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Small reminder for anyone who still doesn’t get it: Player numbers aren’t being demonstrated to show that the game will die and become unplayable. The reason it’s of interest is because it gives an idea of how much support this “almost live service” game will be getting in the future. It’s the same reason people are very fixated on MMO player numbers, even though they’re on a full server out of 20 full servers: They’re worried that the games development will scale down and/or cease because developing for 4000 people is not as financially viable as developing for 50k (for example).
It isn’t about personally finding players to play with, it’s about wether or not development will continue the same way.
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Proof or any info about sales? How many refunds there?
If you consider initial cashgrab as a financial succes - then ok. Good for them, bad for players. So good luck to sell their next game with such reputation. When even before DT realse i’ve seen tones of comments all over the internet don’t buy, it’s Fatshark. Not even sayin 3,5k online for GaaS can be considered as succes.
I mean they don’t care about development as about their source of finances in the first place. Valve isn’t a game development studio for who knows how long. They are much bigger than that. HL2 was in 2004, lol.
I missed the point when V2 become an mmo with end game content, activities, trading and social aspect.
You mean what, stagger is a number value and you need to hit enemy few times in psykanium.
Chains? Pffff. You can perform full vertical with Catachan starting with light then go for light-light-heavy loop. But who cares, it’s not efficient, button mashing works better.
Other stuff will take few hours with simplistic A/B test to understand what you can or can’t do.
There is not so many things in DT you can say about “i have 1000 hours, never knew you can do this”
There is no tight parry window that is different for every enemy like in Souls.
Don’t know what do you want to learn with block, when block doesn’t provide any benefit, you can’t stagger enemy with timed block.
Go play Tekken and you will understand what is core gameplay depth means.
No, cause in it’s core tide games combat not so complex. It could be if you will bring more tight parry/dodge windows. Enemy combos where 1st attack can be blocked, 2nd only parried, and 3rd only dodged, etc. And such stuff will be different for every enemy and with every weapon, then yes there will be a lot of things you need to learn and know.
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Comparing FS to Valve is pretty amusing. Valve made and owns Steam.
As far as FS goes, I’m just here checking that they fix the bugs with the Zealot and button binding so that I can at least enjoy that class. Refuse to play until they fix the issues. Wouldn’t be here at all if my buddy hadn’t just started playing only to promptly fall off. This forum also hosts some interesting, intelligent, and highly analytical people that helped me enjoy and appreciate some of the game’s mechanics.
Pretty clear this game has peaked, and it had it’s second peak due to feedback from this very forum, with maybe a little bit more from reddit. Without the deluge of vicious feedback, the game wouldn’t have had the second peak, regardless of its financial status, which I am sure is good enough. Good enough can describe most of the systems in Darktide, really. Game needed 3 more years of dev time. All Fatshark games and mechanics are largely throwbacks. Studio should probably just release vermintide and darktide mobile games and save some time.
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Last thing Fatshark and Games Workshop should be doing and yet thats what GW seems to want to double down on.
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Fair. However, this is a special situation:
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Tide is Fatshark’s Flagship title. They’ve got nothing else going on currently other than Vermintide and Darktide.
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You mistake concurrent players daily peak for overall players. For instance, if a hypothetical game has 4000 players peak in the evening, 2000 concurrent players in the afternoon and 1000 concurrent players in the morning, those all can be different players. That’s not even factoring in weekend and casual players who don’t play daily. The overall population of Darktide for instance probably is in the 5 digits, not the 4 digits.
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It stands to reason that a lot more players will return when new content is released. Meaning you don’t develop for the currently playing players, but those players + a larger number returning.
First few results Google netted me:
" According to GameSensor’s estimations, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide sales amounted to about $60 million in the first month of release on Steam. If we look at the Warhammer 40,000: Darktide copies sold, the new product was purchased by about 2 million users during the same period."
Source:
" We estimate that Warhammer 40,000: Darktide made $101,251,249.92in gross revenue since its release. Out of this, the developer had an estimated net revenue of $29,869,118.73. Refer to the revenue table for a full breakdown of these numbers."
Source:
Summary
That’s just sales numbers. As stated above, the player numbers, while having much room to the upside, are actually not bad either.
I don’t know how you get the impression that this isn’t a success. It’s in fact absolutely wild to me. The company will definitely be deep in the green numbers. This is also not even talking the purchases post release. There is more than enough funding for Fatshark to support the game long-term and the motivation is there, too.
We even have the precedent cases with Vermintide 1 and 2.
Yes, it’s in the past now. Just because new game releases aren’t their main income stream anymore, does not mean they don’t care. I’m sure Gaben looks fondly back to history of this company. Dota 2, one of their ongoing releases and Counter-Strike 2, also are alive and well. So they haven’t checked out of game development fully.
You get exactly what I meant with that. Passed time doesn’t mean something loses relevance immediately. It only does when their producer gives up on it.
Dota 2 also released +10 years back. Still relevant and still has an e-sports scene.
Vermintide Versus can also be relevant, if Fatshark really tries. But they need to step up their game.
Darktide has core gameplay depth and I refuse to accept your downplaying of it.
Timed Blocks and parries (Catachan Swords) can for instance stagger Ragers. Attack chains for different weapons are different and matter.
Positioning is very important matters.
Prioritizing enemies matter.
Dodge time windows are tight and make the difference between clutching like a pro or having your butt beaten to a pulp.
The skillset needed is somewhat different from Tekken obviously, but that doesn’t make it less impactful.
That’s literally in the game.
You cannot block a crusher or mauler overhead, but you can block / parry their horizontal swing.
Plague Ogryn has one block-breaking attack. Chaos Spawn has a grab you must dodge. Beast of Nurgle has one unblockable attack (vomitting) and one grab and two blockable
attacks.
Traitor Captain bosses also have some blockable and some unblockable attacks.
You have to manage attack timings. You must manage your effective dodges (and as Psyker your peril).
There is so many technical aspects to this, I have no idea what the heck you mean it isn’t complex.
It’s still a Horde game. Of course not every enemy has three different attack chains where one has one unblockable move and the next isn’t.
I think you’re forgetting here that in Tekken you fight one singular enemy and thus have to have more attack variety, whereas Darktide provides the attack variety by the different enemy types. Doesn’t mean it’s not there.
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One major item is missing in this thread: performance. Lookup PC hardware data on Steam, there is a reason why games like L4D2 remain popular.
The game runs like sh…Fatshark didn’t want to “compromise on the visual fidelity” or whatever their argument was. Well guess what cupcakes, this compromised your bottom line for sure.
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Because i’m as a customer has nothing from it, obviously, i can’t feel it. Maybe CEO with his new yacht can, or Tencent managers, i don’t know. I play their games since V1, it’s the same problems again and again. I played The Witcher series from the first game, and holy i can say how there is a succes.
I don’t get it tbh. Context was about development time not about attitude and quality. They can allow themselves to be slow or even cancel games, cause cash flows anyway. Gaben is just like GMartin noone already hopes to see HL3 or The Winds of Winter probably.
It means, because people are losing interest naturaly. And because V2 is also quite outdated - no modern stuff like sprint or vaulting, old graphics (i persoanly don’t care), just impact feeling with some weapons feels old, etc.
Dota 2 is also F2P. I’m not sure about versus, probably it will free only for V2 owners.
It can, i just would like to see DT to have 10k online on average,content updates every 3 monthes, q&a+dev streams, and no anti player bullcrap. After that - yeah, it could be 40 000 games in development at the same time, i don’t care.
It has, but not like it’s that big, it’s more complex than lmb spam, yeah ok. Knowledge check isn’t that big in DT.
See, i don’t even remember that aspect, cause when its 12 ragers - block and parry doesn’t matter, when it’s 1-2 you just button mash them or kill with parry. It’s always either push or push-attack, block is kinda useless. Game doesn’t punish you if you don’t master some mob’s attack.
Yeah well, here is my less dumb eviscerator pattern, i need to swing it few times to understand how to combine 2 attacks to have a full horizontal chain, very complex indeed.
It’s a very basic thing and it’s there in any game probably, cause it’s just utilizing basic human reaction like in irl situations when you see pack of wild dogs.
No, it’s different. You don’t need to perform and master every defensive aspect, game will not punish you.
For example - crusher perform aoe ground slam, you need either to jump after his hit to avoid this local earthquake, or to parry his attack to stop it in the first place, either way you will take damage, you can’t outrun it cause it’s fast and aoe, you can’t dodge it for the same reason, git gut.
1 attack they probably will not perform cause how it’s easy to stagger bosses and just kill them overall. Same with grab - easy to save grabbed mate.
Nah, they just choose it that way to balance game via quantity of elite enemies, not quality. Back in the days when there were like 2 crushers at max it was still just like that.
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I’m just going to pipe up with the way I feel, a lot of people in this thread are just fighting eachother because they are frustrated with the lack of communication. My only issue is Darktide feels like it’s supposed to be a live service game, however they don’t treat the game like a live service. Instead we get some tone deaf communications, most likely because the community managers are very strictly leashed on what they can and cannot say.
I’ve seen too much in the last week that points to the fact someone high up in Fatshark hates player communication. That not hyperbole either, someone really has such thin skin in the higher echelons of the company that they cannot handle any criticism nor dissent, or something. Either that or we have someone who doesn’t want to be held accountable to anything, ever. Because if you don’t show anything that you’re working on, no one can either criticize it or be excited for it. Going radio silence serves no one unless you are in a No Mans Sky situation, which I don’t think Fatshark is in.
I would play this game over Helldivers if I actually felt like I could actually craft something, anything. Instead I have to hope I can get something, and then sometimes just being given what I wanted from Melk drops… Like the loot “reward” even for someone who doesn’t care about loot is sparse, eldritch, and just plain frustrating on every level. If I want to try out a build I should have a clear path to get to it. Not go to the casino and hope the RNG Gods are kind to me this week. I literally haven’t had an interest in even opening this game since Mid December. Why should I, the devs don’t have enough care to say anything, the company certainly doesn’t. Like I’m sure there are devs who care, they just get told what to do however, and then they have to go do their jobs.
It’s just tiringly frustrating.
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To follow up here, Fatshark is capable of good communications and feedback…in some instances. The recent VT2 Versus post is an excellent community interaction that tells people what went well, what didn’t go well, what players did, how things progressed and changed, what challenges can and can’t be overcome, what players asked for, and gave a hint of things to come.
Instead of the firehose of angry e-rants as we see on the DT announcements, there’s a handful of appreciative and constructive responses.
Why is this sort of community interaction and update not possible with Darktide?
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Blame the legion of fools that keep pre-ordering Bethesda developed games that have always been poorly optimized to the point that they need 4 to 5x the power to make the games run properly. It’s been decades. After Starfield was released, this group of fools has become very easy to identify.
Imagine a timeline in which Obsidian was allowed to be the creative and developmental core of Bethesda…imagine it…and reflect upon humanity’s folly.
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I’m sorry, this is too fun and engaging of a thread 
Did we just, in our favorite pastime of finding ways to bash on/defend FS/DT in creative ways, and in good faith and sound mind, involve Tekken, Soul Calibur, Ancient MMOs and Souls games in an attempt to point out the depth of a game that actively pushes you towards interacting with as few of it’s “Deep” mechanics as possible?
Is someone out there counting startup frames in the psykhanium? Are there safe H1s nobody has found yet? Practicing combos and looking for strings in a 100+ movelist? Is there anyone out there practicing QQ swapping? (are macros still banned btw? asking about depth here)
I’d get spawning a Spawn to learn it’s moves, but you really really don’t have to. Unless you’re doing a true-due-nohit-melee-only challenge…
I’m sorry, did I play a different game all this time? Have I been spending precious minutes on these forums, having mistaken the game we’re discussing?
This is the DT that makes 9/10 players forget they can block (even the special psycher mechanic was… questionable), with the 10th being a chat co-oper, right? The DT whose prized melee combat amounts to learning when to push-hit in between LMBs to achieve 95% melee mastery (whereas VT2 had room for the pinnacle of gaming complexity - block-cancelling…) The DT that offered such depth that chain weapons were a meme for 8 months after release (some still are)? The DT famous for the power sword, which requires that you press a third (!) button, wait for the zzap and then count the LMBs afterwards, before doing it again?
That DT?
This is the DT that had me LMB-mulch hordes with a BB for months on end, before giving me the option to LMB bonk hordes, to then unfortunately deem the second option a “less-than-optimal” alternative to LMB-mulching hordes with a BB? And in between I had the choice of H1-ing carapace, H2-ing anything else, or outright not bothering and LMB-ing mixed hordes (with the occasional push here and there), and using a gun for everything else?
The same DT that considered the Zealot the skill class, but all the class-specific melee options were so bad, all the zealots ran (and still run, afaik) with a knife pretended that having to push-strike in-between heavies was the ceiling of skills?
The DT that rewarded such levels of mastery as chaining headshots on shooters that… don’t… move, after pressing a button and having targets outlined?
I mean, ok, granted, DT has some depth - I personally had to experiment with the Mk4 knife out of sheer boredom, to find out it’s not bad at all (alas, not a BB), only to have it buffed in a patch, for it to still not be a BB but with two (2!) different chains - one for single target that nets me one less hit on a bruiser, and one for AoE that has enough stagger to make me not care about option 1?
That DT? The deep hybrid combat game… queue risitas
For something more coherent - anyone who considers tide games to be somehow more than average in difficulty or complexity has either a shallow gaming experience or too much tolerance for 80% capped gear. While definitely built on an impressive and complex engine, what it achieves is more often needlessly convoluted or outright arcane (praise be to people like j_sat who still find it in them to make videos, explaining how the math works for anyone who gives a damn)… And, what’s worse, it has an effect that brings nothing to the overall fun of the experience, only serving to make the combat seem complex and deep initially, only to drive the player to interact with as little of that complexity as possible to achieve not only good, but sometimes the best results. In terms of game design, that’s… hardly Valve-level (it was FromSoft last week, we’re really going at the comparisons here).
And since we’re bringing up HD2 (again) - HD2 does the opposite - while seeming simple and arcade-y, the game offers more and more complexity the more you engage with it, for as much as you’d like to focus on it. You don’t really have to, but you can, if that’s your thing.
An example: Blasting the leg armor off a charger with an RPG/Railgun, at perfect distance and while it’s charging laterally at your bud, to stagger it and finish it off with your primary or secondary before circling out of a hunter pack, dive-nading some space, to then use that precious moment to call in the orbital railcannon strike on the second charger someone just pulled and then keeping on the move? That has the same level of execution, game-knowledge and moment-to-moment decision making requirements as anything you’ll need to do in DT.
The most glaring difference here, I feel, is what the games amount to at higher levels and with coordination. DT pushes you to make “take all commers” builds that can handle everything on their own. For all the coherency and suppression mechanics the game shoved in there, at the end of the day - you want to go in fast, prioritize targets, nuke them afap, and move on. At worst, you’ll have to give some space before advancing again. This is only diversified in Auric, where the brilliant change of pace was - spam specials and elites in waves at certain intervals to create chaos… Ok. Not bad, but obvious and rather boring after a short while.
HD2 simply doesn’t allow that yet. With the most meta of builds x4, you will brute-force the game until you quickly start running into different terrain, different objectives and a botched base/patrol/alert combo, at which point you will have to maneuver together, stagger stratagems and coordinate, or people start dropping to chaos and pressure, gear has to be recollected on the go and the endless fighting retreat begins…
Within the confines of the genre, and for whatever similarities the two games have, I’d definitely say DT has more single-player-focused depth, but really not by much, and doesn’t even come close to the amount of team-focused depth the arcade-y HD2 requires.
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Yeah I think the main problem is comparing DT’s gameplay when it’s good or great to HD2’s gameplay when it’s “but it watched a meta youtube video that said railgun is best or watched some funny clip comps”.
I would say that HD2 is good at giving people a lot of overall options but forcing you to pick and choose what you want in your roster at the moment and what your prioritize. You literally cannot be prepared for every situation even with a well oiled team. My big problem with higher end Darktide gameplay kind of boils down to “Can you deal with the 5 crusher stack and still shoot snipers?” which gets dull after a while.
I feel like especially this will get more deep as more content gets added and you get strats like the mech suits which will likely only be 1 use per mission.
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Considering my experience with tech CEOs, you may be on to something.
Rich idiots tend to be the most thin-skinned, incredibly egotistical morons out there.
It would very much fit that said CEO came up with the ‘player retention’ mechanics and in a fit of outrage that people don’t like those things or their BS excuses for their existence, has stalled development or communication about those things.
See above. Or the devs who actually can interact with humans without cramming their entire leg into their mouths are busy on Versus.
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Considering gamba is there in every Tide game (was somewhat fixed with time) means someone in charge lobbying this.
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This means nothing. You are one person and what you or I can feel is not relevant if the game is financially successful. Take GTA5 Online. It’s a game that I have zero interest in that is hugely successful. Claiming that it’s not because of “my feelings” is just bizarre.
Can it? I’m only talking for myself here but I have not heard a single person looking forward to this. I hope they exist. Balancing PvP and PvE are two completely different things and whenever games try to do both at the same time they do one at the detriment of the other. At least I have seen no example of where this has worked.
Is this really something that people are looking forward to? A PvP mode in a coorporative hoard game?
It’s a hoard game and there can absolutely be depth in mechanics to deal with waves of enemies (but Mayson already gave you several examples of that).
I’m frustrated at the state the game is in. I don’t need them to communicate anything at all. Just fix the game. As soon as they go public with something then it makes it harder to go back on and if they’re trying to do reworks of systems it’s better to just keep their heads down.
I know people disagree with me on this. For me, communication is unimportant. I just want the game fixed. I don’t want to be their friend, and I don’t really care what they have to say until the game is fixed. I have plenty of things to do in the meantime.
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I think this is kind of an odd take in 2024 considering that player feedback is fairly important to fixing a lot of games and we have had multiple reworks that just…don’t pan out.
I mean i remember the first time they “fixed” crafting and they didn’t actually fix a lot of the core problems.
I remember when they “Fixed” the class balance and had to do it like 2 or 3 more times.
I also remember when they “Fixed” the mission board and didn’t actually address the core problem being the mission board itself.
If you are going to take 3+ months for a basic update i think communication is important to let people know you are actually working on something and noy just wasting your time implementing something people don’t give a dam about.
Comparing the class overhauls between DT and SST:E and it’s night and day.
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What do you mean lol, it means everything. It’s a GaaS game, not a single player. Where is that financial succes went for then? V2 versus?
Doesn’t mean every type of enemy should be a horde enemy, for hordes you have poxes, groaners, bruisers, can add nurglings or even other factions.
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When it comes to the financial success of DT, every single opinion is just that - an uninformed opinion. We don’t know. And barring some absolutely illegal leaks, we can’t know.
We can run the maffs all day, calculating revenue streams, costs of doing business, what the Tencent investment means etc etc etc. It all amounts to pure narrative-driven speculation in either way.
What we do know certainly, without question and with zero ambiguity - Darktide amounted to an unremarkable game. For all its promise, the powerful IP, the experience… It’s… there. It’s mid. For every step it took in the right direction, it made another backwards, and one sideways… It won’t revolutionize a single mechanic, while containing and keeping some of the worst the industry can offer.
Barely a footnote in the industry’s history, alas. A niche product that couldn’t make it big in either expanding its niche or moving into more significant territory by virtue of its mechanics.
What should’ve been a perfect marriage of genre, IP and studio became a repeat of all the unfortunate and already recognized flaws of FS’ work.
This year alone there’ve been two games already that’ve shaken the industry in the best possible ways - Pallworld and Helldivers 2. For anyone that cares about comparisons, the numbers and videos are publicly available.
For some quick perspective, the game without a titanic IP, which was last a twin-stick shooter, built on a discontinued engine and sporting the worst anti-cheat option possible, which ran into every issue games in the genre run into, received twice as many positive reviews as the entire number of reviews for DT.
In terms of media, social drive, cultural significance and promise, DT could’ve been up there, but just isn’t.
There was an initial push of YT content creators that attempted to make DT their main source of content. That fizzled out, leaving behind a few channels that gained some traction, a few more that are obscure and a few dedicated streamers that still mix it in from time to time, from what I follow…
There were some popular memes, but again - comparatively little.
So, what is this perception that DT failed? This.
It’s that sinking feeling that the product is just mediocre. An unremarkable dud, not absolutely bad, for it’d be at least a meme then. Yet, very far from significant. Good enough to sell, with a squint and a wink.
I’d firmly state - to be unremarkable in such a way is a failure, perhaps in every way but financially.
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I’m so glad RealAsianRobot moved to another flavour of the month game, that guy was a menace to sanity
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