My old editing professor told me about civil wars inside projects where people would fight it out for creative control and absolutely ruin it when they won, while confiding in him they were fighting to save it from the other guy. One guy had him re-cutting a sequence to something he personally thought was awful while saying over and over “I’m saving this project!”
Word is head writer on Mass Effect 3 locked everyone else out of the building and wrote the RGB ending by himself.
A doofus with power and convinced if he didn’t impose his ideas on everyone else is an extremely dangerous thing.
The game was released in an early, unready, and unfinished state, acknowledged even by Fatshark. They charged full price while doing so.
We’re going on almost two years post-release, still dealing with incomplete and unready features, while the dev team prioritizes a small amount of trivial content (double barrel shotguns, variant green bombers, penances) over stuff like crafting that they proclaim should be a core part of player progression.
Fatshark has had time to cook Darktide, and has chosen not to utilize it wisely. They dumped this game out early to cash in on preorder dollars, and have been stringing it along with minimal dev effort to continue milking cosmetic sales.
Looking at the big stats that matter, next to competitor 4 person coop shooter titles like Deep Rock Galactic, Helldivers 2, Pay Day 2, and Left 4 Dead 2, Darktide falls behind each of these titles in terms of average reviews scores (both professional and user, on a variety of different places such as Steam and Metacritic) and has substantially smaller online playerbases. For every Reject dropping on Atoma, there’s 10 Miners drilling into Hoxxes and 10-15 Helldivers screaming down from orbit.
There is any reason why not the sequel was mentioned ? ^.^
Also i have a hunch whatever time need fatshart to puss out something it need to be done for the xbro’s as well … So Basicly DT team + chiniese slopshop workers + Xbros port code monkeys and you have the largest dev team in hous but effective only 1/3 who’s making “actual” content in an abismal dogshit pace…
I mean, as with PD3, these are dead titles, most of which I’ve never even heard of, not what you usually want to be comparing against as measures of success, nor are they competitors current players are likely to jump to. The only reason to note them is to try and show thay DT isn’t entirely dead yet, despite being closer to these dead titles than its top end competition.
It’s the perfect 40k game in that it’s so all over the place in terms of quality. It has awesome visual environments, character and weapon design but some of the WORST audio design I’ve heard, both in terms of the weapons also the environment. Especially the environment. You’ll be hard pressed to find any kind of ambient noise in that game beyond your own thudding footsteps. Melee combat is wack as hell too and the player is way too squishy and the friendly AI is exceedingly stupid and useless.
In other words, it’s perfectly following the 40k video game formula.
Talking of online reviews. Even saw a review on IMDB. Citing how fs had yet again made love to the pooch. It really is a crime how they seem content and hellbent on mediocrity. When they literally have a golden ticket, but would sooner shred it.
It’s possible to do worse than Darktide, but probably not what we want to measure against.
