Dev Blog: Into the Maelstrom

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Announcements
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A part of it is that the existing systems detract from new content too.

Completely new weapon type - you have to go through the acquisition systems (mostly Brunt’s, because more weapons will continue to dilute the Armour, Melk’s AND Emperor’s gift.) Then you have to fish for the blessings for the new weapon and also spend who knows how long building them to test blessing combos.

Maps have to be randomly rolled on the difficulty you want to play when you are playing. Nothing they are changing or adding to the mission board fixes that short of them breaking their own design for a week again.

New archetypes and classes will also hit the itemisation wall, but it’s now a bit more smoothed with account resources.

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616

When you said it, (at least to me) it sounded like you accept those reasons as an excuse for the awful state of the system.
Apparently i was mistaken.
Apologies for that.

People ask for lock removal (obviously meaning „please remove the locks + change the system a bit so that the outcome is actually enjoyable“).
You say „but the locks are supposed to be there as part of the current system“ (of course they are, because something like that does not just make it into the game by accident).
Well, then rework the damn system (what people have been asking for since release).

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617

Fair enough, and all good. I’ll try to explain myself better in the future and save us all some stress.

If it was as simple as that, it’d be done already. Very few dev teams are willing to just rip out core systems and replace them. FS’s modus operandi has almost always been to take baby steps over a long time when the system is already in production.

I agree with the sentiment that there’s more player friendly designs out there, but as I said earlier, I’m just keeping things grounded. History tells us that it’s overwhelmingly unlikely that FS is going to just replace the entire system all at once.

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618

Why do you think there’s a plan?

There’s no evidence of it, save for some vague allusions to there being some sort of intent with no follow up to actually prove any.

There’s nothing I’ve seen since beta that give me any indication that they’re doing anything but flying by the seat of their pants with all this. The only clues we have to there being more pretty much amount to abandoned or half implemented mechanics and systems that have little to no bearing on what’s already in the game.

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619

Agreed, the only definitely visible plan was how every design decision (outside of in-mission gameplay) skirted past the monetisation whenever possible without making it overt.

620

I do get what you’re saying, this probably does come down somewhat to expectation on weapon quality. I also wasn’t trying to suggest those two changes are all I’d ever want or even the exact changes I’d like to those systems, but I don’t really want to type up my full thoughts on what I’d like to see changed here in a Dev blog thread.

Regarding expectation on weapon quality @MarxistDictator gave a really good example of a weapon where you kinda do need perfect stat rolls to make the weapon perform. My answer to that I guess would be that that weapon needs a buff so it doesn’t damn well need perfect rolls to be good.

I don’t fundamentally hate the idea of always having the possibility of getting better versions of a weapon as long as getting to a reasonable quality of the weapon isn’t a massive pain. Removing locks is definitely one way to alleviate that, but there are other issues with the system that bother me more involving gathering your blessing library and the sheer time investment to even gather enough resources to get to what I would consider a reasonable quality of weapon.

And TBH I’m also not actually against lock removal, by all means they might as well it would be an easy win for them with the community and it certainly wouldn’t help. It’s just not where my personal priority would lie, I only really chimed in here to say yeah actually, not everyone agrees locks are number 1 issue.

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Yes. This is correct.
Some people do not care or see them as the number 1 issue.

That said, it does not matter that some people do not care all that much, as long as the issue is at fault for driving away the majority of the playerbase, and making the game impossible to enjoy for the majority of the players.

622

They don‘t need to rip out anything.
And they can change the system step wise (preferably big steps and over a short time, because it is getting ridiculous at this point, how long they take to respond to 98% of the playerbase leaving).

They don‘t need to.

They could do it step wise, no problem.

They can announce that they are sorry for missing the mark and crapping the bed with crafting until now.
Then they can absolutely guarantee that they will introduce new functions (paid for with diamantine): selective blessing unlocks, modifier upgrades (all modifiers up to 100%), ability to remove locks,
within the next x months.
Then they can introduce these functions one by one. No problem at all.

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623

I see plenty of evidence.

I see the game clearly being designed to use the GaaS model, and elements of basically every general design decision, including the gear system, can be traced back to that.

I see repeated statements from the devs about things being more complicated than they might appear. That means they know not only that, but how the different components of the game interact with eachother. The most infamous such statement involves the words “immeasurably complex”. Then there’s this, from this very thread:

That’s not fluff talk.

And then, and this is more of a general statement, it’s basically impossible to create such a thing as this without a plan and equally unlikely that you’ll get investors to support you if you can’t show them you’ve got a goal in mind.

Like it or not, we’re dealing with a business here.

Absolutely - And from what I can see, that’s the direction they’re heading. They’re just doing it much more slowly than people want them to.

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624

And without a clear plan, or a roadmap, or telling us what their actual goal is.

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625

There’s not much evidence that I can see there. Sure it looks like they went for a kind of model, but that’s all broad strokes like saying the Mona Lisa was a Renaissance Painting. It describes the thing, but not in any way that gives it a defined shape.

They’re saying a lot, but the actual substance of what they’re saying is rather lacking on specifics or actual content. It’s all just filler words, kicking the can down the road, while stringing everyone along with undefined hope.

The only area of the game where we’ve seen insights on design and intent was with the art teams blog on level design.

There’s nothing outside of our own headcanons as to there being any real planning for future systems in darktide, let alone any that make the locks a necessary evil.

In my opinion, other than with the Xbox port, Fatshark have no idea what to do with their own game.

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626

There’s definitely a conflict between their plan being so centred around constant revenue stream and monetisation (which is a big part of the GaaS model) and a plan to make systems actually engaging, interesting or even just not antagonistic towards players. The former plan very obviously has priority, and they can’t seem to make any structural changes to support the other half of the GaaS part (the actual service part) and the latter goal (like their systems testing or modelling is either non-existent or flawed).

Right now, the best simile for the game at large is a nice wagyu beef steak sandwich but the bread is mouldy, and instead of giving new bread they just pick off small bits of the mould and try to fill the hole with literal crumbs.

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627

Bro, at launch this game felt like they went to a GaaS convention, bought a template and slapped it on top of a 40K mod for V2. They’ve dialed it back in a couple of places, but almost everything in this game is guided by GaaS design to some extent. Such a system simply cannot work without understanding how all the moving parts interact with eachother, and that’s not something you can do without a plan.

Remember all the cool stuff they talked about pre-launch? Weapon modding and the mourningstar being a fully fledged social hub, for example? Remember how people reacted when none of them were present at launch? They got called liars, scammers, thieves. The lack of these promised features cost them possibly tens of thousands of players. And you wonder why they don’t tell us about their future plans?

Yeah, GaaS in general is usually pretty unfriendly IMO. I don’t think I’ve ever interacted with such a system and had it be a generally positive experience. The in-mission gameplay is carrying this game so hard.

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Yeah, it’s the difference between squeezing game systems into a GaaS model and applying a GaaS model to a decent foundation of a game. It’s very noticeable. Cart before the horse and all that.

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Why bother so much balancing this system instead of just letting us chose ?

Why not just let us chose ?

Which big impact ? I would just like to understand.

Finally !
Could you please also review my aforementionned questions and “consider carefully the value that players get out of your systems” as they stand ?

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630

As someone who stopped playing months ago because of the locks,
I won’t start playing again because of the locks.

Changes to siloing and map selection are probably nice for the remaining playerbase but won’t solve the main problems which are a lack of content and a lack of build variety to overcome the lack of content.
The rework of the locks might make it less tedious but it’s still tedious.

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631

Launch was like uncovering the dry dusty bones of a forgotten skeleton in an already thoroughly looted tomb.

There were the missions, some weapons, the Mourningstar, a premium cosmetic shop, and a time gated store. I can’t even remember if Melk and his Melk money was there, and if he was he was pretty much irrelevant at the time. Oh, and the tatters of a story. That’s it. You’d be struggling to call that anything. It’s the bare bones basis of a half dozen genres.

We think it’s GaaS, but we don’t really have confirmation on that. If I recall correctly, the most they’ve said about darktide is that it would be like a GaaS game.

But that’s the genre. Sure. Let’s say they have plans to build a GaaS game with Darktide. There is so little coherence with the systems already in the game that there’s no indication that there is an overall plan or intent on how they weave together.

We have no evidence nor solid feedback from Fatshark on what their design or intent is.

We’ve got a crafting system with locks that somehow relate to… Something bigger that they’re planning but can’t give us any details whatsoever on it.

We have weapons that lack attachments to allow all classes to see in darkness.

…you know what, I could go on and on and on, but the point is that there’s no direction to any of the systems or mechanics that they’ve built but so much evidence is half baked mechanics and systems they’ve abandoned or neglected that the modding community have needed to step in to deliver for us.

They didn’t even build themselves the tools to properly roll out new maps so that they would be available to the playerbase on release.

Fatshark have no plan at this stage other than releasing the Xbox port for a quick cash injection.

They don’t know what they want to do with Crafting, Items, or Inventory. They don’t know what they want to do with the story, or the mission select. They’ve got no clue what to do with their own game.

All they’ve got are meaningless words that are meant to string the playerbase along until they finally get their stuff together, and more fool all of us, because they’ve been doing it, more or less, for 9 months now.

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632

because they lack the ability to differentiate between a possibility, and a straight up promise?
THEY set the expectations, we didn’t misinterpretend them, and sure as hell never bothered to set any expectations straight that wasn’t inline of the upcoming product.
all the backlash they got was caused by themselfs, and most of it was deservered.

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633

totally true that, all of that because releasing half baked game just causes more problem in a long run. if the pc version did not have horrible performance the xbox port would be done already.

making xbox port of game that barely runs on top end pc hardware is a challenge. all game assets need to be redone and engine rewritten (amd code path is pure garbage, nvidia one is way better, xbox runs on amd hardware)

now we are in dumpster fire extinguisher mode, no plan, no idea what is going on, just random announcements about announcements about announcements

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634

The point was that they said something was going to happen, then it didn’t happen, then people left the game. That’s why they’re not telling us what their plans are. They got burned badly and now they know to keep their hands out of the fire.

Darktide is a GaaS game. This not debatable. Look up any definition for “games as a service” you like. All of them will describe Darktide.

GaaS isn’t a genre, it’s a business model. Do a little research on GaaS design and you’ll have trouble seeing features that don’t weave together.

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