I’m not being hyperbolic when I say this game launched in a disastrous state. The steam reviews have been rapidly sinking since launch as people begin to realize it, and by the time you guys drop another update it’s gonna be below fifty percent. It has no: crafting system (im not acknowledging the half-assed attempt at a single mechanic of it before leaving for xmas break), no subclasses, no fifth class, no ‘70+’ weapons (and NO, i am never going to acknowledge a skin as another weapon. That is silly and dishonest), a touted 7000+ lines of dialogue and narrative written by Dan Abnett completely out the window in favor of the most dry and confusing series of cutscenes I have ever seen in a game. Not to mention, the day-one premium currency microtransactions are predatory and we ALL know it, and adds serious insult to injury when the rest of the game is barely fleshed out at all. I’m not gonna mention much more since people are getting censored for it.
Fatshark, how did this happen? This is your third game in the series. You’re no stranger to tide games. Why is this one missing damn near everything? This game is violently hemorrhaging players, reviews, and the goodwill of your playerbase - by far your most important resource, despite how it very much seems like you guys have been prioritizing profiting off of whales. I’m apparently not at liberty to discuss leaks (i dont think you guys realize just HOW BAD this looks for your PR on top of all of this), but if you know you know.
You guys have pretty much one course of action to try and save this title: Have an honest, and i emphasize honest, and serious discussion with the community about why development went like this and why we don’t have the product we were promised. Withholding information is not morally superior to outright lying in any capacity, and if you are not honest with us you will see this game continue to rapidly decay in popularity and nobody is buying the next tide game after this. I bet your profit margins are great, but fan goodwill is dangerously poor and it’s getting to the point where it will be an irreparable loss to this company. Premium cosmetics won’t make you any more money once everyone stops playing.
Addendum: I don’t want this post to come off as me just bitching about it. This is really just the congealment of all the arguments I’ve seen made against this game. I made this post in the hopes that Fatshark employees read this instead of all the useless whinging on the reddit. What I said may have come off harsh, but nothing short of brutal honesty is productive. I want this game to be good, I want this game to succeed, and it genuinely hurts me - and the 40k ip as a whole - when it launched in such a poorly received state. It can’t be surprising to you guys that it got panned like this when you knowingly launched it in this state. This next month is literally going to make or break this game; you guys absolutely have to level with the community about what happened during development, why it happened, and where this game is going or you will find the rapidly-souring community will jump ship with haste. Like I mentioned prior, fan goodwill is your most important resource, and it is in DIRE straits right now.
The only thing I disagree with is peoples expectation of an immediate and complete “story.” They built a decent frame work of persistent people, places and things to continue adding story elements to as time goes on. No one should have expected an epic single player RPG style story from a coop horde shooter. What we have currently for story is basically a prologue from levels 1 to 30.
There’s plenty of room to question if live service style story drops are a good idea to keep people invested, but it’s a bit silly to claim they didn’t deliver on something that was never made to be rolled out immediately.
To be fair, not we like expected the most in-depth story. It’s more the fact that what is there is so woefully inadequate it is baffling as to how it was underdeveloped so much despite Dan Abnett’s participation and their advertisement of it.
This intro lacks something to really drive home that there’s more to come. “Welcome to the inquisition” is supposed to do that I think, but I feel like people were expecting something more direct, like a cliffhanger or reveal or something to point toward some sort of more specific event. Or maybe just more happening sooner - It takes 20-30 hrs to level a single character to 30 here. In videogame terms, that would often put you half way through a complete story.
Like, imagine what the current story looks like to someone who doesn’t know that the story is going to be revealed over time. It’d be pretty disappointing. I imagine it feels like a really weak ending to a really shallow story rather than the intro that it really is.
A common problem with live service style story development is developers sometimes spread out different info over different sources outside of the game like YouTube videos and blogged short stories, which in an advertising sense seems like a good way to get more views on your game, but if people miss those drops it seems like you’re dev team is doing less work on worldbuilding than it actually is. I think that’s going to be a problem for Darktide.
I can’t believe the entire justification for trying to save atoma prime (leman russ tank production) was hidden in the level design dev blog There’s no reason why they couldn’t have added a bloody paragraph of text in the game at some point. That’s not detailed background information that only the sweaty will be interested in, thats the whole baseline context for our efforts.
The characters touch on it SOMETIMES when you run the manufactory maps, but it’s not nearly as prominent as it probably should be. A lot of the “story” seems to be hidden in random chatter between characters that you may or may not hear depending on RNG while running maps.
The tank itself also something that rubbed me the wrong way. The ‘Atoma’ Pattern Leman Russ, the ENTIRE reason we are here, does not have so much as even a single sentence to describe it. Making a leman russ variant is literally as easy as changing the armament; which means they can get away with generic leman russ parts being seen sometimes as it’s all the same chassis - but we never see or are told what this tank even does or looks like.
I don’t want to get too into the weeds on the story kernels here, since that’s not what the thread is about, but one comment I’ve heard dropped in game is that Moebian Steel is a bfd and makes very resilient tanks.
It’s fine though, the map system means we play the same map 5 times in a row anyway, so it’s a pretty safe bet that we’ll hear these story elements pretty quickly. Assuming people are listening.
yeah, see I haven’t really heard any of these because it seems like the missions that have the more “story” in them are ones that barely show up at the difficulty my friends and I want to play. Everything people here are talking about are new to me, because I haven’t heard them in roughly 150 hours of playtime. Great lore building right there…
I’m gonna add my complaints to this: The female faces and hair options are atrocious.
There are no daemons. There are no xenos races, a set back coming from VT which had an elf and a dwarf, now it’s a humans only party. The rotating store means you can go for hours or even days without getting the weapon type you want. Character movement feels like I’m wading through mud or waist-high water.
Where’s the weapon customization? Does the game have attachments, such as scopes or underbarrel grenade launchers that you can add yourself?
So far what I’ve overheard:
There’s a sister hive city of Tertium on Atoma Prime that no one is supposed to talk about and its status is a mystery to the grunts.
Weapon factories (tanks in specific) are the main thing we’re fighting to retain control over. Atoma fabricated steel is strong enough to turn the tide of battles.
The Imperium is split by a large rift making warp travel (more) dangerous, so reinforcements are unlikely. Even outside communication is difficult right now.
The traitors control the railways and have heavily fortified choke points along their routes.
It’s an interesting problem, as the players wouldn’t get the full story base on their role in the Inquisition, but is it good to let players have to put pieces together via infrequent rumor chatter in game?
Lmao see the only one I heard about is the sister hive city. Which was a 5 second conversation cut short…which I only heard once. If I wasn’t paying attention for even a moment I would have missed that completely.
The other two I haven’t heard about at all. (Or, maybe I missed. But I try to pay attention)
Again, 150 hours of playtime. It’s uh, really not good if I don’t have a grasp of what the story is if your mechanism for delivering it, has a very real chance that it just won’t deliver it to the playerbase.
I LOVE the idea that we can get bits of lore through these bits of dialogue - it feels interesting and dynamic. I don’t love that there’s…just a chance that it won’t happen. At all.
i’m 90% certain the story was cut at some point in development and thats why we ended up with this placeholder system. similiar to classes, maps, weapons and endgame.
I would not be fixed about the Story so much. Since this was planed as life service. There will sure be an ongoing Story, step by step. Sadly it will for sure be going on by telling it by this small bits of cut scenes. But at least it is a story after all, compared to Space Hulk Deathwing.
But they HAVE to bring the promised crafting and Weapon stuff.
I’m an Warhammer fan. Warhammer Fantasy got killed by shutting down the official Warhammer Online MMORPG and rewriting the lore frame to age of Sigmar.
So all that is left is 40K. And till now most of the 40K game adaptations went down quick due to the lack of love to the franchise from the Publishers. They buy the licence from GW for tons of money, and then they always bring out half baked stuff that never looks like what they advertise.
Space Marine and Mechanicus where good. Inquisitor was good. Until you reach the endless item grind part they call endgame.
And Fatshark better hurry up to pump out content. And i mean real content and not store stuff.
Space Marine 2 and Bolgun will be released in 2023! And Space Marine 2 beside of its Story will have Multiplayer again.
Yeah, VT had much more narrative even, location specific banter, mission commentary from Olesya and an actual story with a finale, that evolved over chapters. From entering the town for the first time to Killing off Rasknitt, as opposed to: I scanned the same place with an Auspex 40 times, killed some rando shotgunner on steroids another 30 times, destroyed a bunch of mechanical sludge eyes and their tentacle pimples and pulled some switches 300 times and waited for a total of one million, four hundred twenty thousand, six hundred sixty six times while still having some basic level crap weapons and getting only to get an Inquisitorial rosette and being taught a new pose to show off to literally no one for up to 60 seconds on mission screen. Oh, and some random nobody who was the traitor died and it wasn’t me. Swell. That’s some big brain, heavy, grimdark writing genius right there!
Next update will make or break this game. If they screw it up then they’ll have to fight with a declining player base and worsening reviews for the next two years, which is the time it’ll take to make this game playable in its intended state.
I don’t know if they’ll do it again after VT2 or just throttle support and jump on the next bandwagon.