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Read about the state of the game, plans for next year, and take the survey that will help the team in 2023

Killing Floor 2: State Of The Game 2022

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Has it already been another year? I suppose time flies when you’re having fun and while the last year certainly has not been without challenges, the team at Tripwire and Saber Interactive have had a blast bringing the community another full slate of content throughout 2022. I want to thank the development team and our external partners for their blood, sweat, and toil that’s part of everything we deliver to our fans big and small. The amazing commitment and support the community has shown for Killing Floor 2 in its 7th full year of post-launch support since early access. The community is ultimately the engine that drives us forward with everything we do.

So before we cover the path ahead, it’s first important to look back at everything we added to the game in the past year.

Today’s Killing Floor 2

Game Updates

  • Spring Cleaning Patch - March 29th, 2022
  • Tidal Terror - June 14th, 2022
  • Blood & Bonfires - October 13th, 2022
  • Polar Distress - December 7th, 2022



Maps
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  • Rig
  • Barmich Town
  • Crash


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Weapons


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  • Reducto Ray - (Survivalist)
  • Sentinel - (Commando)
  • G36C Assault Rifle (SWAT)
  • Blood Sickle (Berserker)
  • ZED MKIII (Demolitionist)
  • HV Storm Cannon (Sharpshooter)
  • HRG Crossboom (Demolitionist)
  • HRG Head Hunter (Sharpshooter)
  • HRG Locust (Survivalist)
  • HRG Dragon Blaze (Firebug)
  • HRG Ballistic Bouncer (Support)
  • HRG Medic Missile (Field Medic)



Weekly Modes:
  • Arsenal Ascent
  • Primary Target
  • Perk Roulette


Quality of Life Improvements:
  • Survivalist Starter Weapon and Grenade Selection UI
  • Weapon Skin Inventory Organization
  • Firebug Inferno Skill Improvements
  • Healing Buff HUD Indicators
  • Granular Mouse Input Customization
  • Cosmetics List Ordering Refinement
  • Disable Seasonal Zeds Toggle
  • HRG Beluga Beat Alt-Fire Rework

New Music
  • It’s About to Go Down by Rocky Gray
  • Cause for Alarm by Rocky Gray
  • The Spinning Spike by Rocky Gray
  • Three Creeping Things by Rocky Gray


What Lies Ahead
With the ongoing success of the past year, I’m delighted to announce Killing Floor 2 will continue to be supported for another full year with our partners at Saber Interactive for it to extend into its 8th Year of Post-Release updates. Over the last several months, the team has sat together to see all that we would like to accomplish and we’re excited to share a high-level overview of what we have in store for 2023.

The main beats will be three major updates throughout Summer, Halloween, and Christmas. The first two updates of the year will be packed with new weapons, maps, weeklies, cosmetics, customization, and quality of life updates you’ve come to expect. For Christmas, we have something a bit different in mind. Instead of the usual new content and seasonal focus, we’ll be looking to dedicate that entire update towards Quality of Life improvements, balance tunes, and fixes. As an ever-changing game with new content regularly added, we don’t always get an opportunity to take a look back and address every request you want to be improved or tweaked for what came before. It's our hope this QOL-focused update will give us the space to tackle some of the more difficult challenges and aspects we’ve had to raincheck over the years.

We love hearing from you about what we should focus on the most and we have another State of the Game community survey prepared that would help the team regarding your thoughts about the game.

State of the Game Survey

Additional Weapons - New weapons are at the core of what we love in Killing Floor 2 and there, of course, will be more in store in both new weapon bundles and HRG variants. Our goal for these new weapons is to continue to provide new and interesting gameplay while delivering a fun and familiar gun feel for the types of creative and realistic weapons the community enjoys.

Additional Maps - With two major content updates ahead for Summer and Fall, we have two new maps planned for the year. First, for Summer, we’ll be looking to partner again with one of the top mappers to enhance a popular community map for official inclusion. For Fall, we’re looking to bring you somewhere entirely new with an event focused around one the most sinister villains of Killing Floor history.

Additional Weeklies -
We also have new weeklies coming this year focused on challenging the players' new rulesets around the Survival formulas that will force them out of their comfort zones on different maps and approaching killing zeds with unexpected behaviors.



Major Events -
We’ll continue to activate seasonal-themed Zeds and objectives with major updates for you to collect tickets and earn cosmetics. This, of course, will come with new achievements for you all to unlock as well as new cosmetics in the store for you to show your creative flair.

Quality of Life Additions -
We’re looking to make Quality of Life a core focus throughout this coming year so that we can deliver important and impactful tunes based on community feedback so you can play Killing Floor 2 and all it has to offer how you want. The feedback you provide within our surveys, forums, social media, and other community interactions is critically important in helping guide us on how we should prioritize these user experiences and balance changes. Please continue to be active as ever within these channels so we have a good pulse on what the game needs. While we will not be able to address everything that’s requested due to numerous potential factors such as engine/system limitations and resource constraints, we’ll continue to be transparent with what is within our power to implement and do our best to be receptive and open to feedback for how we can improve.

Polish and Bug Fixing - As with every update, we’ll be addressing a multitude of issues legacy and new that arise over the year. We know we need to deliver to you a quality product and the community’s regular engagement in all of our various channels and forums in alerting us to any issues is a significant help to the development team. We encourage you to continue engaging with the regular betas we release before major updates, filling out our surveys, and posting your findings. As a reminder, the best way to bring bugs to our attention is through our official forums are available here:

Official Tripwire KF2 Forums

Community Interaction -.
Our community team continues to be at your disposal within our various channels and loves continuously interacting with you. We’ll be telegraphing our upcoming content through our usual Merc Reports to give you an early look at the content ahead will have many more community streams to play us and experience the new content. We invite you all to stay tuned and look forward to hearing from us in the coming weeks and months as we roll out this year’s road map.

Forums - https://forums.tripwireinteractive.com
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/KillingFloorGame
Twitter - https://twitter.com/KillingFloor
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/killingfloorgame/
Discord - https://discord.gg/killingfloor

It’s been a pleasure to be part of this project with the team for these many years. We’re deeply grateful for the millions of fans that own and play the game. We could not do this without you. We hope you have a wonderful and safe holiday season and a bright new year.

See you all on the Killing Floor.

Regards,
David Amata
Product Director
Tripwire Interactive
 
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That's really bad news for this poor game... But might as well since it's your last product that generates any income, right?
If you are curious about more products under the TWI umbrella that currently are generating revenue, here is a link to our publisher's page on Steam. https://store.steampowered.com/publisher/Tripwire :) Deceive Inc is also releasing next year. You are correct that KF2 is still generating income, though.
 
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If you are curious about more products under the TWI umbrella that currently are generating revenue, here is a link to our publisher's page on Steam. https://store.steampowered.com/publisher/Tripwire :) Deceive Inc is also releasing next year. You are correct that KF2 is still generating income, though.
Surely, and the fact that you have to outsource everything you do, including your main product only shows how good the revenue is 😊☺️☺️ I really hope your next game will be a big hit like chilvary 2 or maneater and it wont generate enough loss for you to lose your jobs 👍😊
 
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Understand this: your approach to add new content for the sake of just adding something regardless of quality has resulted in this game weighing 87 GB of disk space (the core game with some skins as of the time of release weighs 30GB). But what's worse, all the stutters, which are a result of the game having to load the skins from the ever expanding asset roster mid-match, are getting worse and worse. New weapon pickup stutter, new join mid-wave stutter, first siren headshot stutter, first scrake kill stutter and so on. All these get worse and worse with more content addition, because it takes longer for the game to find the right skin from the set of skins.

All that happens mid-match. This game is a very fast paced FPS where a dozen milliseconds lost while disoriented because of the stutter jank result oftentimes in death. Even on good hardware, people on potato hardware (HDD vs SSD) suffer even more. Don't you think this is extremely frustrating to the point of uninstall and moving on to better games?

Have you ever pondered on those meetings you've been getting together on over the last several months how come that competing games in the same segment grow in player base while KF2 remains stagnant? How come the "Deep Rock Galactic" game, despite having absolutely worse than KF2 toy story style graphics, is about 2-3 times more popular and keeps growing?

Have you considered that you may be doing something wrong?

Have you ever thought about that the modding community does a better job at advancing your game and, if anything, it's these people who keep this game afloat despite your "ongoing success"? Well, don't break your arms patting yourselves on the back, but the gametracker.com's first page of the most popular KF2 servers has exactly ZERO unmodded servers. What does it say about the vanilla KF2 game experience, for which you are directly responsible?


With that, given that the vanilla game experience clearly loses as compared to the modded KF2, when was the last time your team whitelisted A SINGLE MOD? You may not know, but it was in 2018, >4 years ago!

What about the long list of grievances in the game mechanics the community has been complaining about for years? Such as spawnrage on fleshpounds/quartherpounds, which goes against TWI's own game design principles? Those principles, that made this series successful in the first place? Are you sabotaging your own game here?

Why do you think many mods are successful while all they do is they REMOVE the content TWI introduced post-release, instead of adding anything new, and just this alone makes the game better and more popular? I'm speaking here, as it should be obvious, about EDARs, QPs and the spawn rage mechanic, as well as some weapons.

> With the ongoing success of the past year

Haha, like, having to release THREE out-of-band hotfixes after you broke a lot of important things after the Summer update?

> Additional Weeklies

Based on exactly what? Can you share any numbers that justify spending resources on developing new weeklies as opposed to spending them, say, on QoL? Last time I checked the server browser, a very small amount of players play weeklies, as survival remains your most successful and most played game mode, so why not advancing what works best?

Have you looked into the comparative popularity of all added weapons controlled for their in-game power (as some are used because of their power, e.g. Locust, irrespective of how satisfying to use they are), because the only real world non-gimmicky weapon you've added, which was at the top of your own survey on these forums, was G36C?

With all that, there were a few things you did right this year and that was medic buffs UI improvements. That's were I believe you should put your efforts into as these are not detrimental and non controversial -- everybody likes them, but even here I'm not sure if the performance of the game on older consoles, as per bug report forums section, doesn't go down too much because of the medic buffs icons affecting the performance.

PS If anything, you should cooperate with modders. TWI has a history of adopting community maps for the updates, although not without some controversy in the cases of Desolation and Dystopia 2029, which resulted in a new trend of republishing the original maps on the workshop. TWI could also cooperate with modders for QoL and game mechanics as well.
 
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Well, I didn't have to wait very long to have an answer. We're in for yet another year.

I won't develop what I've said the past two years on similar announcements, and multiple times throughout my presence on these forums. So I'll just note two things :

-We're skipping yet another update ! That's a bit surprising, but I don't really mind. Sadly, this year's omission didn't really change much. We didn't really get bigger updates or massive tweaks. I mean... nothing truly BIG and UNEXPECTED truly came out from the longer break. But hey, we all deserve some time-off ! And at least, that's a few broken weapons we don't have to worry about.

-Next year's Christmas is gonna be focused on more and bigger QoL changes? That's something to celebrate ! But more than that, I do smell a send-off... It's something you haven't done in a REAAAALLY long time, and I always pictured Killing Floor 2's lifecycle ending with a very big balance patch to finally close the book. I must say that I hope with one year of development, you'll have time to make the wait worthwhile. It definitely deserves more than a few tweaks to one or two weapons. But if there was a good time to finally say goodbye... It will probably be next year's December.

Well, nothing more to say. We're kinda used to it now. The best years are behind and we'll probably get more wacky weaponry. On the flipside, I'll probably keep coming for one or two weeks as each update drop. So honestly... It's still incredible (for better or for worse) that KF2 is still getting content.
 
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There are far more problems with this game apart from lack of content that should be addressed in 2023 apart from the current formula. There's atrocious loading times (why are cosmetics 50+ GB? and default loaded in 4k textures? And why does with an SSD does this game still take 5 minutes to load?), questionable balance decisions such as Resilience on Medic, the HRG Locust, Kaboomstick, and Healthrower, and spawnrages. And why is the Medic buff counter UI so unoptimized? And many more issues people have been saying are horrible changes (gas crawlers and EDARs) that you don't listen to or at least find a middle ground?
 
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We don't need much more extra content of the game anymore. There are already tons of weeklies but can not play a specific one whenever we want. We have to wait for weeks/months. Maybe devs can put most of them into the enless mode, but surely, they waste a lot of potential of game at the moment.

Secondly, the balance of HOE are somewhat broken. Patriarch and Abomination are too easy in 5p&6p in comparison with 2p, 3p, 4p. Multiplayer survival game mode is also like that. 2p or 3p game scale should be reference difficulty for the others. Current HOE has not much difference than suicidal. HOE needs slightly buff (balance) for veteran players.

Other issue is: the multiplayer game is too much dependant of presence of the medic perk. For example; suicidal 3p game without medic is much harder than 6p hoe with medic. Medic perk is brokenly overpowered now. It should be fixed urgently. All perks should have their strength & weaknesses proportionately. We are tired of waiting medic's soloing during 10-15 minutes as a last man standing to finish wave in public games. After the last buffs, medic's situation is even worse than old op berserker & harms all the teammates synergy.

Easiest one to fix: Some weapons still need to be balanced e.g. Needed buff: M32 Grenade Launcher/ Needed nerf: Thermite Bore, HRG Healthrower etc.
 
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The survey doesn't offer any option for detailed feedback and just forces participants to judge the game linearly, which limits what you guys (the developers) actually hear from the community. I have so much to say about each of the 10 perks and each of their weapons, but you've only asked me leading questions that make me go "Eh whatever, at least X perk isn't as bad as Y perk." In other words, it feels like you don't really care what the community has to say about your game. There are sooo many things wrong with the game, but the survey doesn't provide any sections to allow for any explanations.

A lot of the issues I want to point out have already been properly and meticulously explained above and in several old posts throughout this forum. If 2023 is truly going to be a year of QoL improvements for KF2, then PLEASE make a lengthy checklist of what the community has actually NEEDED and been ASKING FOR in the past 8 years. Nobody will complain if you just focus on fixing and balancing the game. The quality of the game will leave a long-lasting impact on your playerbase and the Killing Floor franchise as a whole.
 
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Very limited survey, but also proposing things that are far from what we can expect? Things like new bosses, playable characters, even zeds (?)

Also why make a survey, yet again, asking for feedback when there's already a lot more valuable feedback just a couple clicks away, on Steam? And why keep ignoring this platform where most of your playerbase comes from?

Feedback is there, all it takes is just some time to be read. But I guess it's easier to analize numbers from a survey, rather than reading extensive, detailed posts.
 
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Dunno what I should say… I love Killing Floor but I have to agree most of the comments above me ( especially @Psyk0tik ). The best thing for the game would be an announcement for Killing Floor 3. Or at least an Remake with an newer an engine and improved weapon animations, which would fit in 2023 and not in the PreCoD4 Era



The QoL updates are really needed, however I am not sure if they go in the right direction. I completed the survey just a moment ago and I only made ticks from 1-5 how good or bad, I think, perks and weapons are. There was no opportunity for me, to explain, why I think they were good or bad. Just a link to their forums (which by the way also have some issues), where I can feel free, to share additional suggestions…

Well, if you had ever made a thread in the ideas and suggestions section, it is most likely that you received an answer from @Aleflippy (thanks for all your replies, buddy :giggle:) , but it is unlikely, that you received an answer from a staff member. If you are a lucky one, you will receive a "Currently there are no plans for…" message. I read many good ideas. Sadly the devs not.
 
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Well said.

Might I also throw in this link from a previous very dedicated player, since it goes through a lot of complaints re: balance and design direction that are completely valid?
Emphasis mine:
noobient:

Since Cyber Revolt, I started caring less and less. Consecutive patches were more and more about lowering the skill ceiling. Let’s make the firebug not enrage scrakes. Let’s make SWAT a tank and a big zed killer. Let’s make medic deal more damage. All these adjustments turn these perks into something they’re not. All these make it not important to play according to your perk. All these kill team work, because you can be your own one man army even when you have people around you. All these are about turning every specialist perk into a generalist, where anyone can pick any perk and play in any way, it just won’t matter. I’m sorry, but if a game does not punish you for not cooperating, for not working as a team, then it’s not a coop game per se. But then why the hell is this called as such? Are TWI really just a bunch of morons?

No, I don’t think so. My theory is that they wanted to make KF2 mainstream. Turn it from a <10k playerbase into a >100k playerbase. And that can’t happen if the game is really hard, because most people don’t want to put hundreds of hours into reaching just decent levels.

Now, the problem is, the trick didn’t work. Like, at all. You see all those spikes? They’re all just. Free. Weekends. Or even straight out giveaways. So at this point we have a game that appeals neither veterans nor huge amounts of noobs. This is the jack of all trades.

Sadly enough, TWI seems to be well aware of (and fine with) this fact, because they outsourced all development to Saber Interactive at the end of 2019. And this is where you can’t even hope for things to improve anymore.

Or perhaps this blurb from the single best guide in the game's history on Steam, also written by a very dedicated (former) player who quit after the Summer 2018 updates?
Emphasis mine:
FeelZeSchadenfreude:

As of 4/27/2018, I will put this guide on indefinite hiatus, as I anticipating taking a long, if not permanent, break from the game due to my intense disappointment with the game design direction. I no longer trust TWI's ability to judge good feedback from bad, nor do I trust that they have good faith intentions to balance the gameplay. It has already progressed to the point where I do not believe the base unmodded game to be worth playing anymore.

Judging by the most likely interpretation of the most recent teasers the mercenaries are going to receive stronger and stronger weapons, while new enemies are going to be introduced that, as of now, appear to be more frustrating to fight against compared to the existing zed lineup. The M99 AMR is supposed to be the highest direct impact damage weapon in the game, which likely means it is higher damage per shot than the railgun. The railgun was already an unbalanced and overpowered weapon, and an upgrade over it was not needed.

There has also been a recent trend of enemies that by design force you to aim at center mass by incorporating mechanics that make headshots, and by extension aiming skill, obsolete. The elite alpha gained a helmet that increased his head health to the point that it was easier to simply aim at the legs, which in practice just made him a tankier elite alpha. The quarter pound is extremely unusual in that its head health is not that much lower than his body health, making taking the time to aim for the head produce little to no reward. The enemies in the most recent teasers are robots that explicitly do not die when decapitated.

The ability to upgrade weapon damage is also extremely easy to mess up the game with, as certain weapons are already very close to reaching new, potentially game breaking weapon breakpoints. For example, the UMP, with a base damage of 45, only needs 1 extra point of damage to start decapitating gorefasts off-perk, which would give giant killer perks with limited self defense capabilities by design a powerful tool to eliminate the weaknesses that balanced their large zed killing capability. And that is just one example of many.

I have seen no acknowledgement that TWI understands just how thin the margin for error on these issues can be. This game is steadily becoming unrecognizable. All I have seen is statements that they are listening, but nothing to indicate that they understand the issue. Or care, for that matter. Facta, non verba.

All of which I basically agree with.

The core foundation of this game has steadily been chipped away to the point where I am simply uninterested in playing it on a regular basis unless it's on a heavily moderated CD server. In the name of chasing profit and "engagement," we have received an increasing number of mechanics and weapons that dissuade teamwork and mechanical skill.

Look at the list of weapons released in 2021, as above:
  • Reducto Ray - (Survivalist)
  • Sentinel - (Commando)
  • G36C Assault Rifle (SWAT)
  • Blood Sickle (Berserker)
  • ZED MKIII (Demolitionist)
  • HV Storm Cannon (Sharpshooter)
  • HRG Crossboom (Demolitionist)
  • HRG Head Hunter (Sharpshooter)
  • HRG Locust (Survivalist)
  • HRG Dragon Blaze (Firebug)
  • HRG Ballistic Bouncer (Support)
  • HRG Medic Missile (Field Medic)
Of these weapons alone, which are the ones that actually encourage headshotting and not spam?

The G36C by proxy, and the Storm Cannon. That's it.

I know from previous forum posts that your usual way of doing things is to buff rather than nerf, but it's to the point where the game is no longer what it was in 2016, and definitely for the worse. You've sacrificed depth for novelty.

I would've hoped by now to see a balance pass hacking away at Medic and the other chaos perks, and to tweak scale-down mechanics so that letting teammates die in the name of playing on solo would be done away with, but I'm sure that's not going to happen. The depth and risk/reward system in this game has been sacrificed at the altar of novelty.

The refusal to elaborate on the reluctance to rebalance the game only adds to the frustration factor.
 
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I agree with almost everything posted above, these are some great detailed posts that are finally explaining what people keep talking about on these forums when they vaguely complain about the game without mentioning anything in specific. The major problems are power creep and generalization. Whatever the reason is for the push in this direction it doesn't seem to have been all that successful.

Power creep is a problem as it leads to more issues with game balance. Try using any launch-day weapons instead of post-launch. Almost all post-launch weapons make the game easier, especially the more recent ones. Many of them now allow you to take down all zeds with more or less the same difficulty, and without an explicit need to land headshots as well, not to mention timing reloads carefully. A whole lot more work is going to be required to be done should you really want to balance them, due to the approach that has been taken until now. Most DLC weapons also have a smorgasbord of afflictions they inflict, ensuring if they don't CC a zed one way they will another, something most base weapons do not have the capability to do. As such many of these 'problem' weapons allow the player to mindlessly point and click at everything that moves, something the base weapons rarely let them get away with.

Generalization is a problem as without specialization players do not take on roles. When players do not take on roles there's no need for teamwork, and then the social aspect of the game falls apart. With no need to rely on others, you may as well just play solo- it'll definitely stop other players from raging zeds and otherwise interfering with you. Again, with generalization you can just mindlessly point and click moving things- no need to let the Sharpshooter take out that Scrake before you continue clearing trash as a Firebug as you have abilities and weapons specifically geared for taking that Scrake down yourself. If the Sharpshooter gets swarmed by trash that's his own fault for expecting others to compensate for his perk's/weapon's weaknesses- he should've gotten the HRG Locust or Shrink Ray or w/e the most recently added OP weapon is that's been added. Why should Sharpshooter ever bother with specialized weapons like Railgun/M99 when he can use ones that take everything on equally well?

I lost most of my playing buddies when KF2 launched as they didn't like how far it deviated from KF1 and it feels like every update since has been trying to get me to stop playing it by becoming less and less like what I enjoyed about KF1 and adding more and more things that ruin what I enjoyed about it- the slow/tough/lethal balance to zeds, lack of or limited power creep, specialization that requires you to trust team members to do their job and you to excel at yours... You can chase engagement numbers all you want by copying the competition but I don't think it'll do much good if you end up with a game that makes the vets complain so much, if they even hang around. This game has sold millions but the concurrent player count is drastically lower than it should be. By making it easier you take away depth and without depth less are going to sink in the time you want them to as the game becomes more boring as a result.
 
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