you don’t get that people seeing something as a problem does not MAKE it a problem. they did not make the system for people to grind out best-in-class weapons, and people having a hard time doing that is not in their view a problem.
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Fair. To the ignore list, then.
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Seriously… Especially with niche ‘GaaS’ titles. Your core player base is the important asset. The most successful ‘live service’ games have one thing in common, and that’s outstanding community engagement. It’s integral to building long term stability in a game.
If the majority of the core group continually brings up issues they have with the game, but those issues are not addressed and/or developers fail to build that relationship with their community, you’re gonna lose that core player base. After that, it’s only a matter of time before people move on to something else that respects their time and passion.
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If the product is a piece of utility yes. If the product is for entertainment then no - people seeing something as problematic makes it problematic. A game system is good if the majority of users enjoy interacting. If the majority doesn’t like to interact with it then it’s bad. It actually is so simple - design intent doesn’t matter. Lord of the rings Gollum was designed with the intention of being a good stealth game. Majority of players didn’t like the gameplay. It was a bad game. Simple.
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If this were the Steam forums, I’d accuse you of farming clown awards for this one. The moment all you have is people who don’t care is the moment you have a dead product (be that product a game, a movie franchise or something else that typically has “fans”).
What IS this current system designed to do? Because unless it was meant to frustrate players I’m kind of drawing a blank here. Above all else the current crafting system is just not fun.
No one’s stopping you from making a post about how you enjoy some aspect or sharing a story about something cool that happened in the game…
…but if your post gets buried because of the above then perhaps take a hint?
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Imagine defending this level of abject disrespect of yourself and others. Phew.
I don’t know how old you are, but there was a time when games were made by people who loved and played games, for people who loved and played games. You could tell the driving, motivating force behind these projects was creative in nature. The business side worked itself out by nature of the product being successful as a result of said driving force. These games were inundated with a sense of deep passion and attention to detail which resulted in the types of sentiment this thread conveys to be virtually absent on anything resembling a significant level.
Unless you’re willing to be egregiously relativistic, Darktide is, unfortunately, not one of those games and Fatshark is not one of those studios.
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While i get and mostly agree with the overall sentiment, I’d disagree somewhat on the merits of parts of the company.
There’s little doubt whoever did the art and audio design, or even the gameplay, had a solid idea and did a (subjectively very) good job getting the feel/look/sound of the game fit the IP.
I’d argue what we’ve seen since launch is some part of the company going “and now we milk every ounce out of what you’ve made so far, screw gaining or keeping momentum”.
There could be a bunch of reasons for this we’re never going to be privy to of course, a couple of simple speculative ones come to mind like financial goals vs investors/publishers.
Regardless of the reasons, the short-sightedness of what they’re doing at the moment is pretty amazing, seeing as they could at least mitigate a lot by just communicating every week or two with a quick tweet or announcement on the forums.
I mean, even Bungie, kings of weekly waffle posts manage to put something out once a week.
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Helldivers 2 is so much better than this failed gacha dark design RNG attempt. You choose what you want to unlock, there’s a set resource price / level gate for the unlock… and even with generated maps it is creating far more epic, cool and chaotic moments than Darktide ever did.
Their rocky launch was nothing compared to Darktide’s rocky launch and they are putting out hotfixes nearly daily. They communicate, there’s going to be a roadmap, the paid cosmetics are cheap and easy to ignore, hardly different from free stuff. In any case, you can earn the premium currency just by playing.
It’s everything Darktide and Fatshark isn’t.
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I fully agree that there are elements of the Fatshark team that fit that description and they certainly deserve the credit, but the studio and its practices as a whole? No. I don’t think anyone can seriously make that case these days.
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@FatsharkCatfish, as others have said before me, this is one of those answers that in a normal working environment would be unacceptable, both for an employee and for a private professional; if I answered in my work «Be patient, it’s barely been a month since I returned from vacation», my credibility would drop to zero. My clients would immediately turn to someone else more competent than me, and I certainly wouldn’t blame them.
I understand that your hands are tied and your mouth is taped shut, and deep down you don’t really care much about the criticisms and complaints of the nerds who frequent this forum. You are “just doing your job”. And in all likelihood the other Fatshark employees are also “just doing their job”. It is the passion that has disappeared. Fatshark doesn’t have passion in what they do.
If I had to make an analogy with the restaurant sector (since we have a former chef in the forum), I would say that you like to pretend to be a fine dining restaurant (or a bistrot, in the American meaning of the word) with a chef who prepares high-quality delicacies, but the truth is that you are a fast food restaurant or a canteen placed in a strategic point. You don’t prepare food because it’s your passion, you do it because “you have to do your job”.
Perhaps it is anachronistic to talk about passion at work, especially when corporate logic comes into play. However, in my personal experience, I consider passion an integral part of work, especially in relationships with clients and employers, and I consider this true even when (maybe especially when) the job you do is not the one of your dreams.
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Corporate logic has never been logical and or conducive to the results the corpos pursue.
Be it games, movies, TV shows, books, what have you, these are mediums for telling stories and presenting ideas that tickle the human spirit in different ways. For that to happen, the prime motivator has to be a creative drive. You can not piece together a masterpiece in any of the aforementioned categories using focus groups and board meetings.
In the first place, the thing that’s making all the money is, on the most foundational level, the intangible love human beings have of stories and ideas. The corporate logic is hollow, vacuous and soulless and can never achieve the result it, or anyone else, ultimately wants and should be cast back into the deepest pit of hell it crawled from on its devilish hands and knees.
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Fwiw, as a business and customer relations i agree with you, funny in hindsight to think we complained about skin prices after launch, and the response was remove trinkets and weapon skin from the packs and bump the price up more.
As i said earlier, someone who can make these changes is seemingly stuck on milking as much as possible out of the playerbase using assets we know have been in the game since launch in most cases.
I still think the framework and assets show someone cares a good bit (if nothing else about the work they produce), no argument about the approach taken since launch even if patch 13/Xbox launch made it seem like a push in the right direction was finally coming.
Maybe by internal metrics they think it’s been fine?
There certainly doesn’t seem to be any appreciation for the fact that most of the PC playerbase that’s still around have stuck with it since launch and have had to deal with (amongst other things) the crafting system for nearly a year now.
I’ve been playing Helldivers this week and while i don’t think it’s a direct rival (different fix for me at least) it’s undoubtedly a better example of engaging with the playerbase and giving you a feeling of your time mattering insofar as playtime towards a goal.
Darktide’s 2 million credits on average to get a couple of possibly useful weapons towards specific builds for T5+ content is a hump it’s getting harder and harder to bother with even if i like the game.
Not even going to discuss being able to earn paid currency skins by just playing the game vs Darktide’s options.
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I feel like everyone advertising HD2 to this extent probably forget why a lot of people are playing DT to begin with - the setting.
As much as I dislike the itemization and over-reliance on RNG mechanics I love the setting and atmosphere. HD2 might be a great game, but it won’t scratch the WH40k itch, no matter how otherwise good it is.
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It has (for legal reasons) not-dreadnoughts and other things which are plenty WH40K. It will have player mechs, too. shrug
That being said, I guess for some the setting is important.
Obviously the 40k setting is a huge part of the appeal of the game but I personally don’t find it to be enough to carry the weight of all its problems indefinitely (or even that much longer) and I’ve sunk almost 2000 hours into this game and have read/audiobooked dozens of the 40k books.
So once the draw of the setting has been juiced for all it’s worth, what remains is the rest of the game which, despite amazing core combat gameplay (for the most part, at least), is considerably flawed and/or lacking.
I’ve also been binging Helldivers 2 like mad since its release and the sense you get from its copious little details and unique but incredible gameplay is that far more care has been put into the final product and far fewer detrimental compromises and corner cuts were involved in its creation. It’s not 40k, but as much as it sucks to say it, it’s a better put together game than Darktide currently is. It’s not the exact same type of game, sure, but it’s certainly closely adjacent and has, and will, continue to siphon players from Darktide.
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And the melee focus, I would play a tide game on another IP (Or even a in a non-IP game)
This is an important point.
Darktide makes its chops on being a 40k game. Much like tabletop 40k’s various rulesets, Darktide stripped of its setting would attract almost nobody. Tabletop 40k’s ruleset is there largely to give people a framework for people to play with their plastic space army collections rather than to be a tight competitive well written ruleset, there are tons of objectively better rulesets for tabletop gaming than anything Games Workshop has ever put out. Darktide’s fundamental premise is selling warhammer fans lifetime tickets to virtual Warhammerland, and then offering them outfits to cosplay in for their E-Figures, and while the core combat loop is magnificent, I don’t think anyone would hold up Darktide as the pinnacle of 4 person survival coop shooters.
Very few people are buying this game who aren’t already warhammer fans. I think I’ve seen only a single Darktide player ever (either IRL or on here/discord/reddit/etc) that wasn’t already a 40k fan when they bought the game, and then they went on to talk about how they became a 40k fan despite all the game problems with Darktide. And ultimately, that’s really the business model here, it’s providing an immersive 40k experience, far more than being a great shooter in and of itself.
Anyone into Darktide primarily for its shooter experience is going to hop to HD2 or other games, no question, if they haven’t already. Fatshark’s hope and business model is that their core market isn’t really shooter connoisseurs, it’s die-hard 40k fans.
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I’m one of those guys. Between VT, VT2, and DT - I have ~2k hours. Prior to VT, the only WH game I’d played was Warhammer Online. I know very little about WH/WH lore - much of what I do know I’ve learned by reading these forums and playing the games.
I have very mixed feelings about FS - on one hand they’ve developed 3 games whose core gameplay is exactly what I’m looking for - really it’s just nothing short of phenomenal. And on the other they continue to demonstrate (what I perceive as blatant) a lack of consideration for their players.
Communicative and transparent development is going to become the norm - you’re seeing this more and more with small - med studios. Players respond favorably to it - generating a degree of empathy from the community.
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well, make that two.
didn’t give a single thought about warhammer, bought darktide because of its quake 2’esque atmosphere and coop setting and boom got not-attenborough lore-anymore and baldemort on my evening audiobook routine when painting mcfarlane figures…
as for the shooting experience, its exactly that what keeps me playing:
responsive (if servers be willing), fast paced first person with tasty gore and a feeling of sweating quake 3 performance without a k/d pressure to keep up and pretend to be top class over 40 years old.
as honest a statement as it gets.
third person never worked for me, its either me in this universe or i’m staring at a foreign “object” i cant immerse myself in.
same reason i only “finished” the witcher 3 and spent the better part of a year in fallout.
on a side note, seeing multiple gameplay footage of helldivers2, shooting non-humanoids wont do for me, something about bug squishing feels unrewarding.
(as a result i fear space marine 2 wont work as well, bummer as i stocked up on ultra marines and tyranids for my second diorama)
same reason starship troopers wasnt my cup of tea.
darktide maps so far scratch that itch for how i like my environment, guess it’d take a khorn setting for the full gore/viscera experience and damage models seem detailed enough to carry the sense of impact weapons should have on soft tissue (dead island 2 gets it a bit better in my opinion)
cant put my finger on it, the helldiver stuff seems like “plastic”, generic and clean.
warhammer universe on the other hand is something i could wake up in and grin ear to ear even if life expectancy would be less than a day.
right now the feeling is “if it aint 40k it can stay away” for seldom since doom did i feel such a “connection” or “right at home” vibe than here.
good indicator is the amount of “out of game stuff” i buy from a franchise. few years back got myself 2 threezero power armor figures 1/6 scale, took my 3d printer for a spin and churned out 3d models like theres no tomorrow, build a room filling diorama just to get my favorite franchise into reality.
ran out of space in the process.
warhammer in 1/12 scale revived that dormant itch with ease. thanks to darktide.
so yeah current problems as they are, i got my money’s worth and got a backup hobby i can enjoy in a decade or two when the reflexes begin to fade.
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