What direction should we expect the game to go? We finally got an Xbox release date, but when can we expect the updates and content the game really needs to survive and thrive past that?
It’s frustrating that the community has to fumble in the dark and speculate about long-requested / promised features. It’s baffling that what is standard practice (even for tiny indie developers) for the bare minimum of community engagement appears to be beyond FS. How is aloof radio silence the best option here, given the state of the game? Give us a reason to stick around and get excited for the future of this game.
I know this is par for the course for FS, but come on… Throw us a bone, just do the bare minimum.
They’ve done roadmaps and promises and articles in the past, the problem is that they keep failing to actually follow them, so Fatshark have become wary of being public about their plans to avoid the backlash.
I can’t really blame them for that.
But with that said, they must be nearing a point with content and new story that they can start to put out marketing.
I refuse to believe that the animation team made 1 boss in 1 year, and I have to believe the map design team is capable of more than 2 maps in a year reusing existing tile sets. They must be working on a real block of content in the background, and with this amount of time passed, they must be nearing having it ready.
So give us some marketing for map and enemy content so we have something to look forward to Fatshark
You weren’t here for the roadmap debacle in VT2, I take it.
Stuff was hilarious. A short summary below:
Summary
Fatshark actually released a roadmap and it wasn’t looking too shabby. Kind of a good read. Some players were happy, some were cautiously optimistic and some were cynic, just like now. Mixed bag.
Of course, the cynicists were proven right and one after another, Fatshark kept missing every. Single. Roadmap. Goal. Non-stop.
Every new failed goal would produce a good chunk of threads and controversy.
We got some of what was in that road map eventually, but much much later. And some things remain forgotten until this very day.
Edit: Add to the fact that Fatshark isn’t the first to be affected by roadmap deadline failure and the fact that roadmaps were the much exploited sales pitch in Kickstarter Backings when Kickstarter was all the hype and you got yourself a recipe for a good laugh.
Whenever a company comes up with a roadmap these days, it’s immediately taken with a pinch of salt and is used as a litmus test for how much the company’s word can be trusted. Missing a single roadmap deadline these days is a total bust for consumer trust, so most companies never post them anymore.
I wonder how much of that breaking of trust of the roadmap is simply just due to a lack of communication & expectation setting.
Like, if a company goes “here’s our tentative roadmap. This is what we are planning on working on. You’ll notice there are no dates because we don’t know how the implementation of these features will go. We also don’t know if everything will go according to plan, so items are subject to change. But this is an outline of what we’d like to do”
Then if something goes wrong, some clear communication like “hey, we’re trying to make this work but because of X we’re having a difficult time with it. We’ve made some additional progress on Y, we will be focusing on that in the meantime until we can figure out a solution for X”
Then if X just really isn’t working out, a “hey, we’re just not able to make X work because it’s outside of the scope of what we think we can implement because of Z. Instead, we’re tweaking X in these ways to make it work, or we’re just shelving it completely.”
Would there be even remotely a similar level of backlash? Yeah, there would be disappointed people who would still express that, and there’d be forever a contingent of whiners, but I feel at the very least there wouldn’t be as much just…vitriolic contempt as there is now.
Because, simply put, not putting any dates makes people get antsy and start writing about the roadmap all the time.
On the other hand, getting baited by the community to post a roadmap with dates, even rough estimates - It’s going to come back and bite you in the butt whenever you have to re-adjust plans.
Not having any information released is simply saver for expectation management. And you are right Expectation Management is also an important skill in the PR and Sales Pipeline of any company dealing with either.
I’d wager a good chunk of games would have been received much better, had the hypetrain be more considerate.
Everyone would have been blown away by CP2077’s launch, even with the bugs, had they not made so huge waves before.
Anyway, for the VT2 story, this is what we’re referencing here.
Very ambitious. Immediately post release they ran into tons of issues with backend, performance and people were playing the wrong build unbeknownst to Fatshark for several weeks. So they had to abandon the roadmap right after launch, but don’t think the community forgot about it. New roadmap threads were hounding these forums on a weekly basis. Steam forums, too. And Reddit. It was everywhere.
Maybe roadmap isn’t the right term for what would work well. I dunno, I just feel like a lot of angst would be very easily dealt with if there was a way to just convey what in general is being worked on, and how things are going. The roadmap format may not work for that, but something has to, right?
Like again that talent tree. Easily one of the biggest deals the game has seen. Has been in development for months. Directly addresses the hundreds of times people have asked about class updates. Literally not mentioned once until it came up on an article on a 3rd party website. If something was mentioned earlier, yeah more people would be asking for updates but I feel that’s better than hundreds of angry comments feeling angry about a lack of classes & a resolution.
But I’m not a CM so maybe I’m just talking out of my ass. I’m mostly just going off how I’d prefer to be treated as a consumer.
No, you’re right. The roadmap is the right term. And internally roadmaps in game development often do have no clear dates for a long while.
It’s this sensationalization and getting baited into posting dates, that puts game devs into hot water all the time. You were absolutely correct there.
honestly i only wan’t a todo-list from fatshark, simply knowing they are looking at XYZ, and i wouldn’t even be mad, if they just mentioned, “we dropped X feature because we decided it wasn’t worth persuing at this moment”
but being in the dark about everything, not knowing if anything substantial is being done is by far the worst aproach
That’s exactly where I’m at. It’s very easy to correlate silence with inaction, which directly leads to frustration.
Right now it’s sorta like Schrodinger’s features. If they don’t talk about what features they’re doing, they’re both being worked on, and not being worked on at the same time.
What really brought the controversy upon Fatshark was a lack of communication on anything. For example, dedicated servers was dropped and not communicated on for months. I don’t remember if we ever got an affirmative answer on it. Not meeting deadlines is fine. It happens. What’s not fine is not being honest to the community your servicing or, to be cynical, stringing them along as if they’re a bunch of idiots. Hence why the discourse got so vitriolic: people felt they were being taken for a ride.
You can observe this exact same pattern with Darktide. Make x promise. Not communicate on the inability to deliver on x thing or if any issues popped up or if the date has changed on the delivery of said thing. Be silent about x thing. Eventually fans lose patience and get angsty - what a surprise.
This isn’t a failure of Roadmaps or developers failing on deadlines. This is a failure of a developer.
I’m not disagreeing with you there.
The first mistake was to post the ambitious roadmap.
The second mistake was to not make an announcement saying “due to the issues we found after launch we have to abandon the roadmap”.
The disappointment would have been there, but it would have been a one-time thing and limited, instead of becoming an issue that drags on over the months.
And to answer your question, we eventually did get an answer I think. But it was long after the bagel had been dipped into the butter. The response to dedicated servers was “We actually can’t do it after all, because we’d have to redo the whole connection system / netcode and we want to focus on content creation now”.
By the by, we did end up getting dedicated servers, too. Namely in this game. I count this as “they eventually did deliver, but only after 6 years with their new project”.
Doesn’t change the fact by the way, that this roadmap thing seems to be a common issue in game development. Fatshark isn’t the first to make a plan and not be able to stick to it, for whatever reason.
This is why it’s better to set rough milestones rather than dated goals, at least externally. Internally a company should of course strife to achieve dated milestones.
But it’s also an issue with the planning itself.
I feel a lot of broken promises happen because of how developers manage their team and even their own expectations. It often feels like what they told the public is something they just brainstormed in their monthly round table discussion. They thought “wow it’s a great idea”, but didn’t actually test yet if they really can do it or if it’s even practical. Then after making the announcement, they find out “well that won’ really work, dang it”.
Well that’s just poor leadership, poor design, lacking in a clear vision etc.
If they can’t manage their goals either in terms of being practical or achieving them in the set timeframe then they should just stick to a noncommittal bullet point priority list.
Basically a general outline of a roadmap.
In a large project, keeping track of milestones seems a given, no? Gotta be aware of the overall goals, progress, efficiency and state of it all. I’m certain they already have such a list/system.
Now as to why they don’t want to show even minimal roadmaps is up to us to imagine and conjecture about, since we’re not told anything! I’m always having fun with these!
I say the reason is because we wouldn’t like what we see. As in: “Wow, they’ve been focusing on the XBox release since January 2023, huh?”
VT2 versus mode could have been a bullet point, but it was straight up cancelled, so they wont do bullet points either in case they decide they want to cancel a feature.
That’s flat management for you.
tbh I don’t think we can know until we see what we get. The skill tree may be pretty impressive and complex and the xbox release may be relatively trivial since DT is fundamentally designed with xbox in mind unlike VT2.
There is also that the map team and animation team have literally nothing to do with the xbox launch, and the map team definitely has zero to do with the skill tree, so I have to assume they have been working on… something…
