Fatshark has a bad habit of just… refusing to commit.
They’ll clearly drop something they promised, but they will never say it’s dropped. Like solo mode.
Honestly in a fair world that would count as false advertising, because they’re discussing something that they seemed to have every intention of adding to the game, only to drop it with zero explanation, all the while never confirming it’s been dropped as a feature.
Seriously. Whoever is running the place could learn that lying by omission also builds resentment.
Yeah. They never say anything at all. Nothing about plans changing, gears being shifted. Focus changing. Nothing about entire advertised features being dropped. Nothing at all.
They prefer to lie by omission, hoping that people will stick around for features that was cancelled 2 years ago.
There is no excuse for any of it. I certainly don’t buy the whole “different studios have found different ways of communicating that works for them”.
That’s horse when you consider what FatShark is actually doing - or not doing.
it’ll get back up in like two days, which is when they said they were giving us news. stop trying to frame things like they don’t tell us anything when you’re just impatient.
P!ss off mate. Aqshy was there, I was there, it was pretty brutal. People refused to drop it for months to honestly I think over a year. There was a cavalcade of negativity and doom saying about it. It was brought up as a haha gotem like years after it happened.
I agree they need to get over it and improve communication, but they absolutely have been burnt by the community responding to things extremely poorly, to the point I’m not convinced myself what they’re doing isn’t the best tactic. Just drop things when they’re ready with minimal hype mongering. Hype is an insidious poison anyway
Sure, the second best time for them to start digging themselves out of their own grave is now.
On the other hand, words are meaningless without timely action as well. A lesson Fatshark has seemingly well learned, since they are incredibly gun shy of mentioning things that aren’t yet 100% decided on. And given that Fatshark is seemingly so dysfunctional that it cannot into timely anything, that might actually be reasonable.
That was already their bad pattern then though. Instead of coming out and giving an update on the roadmap and/or wether it’s still being worked on they just said nothing. The only time I have seen anyone at Fatshark even acknowledge it later on was Hedge with his “we didnt lie, it’s just no longer true”. Prime example of dogturd comms. It’s a reasonable notion (of course things can change thats what everyone wanted to know about) expressed in the most snide arrogant manner ever (classic hedge phrasing + way too late after ignoring it for a long time).
If they had just responded normally like you would expect (“unfortunately we ran into issues with implementing this and we’re not sure if and when it’ll happen but we’ll keep you posted”) the resentment would NOT have built up like this. Classic case of extremely incompetent comms.
Like that was already Fatshark reaping what they sowed. I really don’t like the sentiment that Fatsharks community being toxic isn’t just cause and effect. People didn’t just collectively wake up pissed and decided “now we’ll be bad to Fatshark CMs”
Also, the crazy thing is they’re still doing that exact thing. Bot overhaul and solo play was promised in november 2022 to be up next. They just silently dropped it. All questions regarding it are completely ignored. I guarantee if someone can at any point squeeze info out of them regarding this, it’ll be a hedge 2.0 style comment that goes basically “stfu about solo play already idiots”, when all it would’ve taken for them to put that particular thing to rest was to go “sorry guys, it’s on hold for now but if it comes back we’ll let you know” and maybe giving out a little portrait frame because it’s a live service game and thats why they have 20000 of them in game files.
It’s just so needlessly incompetent it’s upsetting
As someone who wasn’t there, people still bring it up on the forums today so even I can tell it must’ve created one hell of a sh*tstorm.
Although I do think the best way to learn how to ride a horse is to get back on. If it changes from something special and unique to something a bit more regular I think it would have some less visceral reception. There will always be people being negative, if enough people see the post. But hopefully less over time.
And I don’t even mean just talking about upcoming stuff. There is only so much you can say or should say. But again just some interesting things, talking about stuff like aesthetics, sounds design, weapon design, some thoughts on balance, what builds they some FS people might enjoy running etc. Is far from the standard but it would certainly be nice.
Either that or give me small balance changes every 1-2 months they can decide what’s easier lol.
Holy crap! I remember! That blast from the past was so empowering I had to log in just to comment on this. I remember that roadmap. Oh man. That brings back memories of comedy from steam users as well as anons constantly crap posting about it. Couldn’t go two feet without the roadmap being mentioned back then.
Still makes me laugh every time I see that roadmap. Memes were had from that thing.
Just to give some of you hope, here’s some things that “might” come to the game
2 New Bosses
New Enemies
New Weapon and Variations
New Faction?
New Game Mode and Maps (Chaos Wastes anyone?)
New Crafting System (kek)
Weapon Customization Feature (w free and paid cosmetics)
Just fyi FS blabs a lot of upcoming lore/content via their new ingame dialogue.
If you want to get a “glimpse” into the future, get into psycharium, just stand there and listen to Sefoni.
As for their complete lack of communication: First time?
Oh I’m 90% sure it IS the best tactic, the other 10% is me as a customer crying rabble rabble rabble.
If you’ve ever had to deal with the public in SW development, or even an “internal company public”, or even for karkin’ freeware, it’s hel. In hindsight I should have doubled time estimates or provided none at all and maintained radio silence till near release time. Did I mention some was for FREEWARE?
Having see the community in VT2 and DT, with DT being much, much worse, I can’t say I begrudge them their modus operandi.
In fairness, when you make promises about a product’s features and future and/or release a clearly unfinished product, and then both fail to deliver on some of those features and fail to actively update and notify users that some features are never going to materialize, customers being upset is typically justified. Yeah some of them can be painfully overboard, but in that situation, some flak is absolutely deserved.
The solution to that isn’t to just not say anything ever. There’s absolutely times to not mention stuff, to keep radio silence, and not to get people’s hopes up. At the same time, you need to maintain some momentum, a playerbase that’s collapsed and is only briefly resuscitated every 6-12 months isn’t healthy.
Aw man that roadmap. I was there man. People kept bringing up those items on every announcement on steam because, and I kid you not, Fatshark ghosted us on those planned features. Fatshark didn’t say anything at all. That’s where the jokes started because of them going silent on it for such a long time to the point that we all eventually memed on it.
It’s the exact same thing that’s happening right now with Darktide where Fatshark promised Solo mode and hasn’t said anything about it for 2 YEARS!!
It’s pretty easy to walk something back if a feature is no longer going to be even considered. Will it make people happy? No, but closing an issue and moving forward is fairly important.
Open wounds tend to fester. It’s a really dumb way to die, letting people scratch at what once was a pinprick but has now become gangrenous when you could have dealt with the brief pain of antiseptic and a bandage.
If you don’t address the problem, it remains something that will continue to be brought up until the nail is in the coffin.
Exactly. If something isn’t going to work out then communicate that to the community. The reason why that roadmap from Vermintide 2 was such a joke back in the day was because of how Fatshark didn’t communicate crap about things not working out - which is funny because some of those items were on the official website of planned features for Vermintide 2.
when you consider what FatShark is actually doing - or not doing.
