This is bizarre behavior from a company that is, allegedly, running a ‘live service’ game.
Three months. Three. Months. And you have nothing. You’ve released some bugfixes (none of which fully work, rip Patch 17) and have given us no idea about what’s coming. Nothing to look forward to, nothing to anticipate, no idea where the game’s going, what plans you might have.
Oh, but the bloody cosmetic store keeps chugging along just fine, I see, like clockwork giving us something every two weeks.
Give us something. Anything. Literally anything to look forward to. Or should we just wait until this game drops back into a 3-digit player count before someone actually pulls their head out of their hind end and does the job of communicating with the community that the so-called ‘Community Managers’ seem unable or unwilling to do?
Is this acceptable for a studio? Do your shareholders like seeing you deliver nothing beyond implementing what some third-party cheapskate makes for cosmetics in order to sell to whales?
Is your C-suite panicking because Helldivers is taking your lunch money? Has the sight of a company that actually updates their games with more speed than a stoned sloth struck the sight of your entire set of developers? Are you so incompetently run that you can’t run more than one project at a time and have everyone who actually knows how to code deployed to Versus mode?
Nobody knows. Look at your forums. Look at the reactions of the playerbase as the silence continues. Look at your steadily dying player count.
I’m not going to tag the CMs. They say nothing of substance as it is.
Get your act together, Fatshark. You could’ve made something great out of this IP, and you could still salvage something, if you only had whoever is responsible for your silence and contempt for the community tossed out into the fjords.
2 of those months were vacation. Before that it was a month of preparation for their vacation. Now they’re recovering from vacation.
Forget a content pipeline, what is their actual work pipeline? Do they do anything on Darktide? Surely their teams are working on games separately, so any work on VT2 shouldn’t impact DT, right? RIGHT?!
Honestly my question is, what do the employees even do?
Like this is not even an insult or anything I am genuinely curious.
When your average fatshark employee clocks in for their 9-5 5 days a week what are they working on?
Because 4 months have passed (2 if we subtract the vacation they went on)
And the only thing that they have done is push out a bugfix that has broken more things than fixed.
And then I also ask what is the CM doing?
Besides replying once a week on a thread about cosmetics what does a CM do exactly when they’re not responding to the community (and probably not even reading what the community is saying)
the CM is very low on the communication chain and basically only gets to repeat what’s approved. their job is 95% “keep the howler gibbons busy” and make sure that people don’t just start outright lying about stuff to start trouble. the forum has been repeating the same like three complaints and rejected what the CM’s message on those points was for months, so they don’t have any reason to engage any of that.
constantly being angry about a problem they’ve already said they would look into if it wasn’t where they wanted just makes the community hostile, and frankly it’s pretty clear what they want out of all of these things. go ahead and keep getting mad guys but the only thing the CMs are able to kick upstairs about that is “they’re still mad your designs don’t match what they want to get” and literally no dev cares about people wanting a different game than they’re making.
i mean face it if you were going to actually leave and not give them money, you wouldn’t be on the forums rageposting. you ain’t the people they’re aiming to draw in, you’re already there.
We must be in different time zones, because where I’m at, it’ll only be 3 months on 13MAR.
They haven’t committed to a 3-month release schedule anywhere that I’ve seen but a few things kinda hinted at it. In any case, I would expect either a 3-month or a 4-month schedule, so some sort of release or update to the special mission at least sometime between mid-March and mid-April.
Like many folks, I see you didn’t pay attention to the whole pre-game interview. They said they planned to run it as a live-service game but they also said that they considered Vermintide 2 a live-service game because they continued to update it after it was launched. I know a lot of secondary sources just threw around the buzzwords but if you took the time to read the source it would have tempered many expectations.
Personally, I wish they would re-start the biweekly streaming sessions where they would chat about the game while playing a few rounds. They could even alternate between VT2/Versus and DT every other session so each CM team would only have to do it once a month. That’s pretty minimalist but it would still be something to let us know they’re still alive and well.
I would follow this train of logic if everything else wasn’t set up as if it was a live service game.
The mission board, malks dailies, the attempt early on to have events before the whole thing was derailed by people realizing how bad the crafting is and pushing for an update, even the Orthus Offensive is an example of live service style updating with having a small event before dropping the actual content related to it.
Sure we can cite the interview one way or any other but if it’s not a live service game then all it means is we have a bunch of live service husk pieces that don’t really do anything but add frustration in it’s current state. All im saying is at this point if it’s not a live service game then there is no point to the rotating board, let us pick our own missions.
Ah yes because it looks extremely healthy and normal to have a game where there is no update to when new content might come or what it might even be, and the most popular posts are about another game, the company not being able to communicate, people asking if they are actually alive, and a 2k large post about how bad the crafting is which still hasn’t been addressed.
Another fine Jakal post, glad to see that nothing does change even during extended absences.
Welp, Darktide’s credited PR manager is apparently on the other side of the planet from the studio posting pics of physical Xbox copies he found for sale at a retail store to Twitter. So, I guess that explains the state of the game’s PR.
Frankly the lack of real meaningful communication at this point is baffling. I know its the FS way, but you have a game that is starting to hemorrhaging players, losing core community members, and hasn’t seen meaningful content in months.
People aren’t gonna stick around if you can’t even give a single development update or have real dialogue. It’s like the absolute bare minimal damage control, and they aren’t even doing that.
My guess it’s a bad sign for DT and maybe FS in general… Maybe internal issues (management restructuring or loss of key talent)?
i wish this game would lose core community members, the community sucks. new players coming in and heading “crafting is awful game is deads!” all the time because some chump wants to prove they’re not wrong in sinking all their time into bitching loudly all day is worse for the game than any problems with the progression system.
“Let them fry in their waiting! Let them reach such a level of desperation that they will welcome as a godsend even the barest bone we’ll throw at them! Remember the Snake Update from Team Fortress 2? That’s what we’re aiming for.”
CM’s main purpose is either to be the punching bag or carrier pigeon for feedback. they also monitor forums to give their two cents or spew “we’re listening” every few weeks or so. they are pretty low on the command chain and the only influence they have is collecting feedback from forums to transfer to the dev team as the devs dont focus on feedback so they make the cm do it.
in short theyre just moderators for forums, announcers of new updates and messengers that carry feedback to the devs.
Last we saw, about three weeks ago or so they were all “still getting back from vacation”
Which I find absolutely wild. It would have been mid Feb. This time Fatshark didnt screw up the Yearly Content Abandonment this time, they threw us three new levels before screwing off instead of launching a beta and then lying about it, but that’s a low bar to clear.
At this rate, I’m not expecting anythng until June.
