fatshark is building the maps as chunks which is/was part of their procudually generated maps plan which they cocked up and did not have enough extra map chunks for whatever their plan was. if they get enough map chunks done by adding intersecting maps i would assume they’d go back and rework the map generation to vastly improve map varaiety.
unless your idea of variety is “deep rock galactic has biomes that are totally unrelated to each other, we needx that! i want to fight on a desert planet and a jungle and fight genestealers in space!” in which case your problem is you did not listen to what fatshark was developing and just made up crap you expect them to do for you.
Schrodinger’s Darktide Principle:
DT maps are visually indistinctive and blend together. They lack variety and FS’s previous title could’ve shown the way, since those were already exceptionally well done. - They were building something and failed. This is not DRG! With enough time and new maps, they might rework it. This is GaaS. Also, didn’t listen to what FS were putting out there.
A DT feature is simultaneously understood and expected, and has never really been advertised or even discussed, until an argument is presented.
Top Notch GaaS-Light.
(it’s quickly becoming addicting to point these out… )
“Designers produce chunks of levels, then join five or six together to create a mission. Chunks can intersect each other, creating a bigger overall zone, so that several missions can criss-cross a single zone.” – page 67, Journalist
Oh definitely. I just don’t think this topic should be tackled how OP did it. That’s my only point of contention and has been from the very moment I started posting in this thread. Hostility just helps no one, even if patience runs thin.
Every one of your painpoints I fully agree with, all 4 of them. As you probably already know from other discussions we’ve had.
The opportunity with Darktide is so much greater than with Vermintide, too. There is no debate about this.
I can’t say anything about DRG, but I take your word for it since you’re trustworthy.
L4D2 is from a bygone era. They don’t make em like this anymore.
I was there for Payday 2 the entire time. I saw it’s up and downs. From the very early “Let’s play another Firestarter” days to the John Wick inclusion. Overkill made their fair share of mistakes, too. But their content pipeline is just so smooth. When you play the game today, you don’t even know where to begin. It’s a sea of content, one map more unique than another.
Regarding Darktide:
I’d argue that the crafting adjustment away from this restrictive system and new gameplay content are the two core issues. Of course bugfixes and communication matter, too.
But if Payday 2’s community has proven one thing, it’s that jank and bugs at every corner will be forgiven, if gameplay and supporting gameplay systems are on point. That game even made it through the “oops we added micro transactions” phase and lived, despite a massive (justified) community blowback.
We were comparing KF2 and Darktide in the previous back and forth and the numbers here are in Darktide’s favor.
The only reason I kept pushing this matter is because you insisted previously that Killing Floor 2 beats Darktide by the numbers as an argument. You brought up the steamcharts comparison. My only take on this matter was Darktide having pretty decent numbers for an AA title in the coop niche. That is true.
You then kept (and still keep) calling me stupid in all sorts of colorful ways, despite the numbers on KF2 simply not backing you up on this front. Do I want Darktide to go the way of a Killing Floor 2? No. But I also won’t let you dab on me with such hottakes.
And on that note, Warframe distorts the graph quite a bit.
This is how that graph between KF2 and DT looks without Warframe, starting at Darktide’s release:
You can see the major spikes when new content was released for both games. Similiar pattern. Darktide also clearly has a somewhat longer player retention after it’s first big spike compared to KF2’s spikes, althought nothing lasts forever.
Point being - Despite the grimdark narrative, the world isn’t ending.
And from a Fatshark’s point of view Darktide is a resounding success already - Since it makes more sense to compare previous titles and the growth from that. Here a graph for that:
With every game they improved upon the formular and found more success than with their previous iteration of “Tide”.
We’re just talking about how their best but arguably still massively flawed one can be made better - And their communication as a company of course. They just can’t afford to repeat that launch fiasco they had with Darktide.
We’re all here to discuss the state of the game. Nobody is saying it isn’t in need of improvement. But going @Mezmorki’s and @brosgw’s route with tempered, but well-chosen words is just more effective. Both have been referenced countless of times by Catfish with the memo their feedback was given on (some if it was also partially put in practice).
I’ve yet to see that happen with a single ragepost (which is what OP started the thread with for reference). Just endlessly flaying the reader with strong language just numbs with zero lasting impressions. That’s what I’m mainly concerned about. The other counter-points I made to OP specifically because his post simply lacked nuance and I felt compelled to give it.
why the crap would they? every time they do they either find a different idea that fits their plan better and shelve it or find a major flaw they need to fix first and push it back. plus they get like 800 redditors ranting at them for crap fatshark never hinted at.
Over 90% players gone - successful game
And to prove this point, you needed to remove the actually successful game from comparison, because it “distorts the graph quite a bit” but then you have no qualms adding games that do worse than DT.
You don’t need me to call you stupid. You are doing a marvelous job with that all by yourself.
Darktide has poor player retention, which is not healthy for a live service game for various reasons. When other growing games release an update and get a player count peak they are able to build on the remains of the previous peak, this allows them to compound and grow their player base over time. Darktide cannot do this because the player retention is so poor that there is no one left from the previous player peak.
Answer:
I see more maps and map variety like Vt2 have been suggested a few times in this thread. The issue is that VT2 also had really terrible player retention and it wont be any different with Dartide. So while more maps would be nice, that does not address the fundamental problem of poor player retention that Tide games have. In both DT and VT2 a new map holds interest for about a week before becoming stale and people move on, and Fatshark cannot produce them in anything like enough quantity to keep up with that. Modern gamers in the year 2024 just don’t seem to want to run the same map over and over and over again.
There’s no point beating around the bush. The most obvious solution to this is for Fatshark to do dynamic maps of some kind so that they play differently each time you run them. It is content that can fill in the long update gaps for this game preventing staleness, reducing complaints, and improving retention. This is how both DRG and Helldivers 2 do it and it works.
There are many many approaches to this, whether that is many pathways, or pathways randomly opened or blocked, or huge open maps with randomly placed objectives, or maps generated from canned map chunks, or so on.
Fatshark has some smart designers and can figure out the best approach, they just need to actually approach it, but they just seem to leave it languishing, like the crafting.
while I’m not getting into the Nitty Gritty of the numbers, I don’t think the amount of maps is really the problem but players have art-style-fatigue, in that it all looks the same ish.
Same criticism that was kind-of levelled at Fallout:New Vegas. It all looked brown/tan. (I know it’s the bloody desert but still).
This isn’t a defence of the crrent methods of FS behaviour and comms with their disgruntled customers, but VT1 went down to something like <400 concurrent players before they released Karak Azgaraz (I think) and at least FS had the tenacity to keep going and pull something out the bag.
And here we are again, bemoaning the fact FS haven’t changed the modus operandi since VT1 launch of Karak Azgaraz.
you can’t really compare VT1 to darktide in populataion issues. VT1 had P2P and then suffered a “quality of life” mod that locked people’s servers from players that didn’t meet their expectations, effectively wiping out available games for the majority of players. darktide has public servers so it’s not likely to get that bad in years.
It should be mentioned that this scenario was seen even before the release of the game. People saw the Fatshark logo and knew the game was going to have an abysmal work schedule and QC.
I think people who are just now seeing steam stats should take a look at Vermintide II and realize that Fatshark isn’t Ghost Ship, isn’t OG Tripwire, and certainty isn’t some wonder dev company.
Fatshark has always been mediocre at best and the only reason why there is so much extra baggage is because it is a 40k game in a time where 40k has an extreme uptick in popularity thanks to people like Alfa. Everyone wanted this game which had so much potential to magically be better then the norm and have a solid 40k game when many others have failed.
Verm II has been a game for the majority of its life been sub 4k players. Fatshark was incredibly shortsighted that they could somehow bank on 40k alone to retain more players to justify a live-service game when they NEVER been good at providing enough content to make it feasible.
The overall fate of this game will be just like all the other games before it where it will plateau at roughly 4k players and have its core base of tide players.
If you have any hopes on this game being any better then this then I have a bridge to sell you. Save your sanity and breath and just move on.
The thing that is also weird about FS, and you can see this in VT2, is that they do push out some great content and additions to the game from time to time, but they do it in some sort of parallel manner that doesn’t actually fix the problems in the main game.
VT2 crafting was and is not great either. They released the weaves and the unique totally awesome crafting system for the weave. But then never took the obvious step of applying the weave system to the base game. Likewise, they made Chaos Wastes, which is cool and all and well-liked, but it also doesn’t let you use your own geared up equipment in it - it’s a sort of parallel mode. why wasn’t the idea of slightly randomized maps and a huge variety of mutators also connected to the main game mode as part of a deed rework or something?
It’s like Fatsharks answer to a broken base game system is to just give you a totally different alternative that has no cross-over instead of jus fixing the core system.
Honestly? I don’t need the numbers, so long as one can find people to play with*. What I AM hoping for (despite my better judgement) is a better (read: less frustrating) crafting system.
* - Take Titanfall 2 CO-OP as an example where this is an actual problem. The playerbase is so small that finding a co-op game can take quite a while. But before you jump on Steamcharts to check the player counts for TF2, remember it’s not just a co-op game and there’s a very well made SP component AND co-op isn’t the “default” MP mode. Oh, and a lot of players may have bought the game when it initially launched, i.e. from EA, not Steam.
Emphasis mine. This was in advance of the patch that tweaked the crafting locks a little bit. And based on the comments above we all assumed that those tweaks were the “first step” in the area of crafting. Yet here we are, still with nothing more substantive in terms of crafting improvements. Where’s the next step of the journey?
I remember being kinda enthusiastic about this part of the Comm-link.
But I realised that these were just empty phrases they like to use to not tie their own rope by speaking the outright truth.
)
But before you jump on Steamcharts to check the player counts for TF2, remember it’s not just a co-op game and there’s a very well made SP component AND co-op isn’t the “default” MP mode. Oh, and a lot of players may have bought the game when it initially launched, i.e. from EA, not Steam.