I necro this because, as a coder myself, I wonder what the fatshark dev cycle actually is, especially for Darktide. Does it seem crazy to anyone that the game came out with a great engine and amazing art assets, but literally EVERYTHING else has either been re-done or is getting re-done?
Like before release, was the product manager just hopelessly bad? Was almost every project lead an utter embarrassment to the industry? How could so much have possibly gone so terribly wrong? I would kill to get a fully uncensored documentary of the development of darktide.
fatshark like to have idea sessions where they try to think of things to improve the game. sometimes it’s new content, sometimes it’s new mechanics, sometimes it’s a better way to do something they had been happy with in an earlier build. they can get away with it because their games have such a long lifecycle but it probably confuses people used to shitty mobile games which have to constantly rush out new content to sell to not die.
The game was released half-baked, years from being actually ready both in terms of vision and functionality. It just wasn’t…finished. The core gameplay was largely there and the visuals/immersion is astounding, but between crafting and itemization, classes and talent trees, pennances and earnables, the rest of the game just was neither complete nor were their original stand-ins well implemented. It constantly feels like stuff that should have been thought out in advance is still being conceptualized well into the release cycle (e.g. how Vet needed not just a 2.0 but 3.0 and 4.0 talent trees and didn’t get Keystones in Patch 13 due to late scrapping of the original concept) There’s an almost religious fetishization of implementing RNG mechanics into every level of the game…without a clear design intent or purpose.
As a result, the game feels like it’s both playing catch-up to things that should have been finished before release, while simultaneously being fettered to inexplicable design principles. Things are improving, but fundamentally it’s still in something of an unfinished state. I suspect that’s probably not a product manager issue but more of a “we need to ship something to meet a deadline” issue, where the market will tolerate a minimum viable product. That said, some of the development choices since release have been rather flabbergasting (e.g. with crafting/gear as the single largest user feedback issue for months, why did the studio spend the most of 2024 overhauling pennances and adding a new bomber enemy while waiting almost until Q4 to put out a crafting release?).
The darktide we got was hopelessly mismanaged (and still is but they’ve definitely gotten better) and very unfinished it’s why we’ve mainly been getting system overhauls rather than more traditional content updates. Farshark have been slowly and surely been patching the game to their initial launch vision and what was advertised in that first pc gamer magazine article that was the first news we ever saw on darktide all those years ago.
Were all just holding out to the point where fatshark go ok we don’t need anymore overhauls and can just focus entirely on making new stuff (weapons, classes, subclasses, bosses, missions, any sort of consistent development of the plot rather than themed updates that go nowhere, faction, enemies)
Also a cosmetics and premium shop overhaul with an emphasis on get rid of the fomo and improve the quality and sell what people actually want and have been asking for for years now (definitely not happening tho, fatshark are very quietly stubborn on their store being as poorly run and disliked as humanly possible when any modicum of listening to feedback and any sort of effort would make players happier with it and make significantly more money)
“Totally different engine from VT2 built ground up” - exact same fundamental bugs as VT2.
Bugs returning repeatedly between patches - versioning issues?
The main thing I believe is that the teams for VT2 and DT were separated with very, very little communication between the two, what with DT still playing catch-up with QoL that VT2 has had for years. Either that or they deliberately designed DT to be worse in a lot of respects, not sure which is worse.
Well, as a coder working in a team, haven’t you ever experienced your team repeating same mistakes you’ve seen another team make, say at your previous job?
There’s separate teams working on Darktide and Vermintide, and clearly they don’t share experience, since in Darktide we have
All this to say - yes, it’s clearly the management that’s at fault.
it seems to me… I feel like if I am in an open beta. Cause there’s only in an open beta that a game can drastically change.
And since the “release” they redo a lot of the mechanics of the game.
Crossed fingers for them that they can finally fix whatever the internal problems are over there before another dev studio comes along and copies their secret sauce.
I don’t want Fatshark to fail, but if a competitor ends up appearing and doing it better without a botched release, then that’s all she wrote.
edit - I will also preempt the diehard 40k fans, the IP alone won’t be enough to keep some players around. See - Space Hulk Deathwing
The crafting release is partly what made me think about this. This is the THIRD iteration of crafting. Not the second. They spent a lot of time on redoing the horrible launch crafting to make what we have now, and based on the next release preview, it looks like it is getting done over yet again lol.
The games pre-release dev cycle must have been a disaster or something. Would love to get details because i bet the stories would be interesting.
Yes, many times. That is why i am curious about the propduct owner and project leads. It feels like poor command decisions because the core engine is pretty damn good. I doubt the actual coding talent is to blame.
I totally agree with you. However, and I said exactly the same as you when they announced it, the crafting system we have actually is bad. Very bad.
I could manage it and adapt. But this is the worse system I have seen in a game I played more than 12 hours.
Unfortunately there will be still a RNG part… but… well they should have released the game with the talent trees and the crafting system we will have… or, if what we will get is not yet good, we should have.
By personal perspective and opinion, there has been the following that affected development for DT2:
Developers at FS for DT being a separate team from the VT/VT2 team
Possibility the DT dev team was not as experienced in creating a game such as DT
The game in essence was practically like an Open Beta from the point it was released on PC, up through its release onto XBox, seeing as the game started out in a more simple form before the rework of talents, introduction of penances (followed by its rework much later), weapons selection (which took two years to expand upon, yet some weapons still yet to be released if they do), etc.
A major one: player feedback that kept affecting the performance of weapons in game to the point of where nerfing did more harm than good, and game balance skewed to where iconic powerful weapons in WH40K (Bolt Weapons, Chainblade Weapons, Power Weapons) are deemed inferior in performance comparison (vs Combat Knife and Revolver meta)
Every time the game had any DLC/Patch updates, it feels like they have had to rewrite the entire code from the ground up, and fix accordingly with hotfixes
The devs up to Secrets Of The Machine God had proven they do work on alot more behind the scenes than they let the public know. They did more than just release weapons and debut a new mission map. They reworked some areas of mission maps, added new objectives in some too
Speaking of the devs being more busy than we knew: with the upcoming Unlocked and Loaded DLC Patch having the Itemization Rework, they been working on a hel of a lot more too they hadn’t told the public until recently such as the new timed countdown train mission map
which leads to wondering what else are they working on?
The secretive nature from the devs feels like a means to avert leaks of their WIPs
RNG in the game imo harkens to inspiration from tabletop games and TTRPGs such as D&D and ofc Warhammer 40,000
Definitely feels like there are players that are not used to a long development cycle because of games like Call Of FartniteBloxDuty having or had rapid seasonal cycles of content releases
No matter what news was released from FS on anything, anything, seeing complaintive responses and feedback. Literally, good news even gets toxic reetback by seemingly ungrateful individuals.
Maybe thats a me problem, yet I come from an appreciative disposition of enjoyment for a game such as Darktide. I became more into playing DT after I was playing fanatically the game “Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries”. I was so into that game from its base game (which was clunky and got better) up through all its DLCs that made the game all the more fun. The moment I was finally able to get my hands onto Darktide, I was sold! I am also a fan of Warhammer 40,000 since 1998. I played on tabletop for years. I also loved playing the PC games “Dawn Of War” and “Space Marine”, so when I started playing DT, I was immediately loving the immersion and gameplay.
While RNG is usually seen as a fundamental part of TTWGs and TTRPGs, one part that gets overlooked is that they also provide systems to mitigate or bypass the RNG as much as possible through other resource investment and personal choice, anything from feats, skills, class features, equipment, formations, orders, command abilities, etc. etc, something which the current iteration of Darktide’s crafting and mission selection completely neglects.
Also, the announced train map was said to have a sense of urgency but shouldn’t be timed by Strawhat. And I think it would be a horrible design mistake to put in a hard timer in this type of game one way or another.
