In defence of Fatshark - the realities of games and software development

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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I never insinuated being upset was inherently toxic. It isn’t. But being upset doesn’t excuse the people who are toxic. (not directed at you) There’s a big difference between people complaining about the company, and making it personal with the employees of the company.

The 2 hour/14 day window is pretty flexible if you ask politely. However if someone plays the game for 40 hours and get some characters up to level 30, and don’t like the end game, I don’t know what to tell them. If someone played any other game for 40+ hours and didn’t like the last level, sorry they don’t get a refund.

Yup, game should have been EA. Still doesn’t excuse the people who are being toxic. If all the toxic people left, I would bet we’d have much better communication with the devs.

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It’s amazing how much easier it is to get things done when you actually give a damn.

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well, a lot of the problems the community has arnt exactly centered around features that need a lot of dev time - progression, crafting, weapon and class balance and identity.

those are things a good game designer can probably do in a month, maybe 2. these features are so SEVERELY lacking that DT looks like the first game of a new studio never having any experience with these types of games. that’s whats so shocking and deserving of critique.

if there was a satisfying meta game i could forgive the missing story, even the cash shop and lack of customisability of classes and weapons. but the game has no meat and bones on TOP of everything else.

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44

Did they? NMS is the pinnacle of examples that all you need to do is patch after launch and many will forgive.

I have not forgiven. I will never play that game nor CP2077 no matter how good they get.

Some say I’m losing out, but I have plenty of games in my backlog where publishers bothered to ship complete titles.

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I think you’re vastly underestimating how deeply interdependent all of these things are. They’re all built around the much derided “design intent”, also known as “the objectives that must be met for the game to be considered successful in the eyes of the company”.

Changes to any one of those systems, or any of a range of others, has the potential to impact the game’s ability to meet its design intent. If the game can’t meet its objectives we’ve got real problems.

Whatever changes they make need to work with all other game systems, which might mean changing those systems too, in a way that meets those objectives AND they need to do it in a way that’s not going to further alienate people.

That’s why we keep getting the “update coming soon” messages. It’d be silly to say anything that could be perceived as a commitment until they feel sure of their next steps.

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46

NMS got ROASTED for false advertising…
They did fix the game… years later, after many lessons in communication learnt.
But NMS was their first rodeo.
DT isn’t Fatshark’s first ride.

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Ok, I went through your wall of text. Let me just get to the main point of why I will NOT defend Fatshark in any way shape or form.

1: They promise things they never deliver, this has happened in all their games, and it’s been a constant complaint for Fatshark games for years, and they keep doing it, I have no idea if it’s their marketing team who just post stuff that they’ve heard or if it’s the leaderships dreams that are being marketed and then never given to players. Again, just 2 examples, the V1 launcher STILL says “mod support coming soon”, it will never come, V2 was announced to have dedicated servers, it was one of their main selling points and it will never get it.

2: It’s been reported over and over again that the leadership in the company is really bad, former employees who’ve complained about the lack of leadership, lack of management, and much more.

3: You releasing an unfinished game is NEVER ok, I don’t care who forced you to do it, I don’t care why you try to convince players that it’s ok, IT ISN’T!

4: Is tencent to blame? Well, I’m not gonna defend them, they are a disgusting company who only care about making as much money as possible, but here’s the thing. Before Tencent we got Winds of Magic, one of the worst, if not, the worst DLC I’ve ever seen in a game, they KILLED the game with that fing DLC, it makes everything about V2 worse, apart from Cataclysm it’s just trash. What did we get after Tencent? An in-game shop, ok, sure that sucks, Chaos Wastes a free game mode that the game needed, hmm… interesting. I’m not saying that they didn’t work on Chaos Wastes before Tencent, but looking back at it, the game got more content, GOOD content after Tencent than before. Does that mean Tencent good? F*CK NO! But they are not to blame for Fatshark’s worthless development cycles. They need to get rid of their entire upper level in the company, new management, new project management and just focus on actually releasing a working, fully developed game, and if they want to release DLCs afterward that’s fine, but with Darktide we got 60% of the game in a completely broken state, no defense in the world will solve that or make that OK.

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48

Yes, I’m so f*cking annoyed with people bringing up NMS, Hello Games have made an incredible job of actually fulfilling their promises and they delivered more than that, for free! They went back to the drawing board and actually started working on their problems, they pulled Sean back because he was bad at taking care of interviews and today NMS is actually an amazing game with a lot of content. Fatshark still hasn’t fulfilled their promises for V1 or V2, they are abandoned ware at this point.

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Did they lie and falsely advertise? yes
Did they deliver an unfinished product? yes
[Comparisons with DT stop here]
Did they do an amazing job supporting the game? yes
Have they been player friendly in their designs? yes

Not saying fatshark won’t follow on those last two, but I don’t have the highest of hopes
In my eyes, HelloGames not having asked for a cent, is what redeems the company.
Hell, like Motion Twin, I wouldn’t even bat an eye before opening my wallet if they came up with a paid DLC.

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On the topic of releasing an unfinished product, how would any other profession go with it:
-As a car manufacturer, you release a car prone to crashes
-As a baker, you deliver an uncooked baguette
-As a plane pilot, you keep radio silent with ATC before the landing
-List goes on

People would be angry and rightfully so.

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This is far too lengthy to respond properly.

Overall i can just say that in most company’s there is a strict hierarchy with a uninformed psychopath at the top. Regarding on the degree of madness there will be bad decisions made and employees get terrorizes to “Just do as i said!”. Or the other way around that the person making the decisions so high up in the hierarchy that no realistic information gets passed and decisions are made on gut feel, greed or outright misinformation and no one can or will speak out against it (This is referred to as “flat” hierarchies and “tall” ones). And i think, based on how it went and how so many things need to be “signed-off”**, its not a far fetched guess that some lunatic has made the decisions that all lead us here. And no CM, dedicated Developer or Designer is to blame for the mess they are in.

*Changes need to signed-off
*Updates cant be posted because not signed-off

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52

I dunno, Tesla seems to be doing well enough.

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53

Not really… Company lost 75% of it’s value and Teslas have a lot banking on their reputation…
They’ve just had to cut the prices in China to sell their cars, not the move of a company in high demand.

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That’s true. Before the whole twitter fiasco they were doing well…

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It was already a down trend

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Musk is an amazing marketing agent… but also a bit of a con artist when it comes to selling tech that just doesn’t exist yet.

When you sell people over a lie/hopium, it’s a matter of time before they catch up or be desillusionned.
No doubt Teslas are among the best electric cars on the market, but they suffer from a lot of cost problems.

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tl;dr: Buyer’s remorse.

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Tesla value is mostly about hype. However, unlike various cryptocoins, it has a good chance to survive and remain a relevant factor which is a lot less hype than it used to be.

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And it’s been stated over and over again that without the tax subsidies they’ve received, the company would have gone bankrupt already.

But the argument is solid, companies that released/built products with the lack of quality that game companies do would have died and been prosecuted, just look at Theranos, they lived on the hype, didn’t make a working product and now people are going to jail. Sure I don’t think anyone in the gaming industry (apart from Bobby Kothik) deserves jail time, but they deserve a massive slap in the face for being this f*cking greedy and not able to deliver what they promised, and if they are unable, be transparent about it. If Fatshark said the game will be released with 15 maps and we only got 10 and their response was you will get the rest for free over the coming months that would be alright, but this is the third time they do this ish and people try to defend them for no reason.

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The OP makes good points that are worth bearing in mind. However, it lacks context in light of Fatshark’s past track record.

Fact of the matter is that Fatshark has been operating in the mode of releasing games in a shoddy state for nearly their entire history, going back to even BEFORE Vermintide 1. You couple this mode of operating with a lot of tone deafness about (a) how FS views their own games; and (b) how FS understands their own community. This partly explains the situation.

Here’s an exaple:

When VT2 released one of the devs (or CMs, I can’t recall) said that they were “surprised” that people wanted to pay VT2 for more than 100 hours. Seriously? Do they have no comprehension of what their audience values in games like this this? Had they not looked into why Left 4 Dead 2 is still played by more people? Or Payday 2, or plenty of other games besides?

So when it comes to Darktide, I think somewhere higher up (product lead, senior designers, etc.), not having a good understanding of the motivation for why people want to pay games like Verminitde or Darktide made the grossly erroneous assumption that “lots of RNG will keep people hooked, just like it does in mobile games!” And hey, we can match that to some dark pattern techniques and the MTX shop to make money at the same time. Everyone will be happy!

But their primary audience is not a casual mobile game audience. It’s serious PC gamers paying a modest upfront cost for the game (i.e. it’s not Free to Play). And with the 40k IP in tow it’s also Warhammer 40k fans we’re talking about - which are anything but casual (I’m one, I know.).

For anyone that has been paying attention to the people that like Fatshark’s games and cooperative FPS games, the backlash against this game’s DESIGN, even if all the bugs were fixed and it was feature complete on release, would’ve STILL made people irate. This backlash was entirely predicted by players. People would STILL be mad (and are) about the game’s fundamental design, especially with respect to progression.

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Aside - but I ran a survey mirroring FS’s official survey and asking some additional questions in Part 2. The additional questions show that the #1 motivation (of those listed) for why people play games like this was “The ability to fluidly experiment with different character “builds”, represented by different combinations of classes, skills, and weaponry, which leads to different play styles.” People put in 100s or 1000s of hours on Vermintide 2 (for example) well after they are done leveling up a gearing up their characters. We want a shorter progression arc with greater flexibility to tinker with builds so that we can spend our time actually playing and testing out different things, and challenging ourselves. Artificially stretching our the progression arc with crazy levels of RNG directly opposes one of the core motivations for why people want to play this game.

Link to the survey result summary

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As far as the launch went and why things were feature incomplete - we can only speculate. Did the design really change partway through development? There are mentions that there was a totally different crafting system that was scrapped? Why? Was it a technical or engine issue? Or a design decision to pivot towards their current model? All of these unanswered questions and the resulting state of the game rests squarely on leadership and management.

Personally, I suspect the vague references to “design intent” and the lack of communication around these fundamental design decisions indicates that the changes/decisions were made deliberately (i.e. not the result of a technical obstacle), and Fatshark simply doesn’t want to admit to this publicly, probably for egoistical reasons. The other reason is that they are just incompetent at managing a product and it’s communication, and knowing what would put their consumers at ease. Which is also entirely possible.

I don’t wish the FS developers any ill will at an individual level. There are clearly many talented people at FS, and it’s awesome that the core combat gameplay is as good as it was. If it wasn’t, no one would be here caring enough about the game to complain about the rest of it. But Fatshark’s producers, designers, project managers screwed up big time, and it’s unfortunately hurting everyone - the players, the community, the developers, and FS as a whole.

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60

TLDR; So much crap coming from another Software Engineer it hurts mah wee soul.

  1. We are all aware of the distinction between Developers, Designers and Managers.
  2. For a Software Engineer I am flapperghasted that you don’t know what the AAA title actually means. You do well with bare minimum of research in this respect. This is not an AAA game. AAA is not quality nor the size of a game. AAA is merely a reference to a Studio’s size and available manpower to throw at a single title. Fatshark only barely gets to AA in this respect.
  3. The only games that requires millions of copies sold are AAA/AAAA or AAA+ whatever you want to call them. They have budgets starting at 80+ million USD. Anything below AAA can make do with as little as half a million if they sell a game for 40$ per copy and still have enough for a new title.
  4. No they didn’t need Tencent. Fatshark sold 5-8 million copies of Vermintide 2 by 2021. Even if we say that most got it on a 50% discount sale that’s well more than they ever needed to fund any future project.
  5. Their something something said he was happy with the release of Darktide. They obviously thought it was totally okay to release it with lacking features, unkept promises and similar. Who’d have funk their playerbase was getting insanely tired of this crap?
  6. As said before if you are honest, transparent, communicate and most importantly deliver on what was promised - the gaming industry wouldn’t be in the situation with rage foaming consumers that are frustrated and they wouldn’t have to deal with regular people spewing hate and death threats - there would always be the trolls of course, but that is what it is…
  7. I promise my client that X feature will be in the software, I will make damned sure that X feature is in the damn software. I don’t promise it will be a good feature nor that it will work as intended. But it will be there because I promised it.
    It is. That simple. Do not tell me you cannot make a feature, because that is a downright lie.
  8. There’s a big downside and that’s not having a max refund window in an early access product and Fatshark probably knew that people would refund en masse.
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