Verminrtide 2 feels like a 1000-year-old religion that was around for so long that the holy fervor around it has died down and the believers of it are chill if you say “I do not believe in your God”.
Darktide on the other hand feels like a 200-year-old religion where it’s believers are still up in arms, constantly fighting anyone who disagrees and with each other.
I say give +3 more years and people will calm down. I don’t know if Vermintide 2 will still be around then, but even if it won’t, we’ll probably have a DT player making posts like this regarding FS’s new tide game and it’s passionate playerbase acting the exact same as we have it now in DT.
I don’t think this thread or my post are talking about anyone having fun with it. Hell, I’m having fun with it! There are people who post like their tensions are high though, like they aren’t “having fun with it”. Maybe more of them are on reddit than on this here forum, but I also don’t want to call anyone out as I don’t think its terribly constructive and I like the more general tact this post is taking to speaking about our conduct online.
Just speaking from personal experience here, but. I have 600 games on my steam wishlist. When I have no more single player games or friends are looking for something new, I sort by discount and go down the list. ~80% of the time I return the game. I give myself a 2 hour timer, try it, don’t like it, uninstall and return. I only leave a negative review if I ended up keeping the game.
Darktide was the first game I ever cared to join the forums for. Not just games, but anything really. Not a big social media person. I loved Vermintide 2. I don’t like PvP games and a lot of PvE games are kinda brainless. There’s just not much out there like Tide games.
What broke me for Darktide was the ‘potential” I saw in it. Comparing it to Vermintide 2. And how close it tragically felt to greatness. I was emotionally motivated to make that giant crafting memorial thread. I put a lot of hours I didn’t need to into it. Was it necessary, would the end result have been the same if I hadn’t? No idea. Glad I did anyways given the outcome.
I think balance and other minor things should be corrected but nothing major.
But all this to say, I was highly critical of the game because I liked the potential and what it had so much. The irony in hating something is you have to care enough to hate. Most games I am way more critical of than Darktide are so bad they are forgotten. Ignored, deleted, uninstalled, and returned. The ones you put effort into criticizing are the ones you liked enough to see the potential in or had enough you liked to see it as salvageable or worth saving and considering.
So if I see someone passionately criticizing Darktide and putting the hours in, I would think they have a good chance of also liking it… enough.
It’s a good thing to keep in mind, at least. Feedback is most constructive when you’re certain about it and not that salty. An indie game dev friend of mine said that one of my rage-rants was useful, but I think it’s more constructive to keep it cool.
Darktide’s a great game with a bunch of critical flaws we’ve voiced over and over, but it is improving over time. It helps to take a step back and remember that.
Nah, I think it’s about the same in every game. Devs just don’t have enough working hours for this kind of thing, which is understandable. But my problem is that in the recent years many gamedevs became way too comfortable with releasing bug-ridden patches and badly designed features, because they can always fall back on the “work in progress” and “we’ll fix it later” promises. And most of the time these fixes don’t come soon enough if ever.
Creating well-thought out feedback threads feels like a waste of time to be honest. For example, I was one of the first people on these forums who complained about bugged rituals in Havoc, RNG-heavy boss spam in Havoc (which is supposed to be a bug? no? yes? 3-5 bosses at the same time is a healthy thing for the game?), Twins spawning in spots of many maps where it’s impossible to kite them. Chasm terminus drop after mid event, refinery delta first elevator - nowadays if you get Rotten Armor and Twins at the same time in these spots, it’s a guaranteed wipe.
And what do you think? Most of these things were not addressed even after other people kept creating posts about the gamemode months later.
I see some in the “it’s a waste of time” camp, while others are more “how will they know it’s not an issue if we don’t complain?” Personally, I think it’d be less of a waste of a time and more useful if the discussions were more constructive.
One good example of communicative I’ve seen from developers is Firefly. They have a YouTube channel, memes, and content discussions all the time. They’re small, and they’ve been around since I was a kid making games I like.
Maybe Fatshark just needs a few marketing people with a personality to make a YouTube channel where they can actively show us what they’re working on and communicate.
The core gameplay of Darktide is excellent. There’s nothing like it - closest thing is Vermintide 2, which I also played a ton of. That’s why it’s so frustrating to see the incredible potential of this game held back by all the negative things surrounding it (slow patch cycle, poor comms, balance issues, lack of new content, silly management decisions, etc…). If there was no greatness in this game, I wouldn’t care about it.
And for what it’s worth, I really appreciated your efforts with the Crafting Memorial. The crafting update did A LOT to improve the game for me, and I do think you probably influenced that.
Not only is the gameplay excellent but they have made one of the best representations of the 40k world to date. This is no small feat and obviously creating a brilliant 40k world, amid a sea of other failed 40k games, is going to have people hyper focus on it. Chuck in some of the best combat ever created and bam, unconditional emotional commitment.
A majority of Fatshark’s problems come from not having a properly empowered community engagement department. I think thats a fair claim that anyone would agree with. And I use the word empowered because there are clearly community folk & people crafting the dev blogs and marketing trailers we see, but I don’t think they are empowered to be transparent to the community in a way that would build trust.
Very key. Space Marine & Space Marine 2 & Darktide are simply foundational to allowing users to experience “40k” from the ground level perspective necessary to get true immersion. Dawn of War (and the older and newer RTS-alikes), Battlefleet Gothic, Mechanicus, and Rogue Trader all do well to simulate in some fashion the “table top” nature of 40k but its hard to really be “captured” by the worlds when you’re taking a bird’s eye view.
When you’re down in the muck and seeing that someone thought out how a hive city might actually function you really get pulled in.
This is by far to me the primary reason why I’m inclined to believe GW had a hand in what caused this current kerfuffle:
They generally don’t seem to care who they lease the IP to at a surface level, but for the big ones that stick (Darktide, SM2, etc.), they really seem to like breathing down the devs’ necks.
But only those at the upper echelons know the true reasons at the end of the day
Regardless of whoever’s fault it was, I’m still creased over the fact we finally got a roadmap and in true FatShark fashion, the item that immediately followed the announcement was delayed, with a next week:tm: no less
It’s a love and hate relationship I have with this game. The way people behave in missions in lack of courtesy and at same time great gameplay loop.
It’s a mix of liking the game but also fact the lack of good games in this genre with all the unreal engine slop asset flips being made, which hasn’t made me look elsewhere much.
The jokes about “coming soon” or James Franco meme picture with hangman noose shows people are not even surprised anymore. It’s bad when you’re expected to stumble, because history shows as such.
I mean 2 years - All they had to do is remove that padlock restriction in crafting and provide choice option, but felt compelled to replace with mastery/click unlock blessing time inflation system which led to the same thing anyway.
Even if you’re justifiably frustrated by FS or anything else really, you’re still responsible for your reaction and response. Part of that responsibility includes having perspective and understanding what’s appropriate. FS did not make anyone cynical or hostile, that is a personal choice.
I’ve taken breaks from this forum myself because the over-the-top reactions can be exhausting. Honest criticism is valuable; meltdowns just make it harder for anyone, including the devs, to take the community seriously.
You can look at the replies under every FS Steam annoucement to see some strong venom flung, no matter what it is the devs say. And especially on the class delay post…
Just so you know, it’s considered hazardous be in contact with such high amount of doomer activity, so you might need to take a break, from looking at the computer to stare at a wall for good 30 min, after reading through some of these replies.
Thats a valid crashout imo. The shop is frikking disgusting and costs lots of money to “keep up with” whereas the base game and DLCs are a one time purchase with many, many hours of fun that I think are deserving of the expenditure.
