Fatshark started "Unannounced Project"

[CommanderJ]

@MunKy

Every time they release info people jump on them and pull apart their words to find some hidden meaning. Either that or wild assumptions and accusations get flung around and the forums get a bit heated.

I would argue there are multiple and potentially justified reasons for that. Firstly, if you release a product with problems and shortfalls, missing features, things that look like broken promises and so on, there will be a significant amount of heat. Regardless of what the product is, or the name of the studio. Once that has happened, you have a choice. Be silent, or be communicative.

If you communicate, you run the risk of saying ‘something wrong’ and making things worse. But you also have a pretty good chance of getting some degree of understanding and patience. Some people will be angry no matter what, some people will be happy no matter what, but you can absolutely move the needle by good, honest and informative communication. This includes admitting when things go wrong, as well as talking, with caveats, about hopes for future features.

If you don’t communicate, that is also a form of communication. People will take it to believe feedback is ignored, customers are ignored, and other right or wrong speculations. Things will simmer and potentially boil over.
IF you stay quiet but have prompt and quick patches that move the game in the ‘right’ direction, you can probably afford to stay quiet. If you are unable to do meaningful patches more often than 4 months apart, the silence becomes a problem. As has been demonstrated here and other places, potentially a really really big problem.

Another problem of staying quiet is that those few times you do communicate, people will indeed jump all over whatever you say, dissecting it, twisting it, seeing if it fits those assumptions they made during the quiet period.

In essence, in my opinion, FatShark themselves have created the situation where they are now screwed if they don’t communicate, and raked over the coals the few times they do communicate.

It is laughably easy to fix, but it requires the correct mindset from at least one person in management.

The fix is simply to communicate. Even if that would mean admitting to some terrible things, such as things being further out than anyone would want, or that plans have changed, or that they are still even making plans for XYZ. It’s amazing the amount of lenience and goodwill you can get, even for bad things, if you simply talk about them.

Edit: As an example, how crazy is it that FS is totally happy to let people (who knows how many) think the game is simply abandoned or on life-support, and it took an ex-employee to tell us there is still actually a good-sized team on the game?It’s insane.

[Bigpfeiffer]

lol I love how the ex employee chimes in with basically “your speculation is wrong”.

Seemed fairly obvious, but glad it came from as close to the horses mouth as you can get

[MunKy]

Basically, damned if you do, damned if you dont.

Im not sure its so easy to fix by just communicating. It looks that way from the outside and its something I personally want so that clouds my thoughts on the matter but Iv seen some bad communication do more damage than no communication.

Im hesitant to assume the correct course of action.

[CommanderJ]

It is possible to make things worse by communicating, yes. Like I said, it takes at least one person in management with the right mindset.

Arrowhead had some devs which communicated in… uh… questionable ways, but it was dealt with, and 90% of the communication from the devs is great. And they communicate all the damn time, multiple times a week.

[Fingeris]

Well, only those who do nothing make no mistakes.

But I bet you got used to being “unmistakable”

[Bigpfeiffer]

All good! Everyone is human. At some point in our lives, I think we all learn the valuable lesson of “things presented with no evidence can be dismissed with no evidence”, such as speculation this vague

[Fingeris]

The amount of insights about Fatshark we recovered on this topic definitely gave us more than that.

[Bigpfeiffer]

I agree. I’m only talking about the initial accusation. It seems like Darktide isn’t falling apart

[Ol_Jakal]

honestly, we can tell from the outside why their updates take so long and it’s not leadership. it’s their MO to finish on project before seriously starting another. most online games have a big pile of updates planned to work on and divide their attention to all of them in tune to their release date. fatshark essentially starts a project, focuses on that project, and simply makes a note of future ideas to consider after.

this is both good and bad, but with the community angry about most things they updated for personal reasons and several things in need of post-release overhauls anyways it LOOKS a lot worse than it usually is.

[Heretical_Cactus]

Jackal being Jackal I guess @Ragnarok101 I’m starting to understand what you say now

[Molonious]

@Ol_Jakal

honestly, we can tell from the outside why their updates take so long and it’s not leadership. it’s their MO to finish on project before seriously starting another.

Darktide launched in a thoroughly half-baked and unfinished state by pretty all accounts, including Fatshark’s. Arguably, Darktide is still in such a state in many respects.

Meanwhile, FS is starting a new project already while still developing for VT2.

I don’t think FS has ever had an MO to finish one project before moving on to another. That’s far more the MO of their competition, Arrowhead, that spent 7 years fully developing their latest release since their last product, and is banging out updates on the weekly and has introduced more weapons and enemies in 3 months since release than Darktide has in 18 months.

[Ol_Jakal]

@Molonious

@Ol_Jakal

honestly, we can tell from the outside why their updates take so long and it’s not leadership. it’s their MO to finish on project before seriously starting another.

Darktide launched in a thoroughly half-baked and unfinished state by pretty all accounts, including Fatshark’s. Arguably, Darktide is still in such a state in many respects.

honestly i’d say darktide is in a pretty good state (if a little over-rewarding on item drops which devalues them as a whole) and fatshark has probably mostly accomplished their aims for release myself. it’s just not what a lot of people that bought the game for the 40k license were expecting. not their fault.

[nemy123]

The game had no crafting system, was full of game breaking bugs, unstable as hell, no option to buy a specific weapon and you consider that an accomplished release?
Not to mention a complete lack of story and literally 0 QoL features (most of which are still missing)

The amount of brain rot is insane.

[MunKy]

@Molonious

Darktide launched in a thoroughly half-baked and unfinished state by pretty all accounts, including Fatshark’s.

As a beta tester in V2, the game was worse on release than in the beta for a good 6 months. Idk why that was. Spawns were a mess, sounds were a mess, enemy attacks were frequently not telegraphed (think 180 overheads but just on everything!)

disclaimer: Im sure there were people that didnt see many problems, there always are. e.g. I dont have any issues with DT right now, no missing sound queues, not much lag, not crashed in ages etc.

I agree that DT was in a bit of a mess on release, I just disagree that it was any different to V2. I didnt play V1 or any previous titles in their early stages so I cant comment on those.

[Molonious]

@Ol_Jakal

honestly i’d say darktide is in a pretty good state (if a little over-rewarding on item drops which devalues them as a whole) and fatshark has probably mostly accomplished their aims for release myself

It’s in a better state now than at launch, no question, but still in very much a WIP state 18 months later that is unable to consistently retain much of its playerbase, and with significant promised features either still unfinished or never delivered as Fatshark spools up new projects.

@Ol_Jakal

it’s just not what a lot of people that bought the game for the 40k license were expecting. not their fault.

That is absolutely Fatshark’s fault in such a case. If a company’s customers don’t understand what the company’s product is, or the company didn’t craft their product to meet the market’s expectations, that’s a literal Marketing 101 failure, particularly when the company is on their 3rd title in the series and with that general IP over the course of a decade.

@MunKy

I agree that DT was in a bit of a mess on release, I just disagree that it was any different to V2. I didnt play V1 or any previous titles in their early stages so I cant comment on those.

I didn’t get to play VT2 right at release, but yeah it appears they both had very janky releases and development timelines.

[StrawberryMerp]

@CommanderJ

significant team still working on the game.

The dev team in question

[MunKy]

Hey its my family members!

[Kambrin]

Mordhau just got a new horde mode and it’s generally been more actively updated than Darktide despite being far smaller devs and not actually being advertised as a live service. DRG also comes to mind. I’m not saying Fatshark is unique but it’s not every game dev that’s like this. Many have it figured out and can actually make content and updates and do bugfixes without reverting whole versions just fine.
Most devs I know also don’t abandon development of their game for 8 months so they can put out a console port nobody actually truly cares about. This is probably the biggest reason Fatshark has little goodwill with the community at any point. It’s a very greedy corporate backroom contract move that makes the game suffer hard, but they consistently do it with each release.

[MunKy]

Some of these games put the whole industry to shame really. DRG is a shining beacon in a sea of bureaucracy, greed and business people.

@Kambrin

so they can put out a console port nobody actually truly cares about.

I would like the game to come out on PS5

[Kambrin]

My point wasn’t really that NOBODY actually wants it, I was just speaking loosely. My meaning was that the console port would not self justify its costs and development time if it wasn’t for the microsoft deal. Basically microsoft pays devs hefty amounts of money for them to port their games to xbox, have crossplay, and go on gamespass. Those contracts alone, depending on size of the studio and their title, usually overshadows sales heavily.
Sony has no such concept going on, which is actually precisely why they don’t port the game to PS5. It wouldn’t sell enough to justify it and there’s no analogous contract.