Quite the opposite actually, they are getting a collab with Halo ODST soon. Their last big blunder was when they teased a big announcement, made a special stream for it and it was just the announcement that the game would release on Xbox which to be fair was quite big but we didn’t need a full stream to announce that
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Honestly people hate on the Morningstar for a lot of very valid reasons, but we really don’t complain enough about what a massive vibes downgrade we got here.
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Yes.
The majority of content released since launch has been free, and the commitment to continue releasing free content is a core part of FS’s strategy (and appeal imo).
Arbites was paid and, by all metrics we can see, a big success. I hope that means more paid classes sooner rather than later, but it’s also quite separate from the free content schedule that we know is going to continue (hopefully for even longer than in VT2). If the schedule wasn’t working for FS, FS wouldn’t be publicly saying it is, and it would change (ie likely decrease/stop).
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I dunno man. We have melk weeklies, fomo shop rotations, hourly armory rotation, Havoc derank. We are just blessed they were even more half-assed in implementing retention features even than how they handle everything else.
Yeah they’ve failed at the psychological manipulation tactics, but I’m not convinced that’s from a lack of intent.
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“Wow we got alot of hype and players for the arbites release. Should we maintain the game and ensure arbites is in a good state for the game and have regular updates to keep this massive player increase engaged……nah Let’s stop EVERYTHING and go on school summer holidays frolicking in fields for ALL of summer like little kids” - Fatshark 2025
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Okay, so the FAKed themselves.
Noted.
I see. Ah yes, I saw the trailer with the ODST ending. It was beautiful. The Halo franchise was my childhood and ODST is particularly close to my heart so I cannot wait to see what they plan to do there!
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I’m specifically referencing pre “60 day” good will patch when the discord and subreddit were full of devs negging and stirring shite with players.
It happened more than once and there is still the “bringer of balance” culprit opening his mouth to this day. It boggles me how they allow it to still happen after the backlashes. Once should be enough for a CEO/COO to crackdown on direct dev comms if the open intent failed. And the new CEO has been guilty of it himself, so I guess I shouldn’t be that shocked.
I just don’t understand the point of PR/CMs when all you really let them do is post patch notes. Seems like wasted money.
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IE go play another game and come back when drop free content.
Two keywords : When and Free
At least its not IF and PAY
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On a statement like this, the pedant in me can’t help but wonder from a purely “size on disk” view if the free content updates outweights the “MTX slop” and now class dlc.
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And how much of that “content” was getting the game into a generally acceptable state outside of game play by cutting the horrible not “live service” retention mechanics and adding unfinished systems.
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Size on disk-wise, yes, the free greatly outweighs the paid stuff. Levels are/will be free and are probably the biggest hunk of stuff. And even the Arbites DLC is accompanied by tons of voice work that doesn’t cost non-Arbites players anything to hear.
And MBs aside, it’s clear that most of the work of most of the staff/contractors has gone into things that were released for free.
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They got the money and then f’d off for months again. It’s been like this for close to a decade, they never once cared. Maybe they don’t realize it’s a lot of wasted opportunities for more money.
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Oh, right. I have a few things to say on this topic, after bringing a few new players to game recently (they haven’t yet left, but FS definitely didn’t do much to help me keeping them interested). Here are the issues we immediately faced (in no particular order):
- It didn’t even feel like we played together, as a group of friends. We almost never were present at the same station, we couldn’t even train together, load into a shared SAFE environment where I could show them combat mechanics and let them practice it on some mobs. Psykarium is single-player only, neither you can even start and stop some fights in there without mods. We had to resort to streaming our screens and other gimmicks to do those basic things. Felt SUPER weird and discouraging. We didn’t feel yourself “a team” for sure
- The girl in our group was particularly saddened about poor selection of free customization options available. I fully support her on this topic
- After completing the campaign, they started voicing their doubts about whether this game is even worth further time invested into it - as it did seem like there is not much to do in here. Like they were asking things like “we’ll have to play the same missions again and again? For how long?” and “Are all things, mobs and bosses, will keep be spawned at the same places while we’ll be replaying those missions? That’s boring..” Or “why do we need to do all this, what are the goal(s), are there some global meaning to us constantly going on those missions, how does it all matter?“ Or “Will there be more stuff, more mobs, maps, missions soon?”
- And I couldn’t even reassure them that FS will do something about it any time soon - as they are silent on such things, and generally are pretty slow when it comes to adding things. We don’t have any semblance of roadmap, or statements from their leads - nothing. I did my best telling them that it gets better at higher difficulties, and playing different builds is fun, for some time at least - but they were not really convinced that much.
- We encountered serious technical issues all the way. Ofc the usual errors while reconnecting to hub after the mission, half the times you end up on the character selection screen with some error. But also issue when you try to start a mission for a squad and it doesn’t start, and it glitches to a point you need to re-create the squad or sometimes even restart the game. And occasional DCs during the missions too.
Overall, the state of the game appeared pretty unimpressive to them. Especially when I told them what they saw is actually way better situation, comparing to its state right after release, that shocked them, as the game right now feels as if it was just released (and preemptively released). So, you can imaging how all those things can affect its player retention wink wink Or my friends’ willingness to sink any more moneys into it, by buying DLCs or paid customizations.
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Honestly, never understood this obsession of some players with the “home instances” things. They released this as new feature in GW2 recently, sunking tons of resources into it. IMO, that’s one of the least sensible type of content you could add to a MP game designed as a session MMO (GW2, despite being MMORPG, leans towards session MMO experience heavily, so it applies to it as well). Session MMOs are not particularly known for social activities lol, it’s, by design, a game where you login to play for couple hours, then leave immediately. You don’t spend hours of your time ingame by sitting in a glorified home instance. Most of players will play with the new toy a bit, and forget it forever - thus it’s a dead weight, tons of developers’ hours wasted, which they could spend on developing actual meaningful content, like new maps, missions, weapons, foes, customizations, mechanics. Something you actually login to the game for, in the first place.
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Because not everything should be about raw power.
Having a place where you can put a shelf with your legendary weapons, banners, trophies and to other players being able to visit and see it, it’s just a huge vibe and world building feature. It’s the difference betwenn soul and soulless.
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Riiight.. What really will happen, based on my experience with my group of friends, is most of them will delete the game when they will get bored with it, if it’s not updated regularly - and then it will be not that easy to convince them to download 100GBs again to see a little bit of content update. Make them remember all those mechanics and re-aquire all the skills required for a proper teamplay. What they will answer instead is “let’s just play some other game we already have installed rn, f-k DT”
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While personally I really dislike how FS has handled and is continuing to handle Darktide, I am fine with them having time for vacations in the summer and Christmas seasons and I wish more people had those opportunities. I can’t begrudge them for taking that time off, because no matter how I much I loved or cared about my project if I got vacations like that you know I would take them. (Although maybe I would’ve fixed the Arbites keystone issue sooner. That one is pretty egregious and there should’ve been a hotfix for it already. Hopefully tomorrow.)
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I don’t mind the vacation thing, and fully support how EU handles the workers’ rights in general - but still I can’t agree that putting out a huge update right before leaving for a month is a great management decision. They could have their vacation sure - then release your big things in August, after the vacation, so you could address all issues immediately, and keep pushing new, properly ironed-out updates to keep people interested (that last event - just simply bad..) It’s, like, common sense?
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That’s a very recent quote about FS’s approach and a reflection on how the last nearly-3 years have gone. There’s always a player bump when updates roll out, and that seems to be working out just fine for FS. Like every other game, DT isn’t going to hook everyone, especially after playing for multiple hours and not feeling a desire to push into harder content.
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