I originally made this post in a thread about Throne of Skulls in response to thoughts and statements about Fatshark communication, and have been encouraged by several other posters to make it its own thread, so I’ve cleaned it up a bit and updated it here.
Darktide launched in an underbaked and unfinished state. I don’t think that’s terribly debatable, there’s a reason Mr. Wahlund made the public apology he did, and reviews across every available platform reflect this to this day remain stubbornly mixed. Looking at both VT2 and other competitor 4 person coop shooter games games like Helldivers 2, Deep Rock Galactic, Left 4 Dead 2, and Pay Day 2, Darktide’s reviews are overall much more negative across multiple different review systems (Steam/Metacritic/etc). In terms of average online players over its lifespan, Darktide falls behind these competitor titles, and only barely manages to outdo VT2. This has reflected in some spicy responses to comms and lots of web-drama.
There’s been sentiments of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” from Fatshark and CM’s (and former CM’s) about comms, but while we’ve seen apologies and mea culpas about communication, we still go months without updates or new content or get patches that drop with no news and announcements. That’s an intentionality and consistency issue.
There have been plans for various things like solo modes and other things, that simply disappeared, and instead of proactively coming out and saying “hey, we know we promised X, but stuff has changed and we also want to deliver Y and Z, but can’t do all three so will have to put X aside”, the community only finds out after having to metaphorically pull teeth and go many months without hearing anything, often with little or nothing to show in terms of other cool features that were done instead. We have a repeated demonstrated pattern of telling people things to hype them up pre-launch, dropping plans, not saying anything, getting blowback when people find out, and then basically going comms-dark on future plans. That’s not a “damned if you do damned if you don’t” thing, that’s a straight up “overpromised and underdelivered” problem.
We’ve heard Fatshark then talk multiple times about wanting to reduce randomization and repetition in itemization and crafting and making it a “core pillar of progression”… in a system the studio consciously and heavily designed to generate randomization and repetition to slow progression, as a literal slot machine. The itemization and crafting are, to be blunt (or Brunt I suppose), engineered around the worst aspects of exploitative gambling and RNG mechanics at a deep fundamental level, it’s RNG allllllllll the way down from acquisition and availability to stats and perks and blessings and individual levels of each. All this coupled with a seemingly determined intent to make gear/stats/blessings/etc be as vague and difficult to figure out as possible (e.g. how does one in-game find out what “Power” or “Rending” does, what X stacks of Bleed actually means in terms of damage output, or how +X% Weak Spot Damage actually functions?)
These were intentional design choices that required large amounts of development work to support and implement. It’s been hated since day 1, and gets called out right in Wahlund’s apology.
And yet…here we are, 18 months post-launch, still talking about probably the single most consistent issue the game has had since launch, still waiting with vague details armed with nothing more than almost word-for-word copy-pasta of what Fatshark has said to players before, about wanting to change a system clearly intentionally designed to do what Fatshark says they don’t want it to do. Needless to say, despite some high hopes about changes, instead of hype and excitement we’re mostly seeing cynicism.
From what we can see at this point, this game’s going to enter Q3 of 2024 with nothing more than a variant Bomber enemy, a single new mission, a short event that gives a pittance of crafting mats (for a crafting system everyone is eagerly looking forward to seeing go), some new Pennances, and Bolt Pistols. Oh, and I guess…physical board and card games. Current player sentiment, at least on these boards, does not seem hopeful about Itemization/Crafting (whatever) making it into the 6-25 patch.
Meanwhile a studio within walking distance is putting out that much content every couple weeks for their 4 person coop shooter made on the same base game engine. While I get that things aren’t 1:1 there between studios and games, that’s the competition Darktide faces in the market, and that competition is currently eating Darktide’s lunch in terms of sales and active players.
I get in the Comms role, things can be stressful and people aren’t seeing all sides. However, from an end-user view, this far after launch and with the benefit of hindsight, at some point we have to acknowledge: There are problems with both credibility and consistency, the impression given is that this game was dumped on the market early to cash in on preorders, and is strung along on life support to milk cosmetic sales. Hype generation for updates is minimal, at best we see small bumps of players logging in after an update or announcement followed by a decline back to VT2 numbers, never to match any of the major competing 4 person coop shooter titles out there. The studios choice of development priorities appear to be almost blind, and communicating these things to the playerbase seems to always be stumbling and error-prone.
I’m hopeful things will change, the core gameplay of Darktide is great, but gets dragged down by so many other issues. It’s going to take a long, consistent, and far more open and forward-looking communications paradigm to change that perception, and not BSing players about designing systems to be diametrically opposed to what you’re telling players you want those systems to do. Telling people what’s being worked on, giving people stuff to look forward to and be excited about, maybe a chance to get it on a test server, and being open when plans change and the reasons why will work a lot better (and leave a lot less space for cynicism and misunderstanding) than the “don’t tell anyone anything until we’re ready to shove something out the door” or “we can only tell people the vaguest of vague hints at what’s being worked on, and only with triple sign-off from unknown levels of management”.
I heard you can customize ships in No Man’s Sky now? Seems interesting…