Season 13, something has gone drastically wrong somewhere.
I never watched Sherlock, but I'm very aware of something that happened in the Sherlock fandom toward the end of the series. A big part of the show was allusion to something *very* clever that was coming down the line, that would tie together all the mysteries in some brilliant and unexpected conclusion that would blow everyone's minds. Suddenly all the stupid bits would make sense, and the truly faithful fans would be rewarded with a satisfying resolution that was worth sticking around for. As Season 3 aired and most viewers identified both a drop in quality, coherency, and overall storytelling effort, as well as an underlying air of contempt for fans, faith began to waver.
After the final episode, the fans were so convinced that this couldn't be the *real final episode* because it was bad, and they'd been promised something incredible. There were rumours of a secret episode that was good and the one they watched was shit on purpose as a fakeout. Eventually (obviously, in retrospect) it transpired there was no secret good fourth episode. The ending was shit, and absent the promise of something spectacular to recontextualise all the rubbish parts of Sherlock, much of the earlier episodes seemed shit too.
I feel like something similar is happening with Vigor. We're promised great things for a game we know can be brilliant at times and is mostly fun, but there is a consistent failure to deliver on even basic promises. It's starting to feel like the game is going nowhere. The current meta of LMGs beats everything is extremely boring and the developers have expressed no interest in changing this. Everything they said was planned for this year (increased stability, more end game content, better communication) has failed to materialise. I don't have faith in Bohemia to take the project that is Vigor and deliver what it can be, only to double down on what it is now and to somehow find ways to break it further.
Vigor is dying a slow death. And like Sherlock, it's 100% the fault of the people behind it.
(Originally posted 09/10/2022)