To be fair they wouldn’t have needed to rebuild it if people didn’t go “this system sucks” to such a degree and the rebuild still does jack to adress the actual problems with the game’s progression.
Yet we still don’t have the melta gun. A lot of things were in the game files for Darktide including all the horrendous copy pasted cosmetics that cost 7 bucks a pop and we still don’t have them.
This is some hardcore cope considering that the last major update was December of 2023 and there is been literally no news, communication, or updates for what is to come.
I’m going to throw a note here because i feel like 90% of the people watched a Meta build youtube video and stopped using their brain after which results in people not understanding that there are different tools for different problems and as a result people stopped experimenting.
Really this is the “Dark tide best weapon, Thunderhammer >>>>> Everything else” problem all over again.
Yeah the railgun is good but it has charge up speed and fairly mediocre damage. Someone summed it up fairly well in that it’s a good weapon against most things but it’s not an exceptional weapon at anything.
-MG can be good against medium tier enemies and hold down lighter ones easily.
-The EAT is much faster deployed disable anti tank that comes back fairly quick and also doesn’t need a backpack slot so if you just need 1 thing dead you go it
-The Grenade launcher is far better at horde clear and can deal with medium bugs easily while dispatching smaller ones, it also has the bonus of deleting bug holes and other shootable fairly easily which cuts down on objective time and fumbling for grenades
-The recoilless has some good damage and when team reloaded it’s lightning fast at clearing heavier enemies
-Autocannon is a good all rounder and can clear seconday objectives from range without much effort. Also can be team reloaded so you can shred
-Laser cannon is a bit weak at the moment but hey, that’s what balance patches are for
-Spear probably does the best overall damage and can also knock out bot buildings from a distance which can cut down on having to stop and pop on smaller outposts.
That’s also not getting into the fact that the game has a fairly well done stealth and evasion system that allows solo players to complete objectives while the main team draws fire. A lot of the strats are also great when comboed or stacked which rewards having a diverse team.
What im saying is take any “Muh meta” videos with a grain of salt as there are also plenty of those in Darktide and a lot of those are either outdated or dead wrong.
Edit: As a note im also a lot more free to try things things out when i want to and swap around things for builds without having the dump a lot of time into trying something im ultimately going to not like anyways.
This is just some dumb talking point people like to repeat. Fat Shark had absolutely no problems misdirecting VT and VT2 and even games before this series like War of the Vikings. Its also come to be an apparent fact that Fat Shark has a redemption arc history instead of an abandonware one. Seriously, War of the Vikings and even VT1 fit the definition to a T. Mod support still coming soon…
They have a lot of talent, and a lot of good designers, and then either an impossibly complex work process or genuine laziness sabotaging them at every turn. VT2 actually had to turn face and save reputation because of how badly WoM killed what was left of the playerbase, for instance. But now its apparently le fat shark just has a slow start guise.
Man come on. The projection is off the charts here.
I’ve compared Darktide to other games in the past as well and a lot of the criticism still rings true when compared to other games.
Even giving it a more “fair” comparison being the SST game the communication and general care for players just isn’t there. It’s also a game undergoing an overhaul right now but they are actually keeping their players in the loop and have a rooadmap as well as projected date of release for what is coming.
I don’t know how many times this game has been compared to DRG and there is a good reason for that.
The reason Helldivers 2 keeps coming up is that it does a lot of things that a live service Darktide SHOULD HAVE. The world actually feels like it’s a living and evolving thing instead of just being a fairly static set of missions with an arbitrary “no you can’t play this mission” timer attached to it. I know everyone is hung up on the gameplay but a lot of things that are done right as far as making the world feel lived in and making a live service model that isn’t terrible is also a major factor for why it’s gotten so much praise.
Last event we had for Darktide was in December and it was a boss fight they were going to add anyways. If there weren’t other people on the morning star there is no indication that anyone else is even doing anything. It’s fine to go “I don’t like the gameplay, it’s not my bag” but there is a lot of blatant excuse making for Fatshark not actually committing to the concept of a live service game which was the whole reason this was sold half completed in the first place.
I’d put this down to Tide games poor player retention and Fatshark’s refusal to address it.
I’ve been advocating for dynamic or procedural maps for this game for a long time, but part of me wonders if that would even help player retention. Maybe tide games are just too hardcore to ever grow.
I’ll be honest, it’s really not about praising helldivers but more of the general tone of acting like the comparisons aren’t valid.
Even in a vacuum I’m critical of what Darktide has delivered so far and honestly a lot of the same problems would remain if helldivers was a smash hit or not.
From Day 1 I’ve basically said “Wow the gameplay is great but a lot of the other systems suck and it feels like making this a live service game is kind of a waste”.
Can it change a week, a month, or even a year out where Helldivers 2 content dries up? Sure, it’s within the realm possibility.
Will i get bored of it as time goes on because of the more simple loop and less surface complexity? Maybe, i don’t know, game has been out for a short period of time so it’s hard to judge.
The thing is just based on dev communication and the way everything is laid out im not getting that “ick” feeling i got when Darktide first launched. As pointed out by others the Darktide server problems were also a shitshow on launch and it really was just not handled as well.
Helldivers still has time to disappoint but it’s a lot more positive as far as reception from friends who also previous did a lot of Darktide.
The claims about Tencent are easily disproven either way by simply asking any Fatshark veteran. Even those who like them, like me, will confirm they always did business this way.
It’s cyclical. VT1, VT2 and now DT all follow the same trajectory.
Release plagued with issues (ranging from funny to gamebreaking), year of silence, release to consoles, then finally the engoodening of the game.
Doesn’t excuse the awful start obviously and it really makes you wonder how they keep trucking on from release to release like that.
But the game eventually becomes a great unique experience. Just way later.
If Fatshark had been able to actually generate a procedural mission, a good chunk of their problems with player retention and ‘lore’ would vanish. It’d keep stuff fresh at the very least.
Like yeah, the crafting system is garbage, but if you market a game as ‘live service’ you need to either have a baseline level of effectively infinite content or churn out said content rapidly, and since Fatshark is incapable of the latter it really should’ve done the former.
As it stands, its like the weapon customization or cosmetics - you can see the bones of a system that could have been fun for players, but it got scrapped due to either greed or laziness.
I disagree. They just need more content in quantity. Nothing wrong with handcrafted experiences, the AI Director already creates enough uniqueness each run.
Oh and more diversified modifiers affecting said AI Director would help, too, of course. The more bonkers and batshit insane, the better. This is the Chaos Realm invading and distorting Tertium, nothing should be off-limits.
Fatshark can’t do that kind of quantity. Also VT2 has way more maps but still has player retention issues.
I don’t know if dynamic or procedural or even wide open maps will do the trick, but I do know for certain that more canned linear maps aren’t going to address the player retention issue.
There has been a ton of ideas for a survival / defence mode but have no idea if it’s even being considered.
Having something akin to Chaos Wastes might also help but no idea if that is being worked on or once again even being considered.
Having a new faction pop up would maybe peek interest such as another chaos faction or Dark Eldar would do it but the current rate of content and where the store is at now doesn’t exactly give me much hope that this will come out any time in the next year or two.
There are problems with this of course. You would also need to overhaul how the modifiers and blessing work to make it so the enemies fall into the existing groups. Then also make it so the mission fit into the current mission board or scrap it in favour of something else.
The main issue is that a ton of the issues with Darktide are so foundational or “working as intended” that they essentially painted themselves into a corner which requires having to overhaul one major system or another just to do something like add a new type of gun without it being a huge pain.
I think the other reason a lot of people are really positive about Helldivers in that regard is that the foundation is solid and it’s a fresh start. They can just add a new thing without having to touch up or overhaul other systems. We are what, 2 overhauls to the crafting system and several large and small class overhauls deep? Darktide even a year in still at times feels like an early access game.
In fairness, thus far the HD2 dev’s haven’t done anything like come out and straight up say “hey, we’ve only been back from Vacation for a month, you can’t expect us to be able to provide any insight or news on anything despite having released nothing new in almost 5 months” the way Darktide’s staff have.
Picked Helldivers 2 up last week, nice to have a game with more than a dozen missions on launch and no RNG crafting. If FS can just crank out more missions and make crafting not a Koren MMO simulator, I’d happily recommend Darktide to other people.
Yes. This is what happens when your arguments make little to no sense. You bounce from one wall to another.
Why? Why does FS get to get away with this kind of excuse? They have 180 people. Same numbers developed Wither 3. I would say that Arrowhead also doesn’t have a head count larger than 200. This just proves that they have learned nothihng over the course of their 2 tide games.
This is throwing everything at the wall and hoping something sticks. We are all guilty of it. The forum if literally overspilling with ideas what to do. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Rework of crafting and RNG is an absolute.
Open maps will degrade melee drastically.
Maps problem is layered. You can’t choose which map you want to play, you can’t choose difficulty, you can’t choose conditions. And that’s on top of the very limited map pool. These are all limiting factors taking the fun away. Low level players have only access to empty maps not being able to even see a proper mob, where the actual fun is. Scaling is terrible - and again you have no control over it. You can only have “fun” on FS’s conditions. And they have no clue what that is. This was mentioned here several times. They don’t play their game.
