Cleaning up with half-truths: Darktide has no full Live-Service Commitment, but you're not in the wrong for having thought it, either

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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Because it keeps appearing and I finally think to have it figured out, a separate thread.
I have done the research and want to present it.

TL;DR:
Darktide was not claimed to be a full commitment to Live Service, but anyone who believes it should be forgiven regardless because shoddy summary work by a reporters spread this message as an official looking source.
Here my research on the amazing “Live Service commentary” Journey.
I tried to make it as readable as possible. It’s still a lot of text, apologies in advance:

Round 1 - Vermintide 2
The very first dance with “Live Service” as a comment we see Fatshark and an Interviewer dance together is in a discussion about Vermintide 2 in 2021:

“To be perfectly honest, we’re still figuring some of these things out. We didn’t really design Vermintide 2 to be a live service game. Personally, I am happy—and horrified—that people are playing for tens of thousands of hours. So we are looking for ways to improve the game in the long term, and satisfy those players who just want to play it with their friends, and those who want to grind for new items. Upping the quality of every system in the game.”
taken from here:
Interview: Vermintide 2 Developers Discuss Chaos Wastes Tips, Lore, and More -gamerant, published 3. of May 2021

This was left mostly uncommented and has little to do with Darktide, but for completions sake I want to include it here.

Round 2 - Darktide Boogaloo
The next time we hear about Live Service and Fatshark is in the context of a Darktide pre-release interview between Alex Wiltshire and an unspecified developer from Fatshark. This is where the first fateful quotation originates from. And I must correct my earlier statement as these words were said by the Fatshark developer:

“Darktide’s storyline and missions will expand and develop after launch, ALMOST as a live service”.
-taken from Edge issue 372
No link or full citation, because amazingly I do not find it in Google anymore. This indicates it might have been scrubbed from the internet or hidden.

Clearly it is not stated as Live Service, but inspired by it’s continous updating nature. I wish I still had the full citation, because there the fatshark dev actually expands what they mean by that.

Regardless, after this interview came out, 2 other publications picked up on the interview and summarized it without anyone’s input or approval.
These reinterpretations then engraved the Live Service comment in stone:

  1. The first one is still technical accurate and makes a direct citation with the following sentence:
    “Warhammer 40k: Darktide will have a character creator for players to customise their inquisitorial fighters, and its “storyline and missions will expand and develop after launch, almost as a live service”, developer Fatshark told Edge Magazine’s Alex Wiltshire in an interview published in Edge issue 372 this week.”
    Nr 1: Source:
    "Warhammer 40k Darktide has character creator and “live service” story, published at wargamer.com by Alex Evans, May 19, 2022

  2. Now the second article is where the mess actually started. This article is entirely paraphrased and takes the Live Service comment further out of context by claiming:
    “Darktide has been designed as a live-service game from the very beginning, and Magnuson believes that it will be a more dynamic and replayable game because of it. He explains that the team took a modular approach to everything from VO to level design so that elements could be added, removed, and rearranged easily.”
    Nr 2: Source:
    “Darktide Preview: So Much More Than Vermintide In Space” published at thegamer.com by Eric Switzer on Jun 13, 2022

In conclusion, the dev who gave the interview served the Live Service comment as a comparison, but didn’t claim the game to be fully Live Service.
A third party journalist picked the story up and summarized too roughly and that quote from that journalist then got spread on Reddit, where it was engraved as the Live Service commitment we all expected.

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A thread reply so good it had to be made into it’s own thread.

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Im not surprised if they want to hide it. Thats a huge blunder wrapped up in a single sentence! There is nothing even almost live service about this. What a major gaff!

They would have been better just being honest:
“Much like our previous Tide games we will continue to add content for many years while we tweak, refine and balance many aspects of our game. This will take time so please be patient with us! People who are used to a Live Service level of progress may become frustrated with our pace of updates and communication but we want to assure our playerbase that we love our game and we will support it for a long time. We love you and appreciate you, especially Munky, he is super awesome!”

It might not have been well received, but it would have been the truth.

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Thanks, appreciated.

I agree. Guiding expectations is very important for marketing. Most PR debacles stem not from a product or service itself, but how the performance was different from the expectation raised by pre-release information.

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If a multiplayer game released in the last 7 years :

  • is made to last longer than a few months
  • depends on constant player retention to survive
  • promises to have new content for several years

It’s a live service game. Darktide ticks absolutely all the boxes but only delivers on the cash shop. It doesn’t matter if the devs only compare it to a live service but never intended it to be one, it is by all definitions a live service game. It even ticks all the additional boxes considered as the worst flaws of GaS :

  • Missing core content at launch (crafting, talent tree)
  • FOMO shop with only an ingame money and no way to buy with real world money
  • Artificially inflated lifetime by putting several walls of RNG between the player and a good item (usually monetized and I think it’s safe to assume that at one point it was going to be according to the ressource boosters found by the dataminers during the early days of the game)

If a game has all the basis of a GaS and all the flaws of a GaS it’s a GaS. It doesn’t matter how the devs call it, it doesn’t matter if they call it an ALMOST live service, it is a GaS in every way except content. The game has all the worst flaws found in GaS but none of the qualities.

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In short, game may not be directly stated to be a live service but it’s developed like one and DT’s PR people are either non-existent or didn’t do their job properly when interviewed.

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there has been over two years for community managers and developers to temper expectations. The failure to do so led to expectations that weren’t realized - which leads to frustration.

This is like 1 + 1 = 2 here to me.

fat shark didn’t temper expectations for what they were planning to deliver
fat shark explicitly told people the opposite in some cases of what the crafting system would be

the lack of communication addressing what was expected versus what was delivered has upset the community. People feel bait and switched because their expectations were not tempered. Yes - people could handle it in a more mature fashion, the communication failures have gone on beyond a year and it has made people jaded in many cases.

Edit: Now is a good time to come out and explicitly state what we can expect going forward. I’m a bit jaded as well, so I don’t expect we’ll get that any time soon.

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Thank you, @mayson, for your efforts in compiling all of the source material for this topic!

My main pet gripe about Darktide has never been new maps or weapons, but rather how shallow it feels to delve into the game’s narrative.

While mission levels are typically well constructed, they feel more like setpieces than previous living quarters, and while that design lends itself nicely to creating intense enemy encounters, it doesn’t sell me on the natural world we’re spending so much time in.

It’s as if I’m roaming about on a massive movie set rather than in a real hive city where people once lived.

On top of that, we got the Mourningstar, which is ugly and uninteresting.

In Helldivers 2, I can hug other players both aboard the ship and during missions and in DRG we can dance and drink together.

Small details that enrich the complete experience and sells you on the world.

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There’s so many things they say they’ll do fail to do it and then never actually go hey sorry or that wasn’t feasible or we changed our plans, they just pretend it was never said by them

Weapons modifications
Monthly new maps
Quarterly classes/ subclasses
Solo mode

Like the game may have not been directly claimed to be one, but they definitely advertised it to have the main draws of a live service which then they were completely and utterly unprepared to actually implement in the way they said they would but claimed it anyways. Where in the only thing we ended up getting to do with a live service was a fortnightly updating shop that predominantly sells slop

Where even at the start of this year fatshark had learnt absolutely nothing from past mistakes once again and have spent the first quarter of the year doing and saying nothing beyond more than claiming a hotfix as a patch. Where the community is leaving in droves and wondering if the game is abandoned. Great managing of the game fatshark.

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there’s probably a lot of this. anyone that played through vermintide when it was first laid out knows that a lot of the devs are…a little confused how gaming design language works in english and you have to press them for more details to figure out the hell they’re actually saying. i wouldn’t be surprised if most complaints are just “the interviewer halfassed their initial questions, then made uninformed assumptions about the meaning” that redditors took as gospel and spread everywhere.

if anything, their problem was focusing on giving the fanbase what it asked for from the last game they did, you people always ask for crap that doesn’t work.

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Ultimately Irrelevant, it clearly came across that way in multiple Reviews/Interviews, and Fatshark failed to clear up and set expectations Straight.
its just another communication failure among a big pile of shame.

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Both the Edge article and the Infogamer one were always behind paywalls. They had some YT videos that did read-throughs or summaries but all the ones I had bookmarked have been taken down.

I don’t know if it’s so much “scrubbing” as it is a magazine article with very limited access in an era where magazines are dying off.

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Well, this is enlightening. I’ve just been taking the community’s words as gospel - I’m still angry at the fact that they haven’t been providing substantial updates, but with a better expectation set, I can afford to be more patient in the future once the major issues are fixed.

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High quality OP. Well done, Mays.

After going over this several times in a few threads, I’m convinced miscommunication was aplenty, no surprise there, knowing how FS are in that department.

That said, the game does have all the hallmark features of Live Service. That’s a fact. Whether it was built as this from the ground up, or they were shoehorned in is ultimately irrelevant. The final product is riddled with them.

After all this talk, my own personal conclusion is - a deed (or product in this case) is not judged on intention, but execution.

I’ve lately began using a term that came to me in another thread - GaaS Light. This is what DT qualifies as, categorically. The wordplay is just gravy.

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The business model of the Tide series changed years ago, when VT2 transitioned from paid DLC to paid cosmetics supporting various bits of free content (map packs, modes, etc.). Darktide is the next in the series, but it is very much 40k VT2.

You’re free to call it whatever you like, and determine your own expectations and demand whatever you want from Fatshark, but Fatshark gonna Fatshark…for better or worse.

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Interesting take but name one non-live service game where level infinite (a company that specializes in helping devs handle their live service games) employees are on the board of directors and where you have a currency conversion system on a bi weekly rotating cash shop

The simple reality, regardless of what Fatshark says or what the articles say (which ultimately is also what Fatshark says or they’d clear it up): the game is a live service game in the detrimental aspects and it isn’t one in the good aspects of live service that would actually offset this. That’s the reality regardless of semantics or who names it what.

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With all due respect, this thread is some weapons-grade copium.

They can claim (or omit) whatever they like, but if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck…

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then it’s an RC boat with a shell made to look like a duck.

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Have they ever claimed that ?

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Well, they very clearly changed plans with this one, but even still, we got the equivalent of 8 new classes and a whole new class/talent system in just about 3 quarters, so even sitting at 5 quarters out, they’re still 3 quarters ahead of schedule.