New update, new wildlife features. Hooray! …they still suck.
And we have a new addition to wildlife: Zombie chickens. Besides the questline, these things are completely, and utterly useless. Yes, it's another one of these. Except this time I won't include the usual things.
The new features might be nice, but today marks 8 months of no meaningful change/fix to wildlife. As a reminder, here's some of my issues:
Wildlife when tamed are too weak and die too easily.
A while ago I offered a solution of wildlife being revivable. This may not be new, but whether epic took inspiration from that or not, now you can't say I'm a whinny bitch just because I want nothing more than wildlife to be removed. You know who you are.
Wildlife drop meat when killed
Usually I'm killing wildlife because I don't want them near me. When I kill wildlife from a distance, the meat I'm not able to pick up due to me defending the objective will attract more wildlife, which will then proceed to find interest in my bullet spray. Pretty counter productive, isn't it? Solution: Wildlife shouldn't drop meat. We got enough ways to heal anyway.
Some animals have no purpose
I'm talking about frogs, chickens, and crows. And sure the extra loot is nice, but just like meat, we don't need it at all. The only thing these animals give us is more lag. This is where zombie chickens fit, except they're the most useless out of all wildlife. Who thought it was funny to add these mfs? May I redirect you to here. If you vouch for wildlife staying in the game, can we at least agree that these animals can be removed?
I have to waste support slots or a loadout for wildlife to be decent
Sorry epic, but petsitting just isn't my style. I'd much rather use a loadout to benefit myself, not a doggy I accidently tamed. Solution: more loadout slots? I still wouldn't use wildlife though… I guess this is where the idea of wildlife being a flawed addition comes from.
We already have wildlife… kind of
Here's what I mean. We already have things that attack the husks, which I'm not at all interested in using anyway. How is something else that also attacks the husks, but far worse something "new" that we should appreciate? T.E.D.D.Y. is already pretty bad in high level zones, can't we expand on that ability? All wildlife added was more complicity on the idea of husks being killed for you. Fennix would be great if he worked with T.E.D.D.Y. instead of wildlife. Y'know how they say less is more?
I'll end this off by again saying I want absolutely nothing to do with wildlife. Despite all the solutions I've offered, I still want nothing more than to see "We've moved these fuzzle-cuties back to where they came from" or something along those lines in a HBSR. I don't believe there is a perfect solution to wildlife, or even a good one for that matter. Some solutions I offered bring along more problems. (Ex: if tamed wildlife dies mid combat, it most likely died in a crowd of enemies, and we'd have to go in there ourselves to revive it. It's already a hassle to revive a downed defender that is no where near any husks, walking into crowds of husks doesn't seem any better.) It feels like I'll always be unsatisfied no matter what epic does; therefore, epic is wasting their time trying to fix wildlife, instead of removing it. I'm willing to accept a half-solution to make stw a cleaner experience, but it's been 8 months… at this point it doesn't seem worth it. Epic probably worked hard (after wildlife's initial release) on trying to fix it, and I'm sorry, but I just don't see how wildlife will work out for me in the end.