This thread, like hundreds of others in this forum, proves one thing: Darktide is yet another victim of the “Warhammer 40,000 Video Game Curse”, a curse that essentially translates to the same mantra: wasted potential.
Darktide is an immense, gargantuan pile of wasted potential. This can be seen in the vast amount of dead mechanics, half-baked ideas, and half-developed elements. You’re done for when you notice all these shortcomings and start saying: «If only they made this particular game mechanic actually useful or enjoyable… And what about this one? Oh, and what about this other one?» Boom. You’re done.
What is most offensive is that it is still possible to find a solution to these shortcomings, but Fatshark simply does not care, because it has decided not to listen to its own base and to maintain radio silence. In the end, the old promises of the Open Letter were just lies (golly gee! Who would have thought?!).
This is what drives me up the wall. You’ve got a passionate player base that would go ham on anything you did. Look at what happened in the interval between the class overhaul and the ‘oh yeah we’re charging you extra for Krieg cosmetics’ debacle: the forum, miracle of miracles, became positive about the direction of the game.
The fans are not inherently impossible to please here. Fatshark firing whatever executive decided on the gacha and whichever one set their cosmetic policy and using their salaries to pay for a more consistent communications team would be a positive return on investment. One blog post about the community’s pain points in detail and engaging with the ideas that literally dozens of people have proposed would undo a good chunk of the damage in one go.
Fatshark just refuses to do that. They seem to be under the impression that they’re a AAA studio with the devoted lowest-common-denominator of fans to avoid any real pitfalls.
Chaos wastes was pretty popular with players, if they don’t implement a similar concept they are messing up. Fatshark seems very concerned with player retention for obvious reasons. I’ll wager that a roguelike gamemode would do a lot in that regard.