Nah, we need communication.
However it’s always with Fatshark games like that, i wonder why, hmmm
I mean it’s kinda confirmed that more expirienced devs are busy with V2, not with DT, how it’s not about the priority?
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I was thinking that maybe FS is working on the PS5 build atm. Maybe it will come with new contents.
Not to pick on you in particular but just an observation since kind of poking my head back up, depth has been the new buzzword I’ve seen thrown around to try and downplay helldivers 2 while a lot of times people will still say some stuff that absolutely proves they haven’t really played the game or understood the various systems at play.
Tell the truth I think depth or what is being passed off as depth is actually something that hurts Darktide in a lot of ways. Basically Darktide has a lot of complex numbers at play to really do some simple things that only really make sense in the context or Darktide or a WH40k tabletop RPG. Even basic fodder enemies can have a plethora of different armor values for reasons and at times they are kind of just thrown in there.
A lot of Helldivers 2 mechanics are simple to understand and easy to pick up but depth and complexity come from how all the various systems work together. Generally rules for how a thing works tend to stay fairly consistent throughout. trees and shrubs slow the player down. Trees and shrubs also offer concealment. Strats, explosives, and high damage weapons can clear trees and shrubs which both makes it a clear line of sight for you and your enemies. Larger objects that offer cover will need more boom to clear and objects like rocks or heavy concrete constructions don’t deform at all. You can use cover and concealment to sneak past a patrol by staying low or you might use a strat to clear a section of terrain when defending an area.
An easy point so see where frustration can be created through depth can be comparing how smoke for example works in Darktide vs how it works in Helldivers. Where in Darktide smoke works like a special aura that is only active if you or an enemy is in it. This leads to a lot of frustration for something that is sure, deep but also doesn’t make any sense why it works the way it does. Deployed smoke can sometimes blind your team but do nothing for your concealment.
Smoke in Helldivers actually works like it would in real life. If you have smoke in between you and an enemy it is taken into effect and enemies can’t just perfectly shoot through it to ping you. Yeah it’s blocking your line of sight but enemies are also basing your shots off your last location and can lose you. They will need to look for you and this can be combined to either get distance to move out of enemy agro or lay traps to ambush a patrol who was on your tail.
Yeah sure, you don’t have a ton of different stats like an RPG for every little item contributing to your character’s effectiveness but maybe that is what drove a lot of people off due to not having the flexability to actually build around that requirement a lot of the numbers just being arbitrary.
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No offense man, but you need to get off your computer, go outside, and touch grass if you think Fatshark believes VT2 has a brighter future than DT.
It is an unbelievably idiotic and braindead take. Go f*cking roll about in the grass and never touch the internet again if you believe that.
Replying to the original topic i think a lot of the problems stem from several places:
-The game is trying to do live service but doing it in the most frustrating way it can be done
-The Systems do not work together smoothly
-The game does not respect your time
The Live Service Blunder
It’s not exactly a secret that since launch they have been trying to really make this into a live service experience with promises of constant content updates, dailies, events, etc. Overall i don’t think they have done a great job with this and overall it feels like a lot of what is there is barebones at best.
Part of an effective live service experience is having a drip feed of constant new content and having something that actually gets people excited. New content doesn’t solely need to be new weapons or a new class but smaller things such as a new enemy type, a new map, a new variation, maybe a new environmental effect, etc. Cosmetics can be included with this but due to the price increase and the general lack of quality i don’t exactly count it as a positive in this case.
Another part of a live service experience is feeling like you are apart of a changing world and having it actually be populated with interesting things to see and do and reasons to log in. Warframe is a good example of this as you have fairly consistent alerts, invasions, weekly rotations, and things to do. Basically there is a reason to log in and goals to go for.
Darktide feels mostly like a 4 player coop game that had to bring his awkward brother live service to the party and is trying to find some way to make it fit in. As a result he’s mostly shoved live service in the corner and is hoping people stop bringing him up.
Gameplay system gridlock
I’m going to try to not talk about the crafting system (as it’s been talked to death) and Helldivers (because other games exist and people are going to just ignore the point if brought up) when making comparisons but a lot of gameplay systems just don’t work great together.
Taking something basic like accolades and missions it kind of feels like it was once again made by 2 completely separate teams. So as a basic point you need to complete certain missions to unlock certain achievements. Ok, works simple in other games. You get a group, you load the mission up, you play the mission, achievement get.
In Darktide this is for some reason, a complicated and somewhat frustrating process. First basic failure imo is that you literally couldn’t see up until recently (unless it still wasn’t fixed, i don’t know honestly, a mod might have fixed it) what missions you have and haven’t done for an achievement so you need to figure that out first.
Then you get your team together. Ok you know where you are going, and what you are doing, you just play the mission now right? Well, no. The mission board has a random rotation of missions with random difficulties so if your mission isn’t on there you are SOL. Wait 10 - 20 minutes for it to rotate and play something else. Ok so you are back, you check the board, and the mission is on there!..but it’s no the right difficulty. Great, you are now waiting longer and playing something else. So you have waited another 30 mintues, you have your team, you have the mission up, you play it for say 10 minutes and it’s no a success. Things went sideways because of a bad spawn of 5 crushers, the demon host glitched out, someone fell through the map, essentially something happened resulting in a loss. No bigge though, just replay the mission…well i got some bad news.
This may sound stupid that im making a big deal out of this and trust me, it’s not lost on me but i gotta ask an important question: Why is it designed like this in the first place?
As brought up above there isn’t really a point to having rotated missions as it’s not like you get anything special out of doing the ones up on rotation. There is not real incentive to engage with the active missions beyond “it’s all that’s there”. This could have been a good opportunity to do something like Warframe’s alert system or DRG’s weekly mission but instead they just decided to make the standard missions selection process a pain for arbitrary reasons. I really can’t stress the arbitrary reasons statement enough as it’s not like hel- uhhhh, sorry, say Foxhole where the point is that fighting is going on in an important area since that’s where the frontline actually is. What missions are happening have literally no connection to anything else going on in the world besides “this is what the random timer has decreed” which brings me to my last point.
The lack of respect for player time
I think one of the major identifying factors of self reflecting on why ive spent less and less time with Darktide is that due to factors irl i have far less time to spend playing games. Where as before i could dump a lot of hours during the week trying to do dailies, hunting for weapons, trying builds, and other stuff i just don’t have that level of time anymore. The game wants you to play on it’s schedule and do the missions that it has up for you and that’s the end of the story.
If i want to do something like say vibe with friends on Zomboid or Sons of the Forest we load it up, load our save, go where we want, and it’s all good. If i want to go do some coop on say l4d or Payday 2 we load it up, pick the mission, have a fun time for 30 minutes to an hour and then go do our own thing. I can’t tell you the number of times ive thought of doing Darktide, thought of the combined headaches from the various systems interacting, and then decided “nah im good” and played something else.
Since launch ive said “Yeah the other systems are clunky but the gameplay is great” at least a thousand times but it’s gotten to the point where the frustration brought on by other systems far outstrips the enjoyment from the gameplay.
There is just a far to much in Darktide that makes people go “Why is designed like this?” and i think it’s fair to say that many people don’t think FS are actually serious about fixing a lot of the structural problems with how things are.
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Disagree - I think we have different ideas of what I mean by depth.
I don’t consider the numbers games of perks and bonuses and talents to be the “depth” in DT, it’s the literal moment-to-moment decision making. At any given moment you have to prioritize the enemies in front of you in a 4D puzzle; what attack combo you’re going to use, if you even want to stay there, and if not, what movement to use to get to a better position and escape these enemies.
If I’m Psyker in melee with a shooter, I can use Special into light for a quick jab headshot then a quick overhead that is often enough to kill them. Against a tougher enemy I may opt for Special into C1, which is slower but does more damage. I may weave these into repeated lights, timing my pushes not just to keep control but to maintain my stamina. If a special comes I have to determine if I want to stay in melee or switch to ranged, if the former then how do I get to it safely and if the latter how do I stay safe from enemies in my face? These can be very simple or they can be very complex problems depending on context.
In VT1, there was only a very small difference in weapon damage between rarities, there were perks but no RPG stat bonuses and perks were fairly limited. The moment-to-moment core gameplay loop was still incredibly strong, though!
I don’t mean to bash Helldivers. I think it seems very fun, and it obviously does have complexity, as in positioning and enemy priorities and loadout. It’s just as deep as 'tide games - very few shooters actually are because guns tend to have fewer methods of attack.
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I think that’s fair enough to a degree.
Maybe im not really considering combat depth since a lot of stuff is kind of engrained at this point and i just do it as a part of a basic thing (Dodges into attacks into parry into stacking bleeds, swapping to ranged to deal with larger targets and back, etc).
As stated in the other post i think the problem really does come down to a lot of the outside of gameplay systems just not playing well with the moment to moment stuff so that’s where my mind goes these days. I think also depth and complexity varies with classes.
I find Psyker to be pretty involved due to how much of a glass cannon they can be and how managing the heat mechanics go but with something like Vet it’s a bit more brain off and automatic. Melee fodder, use plasma / other ranged for rooms of shooters and larger enemies, throw a Krak when the eventually 5 stack of maulers shows up.
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That’s what you get when you sell half a game for over a year too early, you burn through your firsty wave customers for a quick buck and kill your product’s long term viability
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Nice meltdown dude. Never said that
But that’s just a pure fact that FS isn’t that kind of studio that can support 2 games and develop 3rd one aswell (V2 versus). They can’t even release one game without making it a disaster. Yet we hear those devs are confident with development and communication process are busy with V2.
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High-octane action isn’t rly deep, it’s pure reflexes and muscle memory. Depth is about how many things there to learn and how much time it will take. Like tactic games, crpgs’ don’t have fast paced combat, still can have depth.
So width can be converted into depth at some point, cause more there stuff more there to learn. Mechs and vehicles almost there already, new faction - illuminate (was in HD1 and in HD2 datamine). Especially if they will add melee weapons, different gadgets and a proper stealth (melee and stealth was mentioned by CEO in a positive way, if i remember well)
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They clearly can. You see it happen right at this moment. Just not at the speed that we’re used to.
Considering that this industry also knows Valve time ™, though, I will say Fatshark isn’t bad at all what this is concerned.
They just have a weird way going about their PR that leads to ambigious public perception of them.
Thought Experiment:
Take Versus as an example. Let’s imagine for a second Fatshark was more communicative. Rather than being quiet for 4 years and suddenly dropping the absolute bomb shell of a playable beta, then going quiet again, they’d behave like the Helldivers 2 devs.
First February weekend: Surprise playable closed beta.
Second February week: Short dev statement about the core gameplay concept of beta. “How we envision Vermintide Versus”. Length: Roughly 1-2 paragraphs.
Third February week: Announcement planned Skaven / Chaos playable classes and why they were chosen. About 2 paragraphs.
Fourth February week: Short Q&A where a handful of questions regarding specials and their role in the context of versus are answered. Doesn’t have to be much. A few one-liners will do.
First March week: Mission Design for Versus and why it has to be different compared to ordinary campaign missions. 2 paragraphs at most.
Second March week: The role of our Heroes in Versus. 1-2 paragraphs.
Third March week: What really got us motivated to do a Versus mode. Why are we passionate about it? 1 paragraph.
Fourth March week: Balancing the game mode, what difficulties we encounter and how we handle them.
Can you imagine with this schedule how hyped Versus would be? YouTubers would make videos on each of these statements and “speculate”, players would have it in their YT and Twitch feeds. Versus would be on everyone’s radar. And the general perception for Versus would be “Hype, can’t wait for it”.
The overall size of the information would be equivalent to one singular interview (when Fatshark gives one, they go quite in depth).
Just taking all the available information and commentary and spreading it thin while posting them regularly would immediately alter their public perception.
Instead, Versus is barely talked about right now despite having it’s own forum and people have the perception of Fatshark being slow. All because “nothing” is happening. That’s crazy.
And Darktide does have a lot of depth to learn. Some of it is convoluted or janky, but it definitely has a level of depth to it’s combat, how combos work, how attack interacts with each other, etc.
Compare with Skyrim “Left click does attack, Left click held down does heavy attack, Right click does block, ooga booga that’s all there is”. I am hyperboling, but you get my drift.
I would say that Darktide even has so much complexity, it becomes too hard for the casual gamer. That’s partly why it has so low numbers and remains a niche title. It’s complexity goes beyond what many want to learn about their games.
With all the hidden mechanics, Darktide comes close to the complexity of a fighting game and most players barely even explore that.
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What does the addition of a new mode to another game have to do with the (felt) neglect of Darktide?
It serves as a stellar example how the way you (don’t) communicate about your product changes the perception of it’s progress. What I did with Vermintide Versus here can also be done and applied to Darktide.
They already had a release model for commentary / announcements. Every 2 weeks. They stopped because they believe they have nothing to talk about, but that isn’t true. If instead of trying to trump every new comm link from the next they were to just keep the posts a little bit smaller, we’d get regular communication and have a feeling the game matters.
Remember: Emotion is the most important part of any sales pitch. Always. People don’t remember what was said, but how it made them feel.
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I mean they can try, lol, but what is the result? It’s not even near to call it a success. Versus is more like experiment, side project. But i don’t get why they waste their resources, when DT is in such poor state. Fatshark not even close to CDPR, who has like 3 games in development or something.
Cause Gaben doesn’t care about game development that much. Steam, dota, cs, Valve is a money printing machine.
Cause it’s too late, it’s an expansion sort of, for the game that is there for 6 years already. Game that most of its lifespan has 3,5k online probably. I get they want to learn how to create a PvP game, but they are doing it midst wildfire scorching their reputation.
It has, but once you will remove hidden stats and stuff it will become simple. Tides melee works the same way as Dark Messiah or Dying Light. There mostly training involved in it’s core, stuff you need to sit read about is mostly numbers.
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Why even post if you think the game is dead, you know the game’s fine and just want attention.
It’s hard to describe how much I disagree with this.
You can probably play the game just on twitch-instincts, but it’s actually a lot of decision-making. It’s a lot like both classic Doom (1 and 2) and Mario in this, oddly. Every second the whole “puzzle” of the situation changes and you have to solve a new problem. Miss your rock as Ogryn against that Trapper? Maybe you dodge its net but now you have a whole new situation to deal with. This is NOT simply twitch-gameplay.
Again, Helldivers isn’t bad, but it doesn’t have the same depth. Sorry.
Yes, I agree. The skill ceiling is insane. No-hit runs are probably possible - definitely possible in VT 1 and 2! It just takes insanely high skill. And it’s not just reaction gameplay - it’s knowing what to do and when by reading complex situations.
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Yeah, definitely agree here.
And yeah, Psyker is a fun class - some high-level players still think it needs to be more complex - I tend to agree. Given that its staves are kind of the main feature of it, I feel like they need more complexity than they currently have. Giving the tertiary attack a use (because I mean no one uses the bonk - it’s funny, and people asked for it with Sienna, but what was because she had literal SPEARS) that interacts with the other abilities would be great.
Like imagine a staff that created a damaging bubble in front of the user on a charge attack. Primary attack could be a beam or something of that nature that is useful, but also can set off the bubble. Tertiary attack could cause the stationary bubble to move forwards. Just an illustration of how they could all be brought together.
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And it doesn’t need to go on wiki and read 20 pages of how different mechanics interract with each other than go back and practise them for 4 hours in psykanium.
Eh, like i’m a boomer myself and was playing unreal tournament and quake when was a kid, never seen these games as deep games, but just utilising some simplistic brain activity. Like once you understand how to play that’s it. Like riding bycicle. Sure you can master some aspects, but like there is nothing rly to LEARN, just to practice.
Fighting games on another hand is hella deep games.
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Yeah - this is what makes this game so effing good. The addition of tertiary attacks and the slide really just amped up the winning strategy of Vermintide (though we lost some things like staged attacks . . .), in terms of combos and such.
The big problem is the stuff outside of the missions . . . and bugs, of course.
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It’s a financial success and it’s clearly servicable product. How is it not a success?
We just measure them by perfectionist metrics because we see more potential in them. Objectively speaking Fatshark is very successful.
The company’s networth is probably upwards of 7 figures.
Doesn’t mean they don’t care. Valve always released bangers. Games that ushered in new eras of Gaming. How can you say they don’t care when Half-Life 2 and the engine it was based on defined more than a decade of Gaming?
The reality is simple: Proper software development takes time. The only reason devs are able to figuratively jumpstart quick games these days is engines already being pre-built. For indies, it’s usually the scope being smaller.
You say it’s too late, meanwhile there is 20 year old MMO Everquest still releasing expansions.
I think you are taking a very subjective look at these things and writing stuff off way too early because your own enthusiasm has faded.
The reason Fatshark games aren’t gaining more tracting certainly isn’t the age of their releases, it’s their marketing needing dire upgrades and their content development needing to get speedier.
No, it would still retain most of it’s depth.
Which attack causes a stagger reliable against whom?
Which attack can or cannot be blocked?
What attack chain combos into what other attack chain?
When is the right time to dodge an attack?
When is it more senseful to block as opposed to dodge?
These are all very technical questions that games without depth don’t have.
You’d ask similiar questions to learn Tekken or Soul Calibur. So that’s why I say the game is roughly at that level.
Even with armor class and other such things out of the question, Darktide is a game with unparralleled depth.
I whole-heartedly agree with your accessment. This is precisely the reason Tide games and Darktide specifically even can be high adrenaline.
Everything hinges on applying knowledge quickly and fast. Prioritizing right. Reacting fast while still keeping your cool.
The game gives you a lot of tempting moments to drop the soap. Holding firm does take skill, which is why there is such a strong divide between Malice and Damnation+ players.
I think what’s happening to you is that you’re downplaying the skill involved because you yourself have mastered it. Similiar to how a skilled artist believes himself to be doing nothing special, when most people could never replicate his actions or work.
I believe this stems from your own mindset. Yes, at some point things become instinctive. But that’s a result of your training, not them necessarily being simplistic.
This reminds me a lot to shoot’em up players who play stuff such as Dodonpachi. When they are really skilled at the game, there is so much technical knowledge involved. But it may look at first just like twitch skills.
Don’t discredit yourself. It’s fine to acknowledge your own skill once in a while.
I also want to add: Practicing is learning. These two are deeply interwoven with each other.
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