Almost 2 years have passed since the initial Darktide release, and the communication between you and the players has been somewhat unilateral. This is not to say that the game has not improved or that you have turned a blind eye to community concerns altogether. In fact, there has been considerable progress in both areas, and it would be unjust to pretend otherwise. The upcoming update is supposedly going to solve the most important gameplay issue Darktide has had since its launch, which is crafting locks, and for that I am deeply grateful. We have been waiting a long time for this.
However, the game is still, almost 2 years later, a technical mess, with constant lags, random game crashes, long loading times and client hang-ups between missions. Not to mention bugs that were reported and acknowledged over a year ago and are still in the game. Meanwhile, Fatshark decides to divert resources (developers, time and money) to implementing features that no one asked for, and frankly, no one needs to play the game.
I have been playing Darktide since beta, have clocked over 1300 hours in-game time, and don’t plan to stop playing in the foreseeable future. I care about this game, and this is why I post here. It would seem logical to fix technical issues before investing time and effort into other ideas. It feels like you are adding beautiful decorations while the foundations are crumbling. Please fix the game’s most burning technical issues first.
While I don’t mean to trivialise any of these issues, the game would be financially unviable unless it used instanced servers (search AWS and Jonboy - I didn’t find out the detail but I’ve commented many times).
That many of the issues have gone on for so long are I suspect just limitations of the technology out there; sometimes these instances get laggy as their host server has a blip.
Of course a locally hosted game would be perfect… for the host. But given the quit-rate of the average DarkTide player, I am utterly grateful that we have 3rd party hosted games. Even if now and again there’s some instances where I get trapped around the corner due to a bit of lag. I might get trapped like that every 20 games. It might cause us to lose a match every 50 if I just happened to be a lynchpin in the game.
But can you imagine how regularly you’d spend 10-20 minutes on a map, the host going down, then hitting Alt-F4 and booting everyone back to the Mourningstar otherwise?
So yeah; while I also get frustrated every now and then, I think what we have is maybe the lesser evil?
Thanks for your post. I agree with you. I don’t expect devs to be unresonable. However the game is booting players to Mourningstar or even to desktop every day for no obvious reason. I never had such issues with Vermintide, and I would assume both use similar server solutions?
Occasional lags are understandable and acceptable, but serious bugs and technical problems are not. I play a lot of games, on PC and console, and none of them has Darktide-level technical issues, and this has been the case for Darktide for almost 2 years now. My point is that there are technical problems that should be solved before even thinking about new features. It just doesn’t make sense to add client features when the core client is a hot mess.
Adding new content is something different; I think we all want new missions and weapons more than anything else.
I think the game needs serious optimization as well, without this DLSS nonsense. I’ve never been a fan of it in a game where long-range visual recognition is important, and I tend to lose frames even on my relatively mid-tier computer - it maxes out my GPU.
they don’t, both vermintide 1&2 uses peer to peer hosting. While progress was hosted primarily on fatshark servers.
in darktide fatshark switched to fully server hosted games.
(mostly due to many community requests).
Both has advantages and disadvantages
tho i heard that they used Amazon server framework which isn’t optimized for shooter tick rate demands.
but since its 3rd party i doubt they have much influence at all in that regard.
I feel your pain. I upgraded my rig twice just to be able to play the game the way I want to play it. But that should not be the case. Most players will not buy hardware because their favorite game is not optimized.
No to mention that I switched from Windows 10 to Windows 11 to be able to play at all, because at one point in 2023 people with AMD GPUs were not able to play on Windows 10 for about a month. (I realize this sounds ridiculous but it’s a true story, you can search technical subforum to find out more if you are interested) I mean if that’s not a technical hot mess then I don’t know what is.
Darktide has the honor of being one of the rare games that has seen no improvement to its technical aspects in these almost 2 years since release. Kudos to the team, aren’t there any dishonor trophies out there for publishers/developers we could hand out to Fatshark ?
VT2 launched with a multitude of network and netcode issues as well. If I remember corectly it took more than 6 months to fix the constant back-end errors. Ghost-swings and inconsistent audio (hit warning) notifications were other issues.
Wowza, this post is so polite I almost forget it’s the game’s forum.
I do agree with you, this will add more polished feeling to the game.
Also, the only technical issues that are bugging me right now are connection issues, I understand that my ISP is ass, but I still want things to be better.
(it’s hard for me to go past the first loading screen that requires connection, not to mention insane ingame lag, but that’s on my ISP)
It’s actually fine, they just need to make a player play locally, which means that all calculations are done by YOUR computer and not the Server.
That is how Tutorial mission and Solo Mod work
Problem with that is as soon as you let the client decide where he is or where he aims etc and just send that info to the server you open the door for manipulation of those values.
now was cheating a huge problem in predecessor games? not really, but i dunno if they would even take the tiniest of risks
Guys the technical issues of this game is never just limited to network issues (though it does have a huge amount of that for sure). There are many other technical issues that deeply impact the game, like how frequently actions (like switching weapon, special weapon action) don’t get triggered without hitting the key many times, and anyone still remember that issue where if you have literally any ray tracing feature enabled, the game halves your GPU utilization after one match and your FPS can go from 70 to 40 until you restart the game?
I thought I was making a similar statement, but for some reason most posts discuss lags.
Let my try to rephrase: The game is in bad technical shape, and it’s been almost 2 years since full release. I get a random game crash every 2 or 3 games. Every other game gets hang-up on loading screen between missions. Chat and voice chat are down every month. There are numerous bugs that have been reported and acknowledged over a year ago and somehow are still in the game. (go check the bugs subforum, I report there).
However, instead of making the base game work well, Fatshark diverts resources to new features no one really needs to be able to play. This does not make any sense. Unless you don’t care about your game and just want to lure new players, because “Hey! we’ve got new features!”. I don’t know, guys, it’s like milking a dying cow. It’s just wrong. Also I don’t want this cow to die.
This has been a consistently odd thing. As issues with load times and disconnects have persisted since launch, little appears to have been done to resolve them, it still takes far longer to load into Darktide and then into a mission than either DRG or HD2. As reviews and player feedback across every community platform screamed about crafting and itemization…Fatshark decided that Pennances and green-colored Bombers were more important.
It really feels like dev priorities are decided in a vacuum by throwing darts at a board.
this is normal with swedish developers in my experience. im not even being sarcastic or anything, it seems they have some kind of plan they stick to rigidly regardless of how many fundamental problems the core game suffers from. Only with a huge amount of backlash can they very very slowly start diverting from their plan. Posts like OP’s will be abundant and will be promptly ignored. Maybe that’s a Community Manager issue with them not relaying the actual feedback people give to the game, maybe it’s too many people giving divergent feedback all at once but at this point I just assume every swedish game to be like this and for them to just ignore player feedback completely. Fatshark isnt as bad at the GTFO devs at least.
I honestly think the communication has improved a lot better. now there is a lot of presence
but it still remains that there is no constant updates, from the game itself. when updates come are indeed good and most of the time nice things, but they should be more frequent.
maybe also taking the step to display a roadmap of things that will come in future, so that the players can be satisfied, giving also hype if done well. and giving a sense of production in term of further development.
hotfixes too sadly, do not come when needed, if there is something to fix immediately that is game breaking… for example in a lot of maps you can get stuck, and players have to leave the session because of that. most of the time, hotfixes are included only in the big patches, and big patches come very slow…
