Enough Fatshark

[salvatoreoptimo]

Hi Fatshark, this is a topic that I wish I didn’t write, but it wouldn’t be fair / correct.

I have played Vermintide since the 1st installment, I have dedicated hundreds of hours to both titles. My dedication comes from my big love for Warhammer’s lore and my love for videogames at the gameplay as a technician. This makes me “less critical” than I usually am xD.

Even taking this into account I have had flame reactions in the past with the game / Fatshark. After several notices and recommendations, I understood that the game development process had its complications, I empathized with the developers and I realized that I had to take things differently.

Over time, I took the “analysis” of Vermintide 2 from a more “technical” point of view, since it was almost impossible from an enjoyable perspective. I came to the sad (because it shouldn’t be like that) conclusion that the game was in development, like a beta.

From this new point of view, the game took on another meaning, it didn’t irritate me so much; although this did not last long. I started to put the game to the test, to check parameters, statistics, situations, etc. I realized the unfortunate real state of the game. Before strange events bothered me, now I realized that half of things didn’t work well.

One hopes that over time the developers will polish the bugs / bugs of the game with successive updates … in the case of Fatshark this does not happen as it should.

The game still has many of the mistakes of the beginning (some even since Vermintide 1), to which new errors have been added, because this is one of the important points: updates should add new content / fix errors; but it seems that Fatshar makes a mixture of both options, adds nothing without generating a multitude of new errors; Beware of this, I am aware that the fact of adding new content to a game implies a multitude of unexpected interactions that cause errors, the problem is the new_content / errors ratio. It is not permissible that the errors are multiplied with each fix / correction patch.

All this demonstrates a great inability of the Fatshark development team which seems overwhelmed. The worst (for me) is the feeling that is transmitted: this will not improve, it will only get worse until it is abandoned by another project.

I have come to question the importance that Fatshark dedicates to the project, since new mistakes have been made that had already been solved / commented before. I understand that Fatshark is a company and that its objective is to sell and that a game already sold does not generate so much to devote many resources to it, but I think it should make an investment in new (and qualified) development staff if you do not want to keep the bad and deserved fame that has been earned.

Before any reply, I have to comment that I have written this having some programming knowledge, seeing part of the game code (with the help of 3rd), and from the desire to see an improvement / change in the game, since I would like to love the game, but the company (currently) does not deserve it.

I consider myself a person with a hard criterion (maybe too much) but never without reason, but let’s not get confused, any community has a loyal and unwavering fan base that decides to bury its criteria by flattery. You can see many examples in this same forum. The truth is the truth and I do not have to have it, but I doubt that these deep and repeated criticisms are based on nothing, and more importantly, it has been too long that we have given for the current state of the game, too . For me Fatshar crossed the line of patience of the players.

Finally, I know that this post will annoy several people and I’m sorry, it’s not my intention. And worst of all, experience tells me that this reflection will not help, it will be forgotten along with so many others.

Greetings and see you.

[Bullwark]

@salvatoreoptimo

it will only get worse until it is abandoned by another project

I won’t be surprised if that is secretly planned already. Depending on the success of Season 2 (+Drachenfels +Emporium), they might or might not slowly abandon V2 and move on.

[Frostysir]

Well as much as i´d state that Fatshark has been doing a fairly good job overall some criticism is due when it comes to the discussion of how well they have handled bugs so far, and some balance issue´s.

I mean sure bugs can come up, it happens with every game more or less, but Fatshark has been very slow or even entirely unsuccessful in fixing a few too many major ones.

Silent specials, endless horde music, double or triple end-of-the-map-event spawns etc.

Fixing a major bug should happen within a week or two, not months later if they do not want people to grow absolutely sick and tired of dealing with that kind of crap.

In addition it becomes a real bad experience when a supposedly already fixed bug comes back, several times.

And having chatted around with a random group this evening i got the impression that people truly are very sick and tired of all the bugs, them and the beastsmen who still act like the + to any difficulty.

Seriously? They hit very fast, they hit very hard, are large and they move quickly too ontop of their bosses the minotaur easily being the hardest boss short of Grey Seer rat&rat warlord by far…well in my opinion anyway.

Then there is the issue of poor balance in some areas in addition to bugs, as well as seriously lacking systems.

Like weapon balance with some being utterly awful compared to the rest, or the crafting system being so dang clunky or pointlessly repetitive and unrewarding.

Like for real? I open 20 boxes and i now have like 50 items i need to scrap but i can only break down 9 at a time with a mini cooldown between each and i also have to select everything manually each time.

Opening more than a few boxes at a time is also quite a time consuming pain in the ass too.

So all in all, lots of things just stack on eachother and buildup to a negative experience…now i cant say much as i still find gameplay itself enjoyable enough to keep playing for now but i really do not have any real “loyalty” left so to speak off : (

[Khakipants]

Almost suspecting that too, but then came word that they were planning on introducing one career before the end of next year. So I don’t know what to think. I believe that they’re working on a lot of different projects at once and this points to that; it’s just one more example of all the different things FS has promised.

[Bullwark]

Making games is a business unfortunately. So it’s smart to at least have a backup plan in the starting holes which will come to fruition if things go down the drain with another project/game.

[RandomLurker]

It’s one thing to have bugs. Every game has them. No exceptions.

It’s another thing to have the same bugs again and again. FS fix them, they come back. FS fix them again, they come back again. And so on. They finally got it polished and working well in 1.7, needing only a little fine tuning. Then they based their expansion on a 6-month old build, effectively reverting half a year of progress.

Then, after 2.0, they fix some things. They break some things. They fix those things. The original bugs come back. They fix those; the middle bugs come back. They stop for 2 months, apparently saving up for something big, but when it finally arrives there are only a handful of bug fixes, except not even that because the fix advertised in the patch notes apparently isn’t in the actual build that was pushed to live.

It’s a comedy of incompetence. Their build pipeline is more like a rat’s tangled sewer tube. How they even managed to make a piece of software that runs when they can’t keep their dev branches straight is a mystery to me.

[munis]

Not sure if it’s me who’s understood this wrong or the other way around, but I got the impression that the branch that ultimately became WoM is not 6 months old, but that WoM and 1.7 has been developed side by side with fixes being merged to both, or from either to a dev branch from which again to the other.

In other words I understood WoM being more close to the main dev and thus the most recent, except for some 1.7 fixes that were either forgotten to be merged or were incompatibe / were merged and were incompatible and broke more and maybe fixed nothing.

If you go to Aussiemon’s github and compare especially the newest to 1.7 you can see that the current version which is the most broken has to be close to the dev because the nature and scope of many changes are clearly for something new. Even the executable itself has some new stuff in it which point to things under work. Plenty of those don’t visibly show to the player except in the form of bugs.

They have a ton of work to finish Versus while at the same time trying to keep adventure mode in a good shape.

While I hate the fact the game is too broken at the moment and the fact that they can’t afford to playtest releases, I feel that given those two it’s better to make us the testers and keep working. Better than keeping separate branches until on release day doing a big merge with testing being ”works on my pc -Dev”.

Obviously there are a million ways to improve the process, one obvious being public betas even for smaller patches that stay in beta if they don’t work.

1.7 took quite some time to become as stable as it is, and now the process starts from zero again. Would happen a bit faster if they actually wanted to fix stuff, but it seems some motivation / feedback is missing. The last stream had a moment with the dev making a written note to himself when a bug showed on stream and both of them and the chat noticed. It’s probably an easy one to fix like are many other, but if a source for motivation is missing the of course it’s going to take time and failed half-efforts.

If there’s not enough good feedback inside the team then weekly devs join random games stream could do some good

[Bullwark]

@munis

Obviously there are a million ways to improve the process, one obvious being public betas even for smaller patches that stay in beta if they don’t work.

1+
This ! So we can actively work together and hopefully avoid bugtides, etc…!
Although: beta-feedback had been ignored in the past! But it’ll be a process worth a shot!!

[RandomLurker]

They used a build of 1.6 from February. WOM launched in August. It’s extremely improbably that they merged the fixes as they went (or perhaps verified they were applied properly) since the bugs were literally exact duplicates of things were fixed in 1.7. One is a coincidence, two is bloody unlikely, but an entire build’s worth of duplicated bugs is no accident.

@munis

Obviously there are a million ways to improve the process, one obvious being public betas even for smaller patches that stay in beta if they don’t work.

Games are indeed a business, but FS has poisoned their own well good an proper now. They are not going to stay in business if they don’t get some customer trust back. This suggestion would be a good start. Not breaking things AGAIN with every patch would be another good start.

[Randaru]

Most veterans had little to no belief in Fatshark as a developer even prior to WoM update; and as a company, they treat their customers as people who pay to do QT for them, and even after the QT they don’t even need to fix anything because they already got the money. This is just a sad reality of what unearned success does to companies nowdays.

The best thing you can do is to take your business elsewhere, like most people I know did after the patch. The best a consumer can do for himself is to not be an enabler of practices targeted to scam and milk him. As a predatory company, FS gladly has no buyers and no finances to rely on in case they lost all their core audience they worked so hard to fleece and alienate. Unlike mega-corporations that can sustain themselves for a long period of time without profitable products, FS will be replaced by more reliable developers even before (or right after, at the very least) their next game releases.

I will probably get silenced and banned for warning people, but I don’t care anymore, since I was one of their oldest custimers who hoped to see them for anything but a scam they are.

[Khakipants]

I don’t really agree with your cold description of Fat Shark, but I feel like if a game tries to do a game like this - a rather deep horde game - then it’ll outdo Vermintide and take that audience. Deep Rock already took a good few players (though, they’re so different it’s not really a massive migration).

[OrsonMaxwell]

@Randaru

The best thing you can do is to take your business elsewhere, like most people I know did after the patch.

Can’t get a refund at this point though, so my monays are already in their pocket seemingly without any assurance that the game I’ve paid for would at least remain at the quality level at the time of purchase.