Before getting into the (probably lengthy) nitty-gritty, let’s get a few things out of the way. I am a Fatshark apologist, and both V1 and V2 are a couple of my favorite games of all time. I have about a thousand hours in both games and am a legend/cata player. When I say that I have some experience with the Fatshark patch history I mean it. I was there for V2’s strange and wonky launch, complete with completely underpowered or downright useless classes and Kruber one-shotting bosses with a single arrow. I was there for Winds of Magic and all the extremely “happy” players that came with it, and I was there for the implementation of the surprisingly not totally terrible cash shop. I have always loved the games (even looking at you WoM) despite some questionable patches and choices. I already have 400 hours in Darktide, and despite the things I am going to bring up, I genuinely love the game.
To start with, the gameplay is great. You guys honestly knocked it out of the park with the way guns feel and despite the repeating environments, they still look amazing (The sheer amount of 40k terrain pieces that look pulled off the table still make me smile). Transferring Vermintide melee into 40k works great, and despite a few problems with scabs being no-scoping giga chads (C’mon guys, didn’t you already solve this problem with spear boys in WoM?) and wonky dogs (They’re still flying to the moon btw) the gameplay is top notch. I have no doubt that as time goes on, you will fix what little issues there are in this sector (and probably create new ones and then have to fix those lol).
Now, obviously you guys don’t have control of every development decision that gets made, but that doesn’t mean the player base can sit back and take every bad or poorly implemented choice lying down. For me anyways, this mostly comes from a place of love, as I genuinely want to keep playing your games but we need to talk about the stuff that is clearly making people upset or downright angry.
The real issues with the game start showing when you’re not in a mission. As I’m sure you’ve seen with hundreds of other posts and reviews, the biggest red flags stem from the way you’ve so far implemented the real time rotating shop, the lack of crafting, the weekly quest rewards being extremely lackluster, and of course, the cosmetics (oh boy talking about the cash shop is gunna be a doozy). There’s a few smaller problems as well, like not being able to pick missions you want, or the obvious ones that are already on track to be added (questionably late) like solo missions.
Let’s start with the rotating weapon shop. This one is a real odd implementation. Whether or not it’s actually based on the goal of having players log in to check the shop on a regular basis or just a poorly implemented way to try and do away with loot boxes, I think we can all agree that it’s @#$%!@ annoying. In V2, we had to deal with loot boxes, but to some extent because of the way crafting works, we always had the power to end up with a perfect weapon or trinket with time. Power was slowly increased as you leveled and did higher difficulties, and every bonus or perk could be changed out and rerolled. Now this was never really perfect and I’m sure plenty of people can find stuff to nitpick about. For me the biggest problem was a lack of control over what type of loot you got, a good example being that when I started playing Salty, the main thing I wanted was a red pair of pistols. It ended up getting every single other red weapon before I got my pistols. On the surface, you would think a rotating shop would be a good way to solve this kind of problem, but the way it’s implemented, we have even less chance of getting what we want, as we can’t “fix” or upgrade a weapon like we can in V2. The new norm is hoping that you find that magic grey rarity weapon with big numbers, and even then, since the crafting is yet to be fully implemented we’re at the mercy of the random blessings that could make that beautiful 380+ gun a useless hunk of metal. As for the hourly rotations and “player engagement,” I think there’s been plenty of threads or topics about this and we can move on.
Let’s talk about Melky Melk’s shop. On the surface this one seems like a no brainer. Do weekly quests, get sweet weapons (that rotate daily). Nope. Let’s be honest here, Sire Melk’s stock sucks. I think out of the 400+ hours that I’ve spent in this game, I’ve seen 2 good weapons across all 4 classes (checking every characters shop daily). And once again, we’re at the mercy of the RNG gods (I’ve seen staves on my psyker maybe once a week, and one of those “good” weapons I was talking about? Well, it was a lasgun I would have killed for on my vet) Maybe if we had a way to reroll modifiers, this would be a good shop, as the blessing combinations are sometimes interesting. As we already know all of the (currently) to be implemented crafting features, this isn’t possible. Until the base modifier numbers go up in this shop, weekly quests are almost not even worth doing (other than to save up for later when the shop maybe works).
Time for the elephant in the room: cosmetics and the cash shop. What happened here? When you guys first announced you were adding a cash shop to V2, most of us were pretty worried. We all knew why it was happening (no judgements), but the player base was understandably worried. But you proved level headed and implemented a cash shop with decent prices for some unique helmets, and shillings, which were at least a great (albeit slow) way to make it so we could buy all kinds of interesting stuff without cash over time. I even bought a couple helmets just to support one of my favorite developers (the Sienna skull was quite nice)! And even without the cash shop, there were cosmetics that would occasionally drop from loot chests to keep things interesting. But what do we have in Darktide? The Penances (one set for each difficulty, minus damnation), some recolors (and not even for all the “cool” pieces), and a cash shop that looks like it came straight out of a battle-royale. Where did the shillings idea go? Where are all the cosmetics that are in the game files and promotional material? Why do I feel like I launched Apex or Fortnite when I open the cash-shop?
I feel like we’ve gone backwards here Fatshark. While I understand that you guys have investors to answer to (because that’s the only explanation I can reasonably give that explains what happened here), you folks have a duty to tell them (or yourselves) that this just plain sucks. I know for a fact that player numbers are down as I’m already having trouble with games that never go above 1-2 players in the higher difficulties on a regular basis. Once someone has earned all their cosmetic penances, what is there left to earn? At that point a character generally has a decent set of all orange gear (not perfect ofc), and since we don’t actually get reasonable rewards from doing missions (More plasteel please), what reason do I have left to play other than just to replay (which I do because it’s fun, clearly, but even I’m reaching a point where I’m getting tired of just looking at the shop and joining 2 player damnation games that are doomed to fail)?
TLDR; I love you Fatshark, but you have a rough year ahead of you. I have faith you guys will have an amazing game 1-2 years from now, but you need to take a good, long look at what a big portion of the community is yelling about right now (even though I’m sure there’s a layer of toxic filth to look past).
can I suggest you change it to something less hostile?