I still look at the last update video and the Exec. Producer saying, “Before we jump into the new content, lets take a look back at what we did to fix this game up.”
Dude. Time goes forward, not backwards. We already know what FatShark is doing and we were waiting for them to at least show the progress they are making towards new content. In addition, publicly addressing the issues that the community has been saying for a long while.
But the community will never get that kind of feedback unless there is a public outcry to do it.
I run different profiles for every game. I finally got the logitech game detection part of the software running. I do also keep a smaller mouse as I find the g600 can sometimes cause stress in the knuckle of my fourth finger, but I keep coming back.
For Darktide, I put ult on three places on the thumbpad, dodge on another and on ‘mouse wheel sideways’ (A fuction I can’t do without.) so I can hit with my hand in several spots, rapid attack on the other side, ping on wheel forward, and crouch/slide as well. The rear of the thumbpad is special things like grenades or the like. Usually use the Gshift as a DPI shift in a shooter and keep gshift only on rpgs where I need a ton of buttons, like when I was a hardmode dps in swtor.
well as you said it they sold you a game a a “Live Service” so you bought it knowing that things would be coming " Eventually™ " or " Soon™ " do we all want this game to start shoveling out content to us, YES!
do i wish that they would just release the Entire Cosmetic Store and not do the Rotating shop YES!
but thats a diffrent issue.
well they have been doing more than that,
Patch #4 Blessings of the Omnissiah
added Crafting System, Loadout Sets, Emotes and Hud Changes.
Patch #6 Tools of War
Armoury Exchange relocated, Class / Weapon / Blessing Balance, GameEngine fixes.
Patch #7
Controller Fixes, Class / Weapon Balance, Bug Fixes, Net code fixes.
Patch #8
Class / Weapon Balance, Mutants / Pox Burster / Spawn changes, Net code fixes.
Patch #9 Garbs and Penances
Garbs / Penances added / reworked, Class / Weapon / Blessing Balance, enemy changes.
Patch #10 Rejects Unite
new maps, Chaos Spawn, Commissary added, new cosmetics added for Ordo Dockets.
Patch #11
Cross Play with GamePass, Class / Weapon / Blessing Balance, Map reworks,
Patch #12 Into the Maelstrom
Auric missions, Mission system rework, Crafting changes, Un-Silo’ed resources,
so to say they have been doing nothing is wrong, they may not have been working on issues you or others have wanted them to work on first, but they have been working on things.
I legitimately don’t know how you can type this up, look at it, and go “yep these are the additions are solid” without having a minor singularity form inside your cerebral cortex.
How many of those are effectively really working on the game, though?
Departments a modern game company has (a handy checklist):
Management team - oversees everyone mentioned below
Human Resource team - Manages existing staff and keeps it in line
Recruiting team - Gets new employees on board and does hiring processes
Accounting team - Everyone wants to get paid, including the taxman
Front Desk worker team - Mailman and e-mails want to get managed, coffee cooked
Legal team - Modern wars are fought in court
IT team - No working PCs, no product
Community Management team - We all know Hedge, Catfish, Quickpaw and Aqshy
Game Design team
Visual Design team
Sound Design team
Animaton team
Monetization team - Clearly there has to be one
Combat design team (we know Fatshark has this because the CMs referenced this before)
Programming team ← This is the one responsible for performance and it all coming together
Also optionally on board, if not outsourced:
Music Production team - this was outsourced to Jesper Kyd
Security team - they may not have one
Quality Assurance team - I know what you’re thinking lol, still most companies have this
Marketing team - creates advertizements and such
Distribution and Sales team - ensures the product makes it to shelves and has buyers
Customer Support team - no matter how low you rate this, there is people allocated to this
Web Design team - We’re writing on a website here right now, if this wasn’t outsourced, someone is programming, developing and managing this space
Not defending their pace here, but just saying. The core team producing the product these days is usually only a fraction of the full company.
You say they have 180 people, I say some odd 7 people are actually programming the game and it’s base code.
They are surrounded by people managing them, shielding them, designing their tasks, handing them the tools and overseeing their progress.
Most modern companies work that way. If they have +100 people, assume 5-10 actually work on the actual product or it’s core foundation. Rest does work to support that or to uphold the company’s existence.
With respect to delivering what was promised, sure, given the relatively slow release time of updates. With respect to creating arguably the best PvE high intensity melee shooter co-op game around? Absolutely not. The core gameplay is astoundingly good, and I think you’d be very hard pressed to argue otherwise.
Generalities like yours don’t hold much water, you need to be specific with your arguments.
To be fair, the 2 recent new maps are freaking excellent, and yes more would be nice, but don’t be so quick to dismiss what has been done. Maelstrom is a damn nice update, even if it uses what already exists, it’s pretty fresh. Fingers crossed for more maps or monstrosities.
Again, yes, it’s been slow. The latest update is solely a response to the playerbase. I think if Fat Shark completely folded, and did everything people like you want, you’d still find things to complain about. For example, if all locks were removed, weapon crafting would be get tired quickly and be super boring. Are there improvements still to be made? Sure! I can certainly think of a bunch. All I’m saying is, what are you actually complaining about?. I honestly don’t know where this entitled gamer thing came from.
_
I can’t help but wonder that the blowback due to release and game issues, but also the toxic thoughtless comments that almost certainly helped tank the game somewhat, have reduced the budget, and now because of that there isn’t enough money to put X number of devs on Darktide to pump out more updates. Because the player base is reduced, updates are potentially proportionally slower?
Just my 2c. I think the game has come a long way, the development is slower than we’d like, but the gameplay is still king and people forget what’s good. So long as it gets updates, I’ll keep playing. If it’s slow, I have other games I can switch to. If you have a more specific argument, that would actually help game dev and discussion. If all you say ‘FS is rubbish’, you’re simply looking for other clowns to say yes without actually arguing anything of substance. If everything done to date had happened in 3 months instead of 6, would you still complain? I’m trying to divine what it is you’re really complaining about. Happy to discuss, but tired of generalities.
We have had this thread, or similar like it for a while now. But when you state that the gameplay at its core is good, you’ll hardly find someone who disagrees and then you bring up that a simplified crafting system would become boring I have to ask, would the loot system not benefit to be more open and new player friendly? Would it somehow distract and take away at the gameplay if you had greater control of how your items would be tuned?
i think its more that they have been working on things,
as someone who has worked in Gamedesign its never as easy as lets just change this variable and wait to see what happens. may times their are unforseen sideeffects as part of the design process.
also say that someone has a issue inside their head as in to discredit or offend them,…
ya dont know where you were going there, could we just stick with thoughts on the game?
I mean it’s an obvious thing not all of them are actual devs, but it doesn’t change anything, they are not a small indie studio. There are smaller ones who don’t recreate bugs from old builds and can make cosmetics without clipping.
I hardly doubt that proportion is so, cause:
it should be teams - lead, senior, assistant etc.
you need to pay all thse people, it’s easier just to be 5 people indie studio in that case, if it’s only 5 people making a product
some things like IT could be fully or partialy outsourced, aswell as monetization team could be from Level Infinite (Tencent)
It’s not just the main story I’m worried about, but the characterisation of the Space Marines, the world building, the supporting actors etc. get that wrong and it sours the entire experience.
I’d generally agree, only - the company that’s responsible for delivering arguably the best PvE high-intensity melee shooter co-op game around is also the one that’s gotta own up to this:
To put it bluntly - the generality definitely holds water, FS’s outstanding achievements only compounding the dissatisfaction with the game.
To be fair, 2 maps (3?), 2 weapons, 10 variants and a bunch of prem cosmetics are to be quickly dismissed and rightly so.
In the timeframe that DT has had since open beta? Please… The bad faith FS have harvested is nothing but justified. And yeah, Maelstrom is fun. For a week. The Freshness quickly running into the concrete wall of hitreg issues, gameplay bugs and everything outside the gameplay being dodgy, silly or not there at all. Fingers crossed, pal.
Yes, it HAS been slow. Nearly a year. To arrive at solutions we’ve been fervently suggesting since BETA.
Out with this argument. There are no “people like you”, as you referred to. Even in the most nuanced and complex conversation possible (such that have been had on this very forum and in the discords), the underlying conclusion is that either FS are incompetent (for whatever reason, that being management, lack of experience or corpo oversight), or competent enough and THIS is the product that was intended.
I appreciate the comparison between Larian and FS, I think it’s poignant. Larian are a specialist studio with a long history, amounting to the decisions before, during and after the release of BG3. The results are evident, I hope. FS are also a specialist studio with a long history, down to the acquisition of a popular IP and the opportunity to launch a killer title, same as Larian. But the decisions before, during and specially after launch were the polar opposite, and results are also evident, I hope.
It’s worth the wonder, isn’t it? What could’ve been, if FS did a Larian and called the “Launch” a WIP Beta. The response would be different, the forums would’ve surged in a different direction and so on and so forth. Probably.
But FS didn’t do that. And the rest is 10 months’ worth of history. The reading of which leads you to suggest that the game was unjustly smeared and tanked on purpose? The most faith I can allow in this argument leads to me think that if the brilliant but mostly flawed game we were presented with CAN be tanked by a bunch of thoughtless bots and negative jerks with keyboards, then maybe… you know… there’s something to be said about how good your game/company is at being a game dev company…?
As to the consumers who entered beta with hopes, stuck through the disaster launch, supported the game and FS through community, cosmetic purchases and 800h of time. Who gradually got disillusioned, disappointed and ground down by months of nothing, except recurring conversations. Who then posted steam reviews, came to the forums with “negative” topics and abandoned/got modded off the discord? Those are anomalies, right? Crazy people, not at all representative of the majority DT playerbase, yeah?
If you still don’t understand where this thoughtless, toxic gamer entitlement comes from, I hope this sheds some light - I maintain, that a full-price purchase of the Released product, another 5x times that in prem shop currency, nearly 10k discord messages, 24h of forums reading time and about 120 responses written, on top of the nearly 800h hours of game time, entitles me to have a well-formed opinion on the company, the game and what it went through so far.
The game’s pretty much done for, I’ve come to that conclusion. Not only because of how much player-bleed there is (at this rate, average player count will be below 2k by the end of the year, with peaks of MAYBE 3 to 3.5k), but the underlying issues cannot be resolved, because they are at the very core concept of the game.
The live-service model HEAVILY limits what they can still do with the game. The net-code issues will never go away. And, realistically, what are they ever going to produce that will make any substantial amount of buyers give an incentive to get back into the game.
The core mechanics are solid, but that was the easiest part. The combat is VT2 combat is great, but even additions like spriting and cover are already more than questionable in their implementation and just feel “tacked on” instead of being an organic blend-in.
Everything, literally everything else is a step back on what was established with VT2, and what so many people tend to forget is that these changes were implemented with intent. They knew what they were doing, all of it is DELIBERATE. There is no accidentally making it worse because they tried to do something new or different. It’s a quite classic case of: What is good isn’t new, and what is new isn’t good.
They are dedicating the majority of their ressources to console releases, there is very little doubt about that. But whom are they going to release it to? People will know that the PC release is a miserable mess that is PRIMARILY(!!!) built around FOMO mechanics and an ingame shop. I can only state it again and again: It’s NOT a game with a built-in item shop, it’s an item shop with a game built around it - and this will NEVER go away, because it’s this game’s identity.
There will be no additional classes, at least not more than one for each archetype, because whom are they going to sell them to? The amount of work needed for new animations, balancing, bug-fixes, weapons (and possibly: voice work) isn’t economically sustainable for how many players are going to be prospective buyers. Even if the complete current players base were to buy a new class, it would most likely not even cover the cost of its production.
FS just dropped the ball and pushed the goodwill of the community too far, out of pure greed and trying to please their VC (yeah, yeah, you can’t convince me in a month of tuesdays that their chinese shareholders aren’t the root of this).
I still go back to VT2. If I had to give FS one advice: Release more content for VT2, release Sienna’s carreer, and re-release the game with a new, HUGE content pack. Supporting VT2 for the next years to come seems to be a much smarter business model than trying to save DT.
I think that the odds you gave are too high, but the gap between the old system and new one is too low. Being able to choose both the blessings is a lot more statistically significant than both perks, at least on certain weapons that have very rare blessings that are desirable.
Fatshark has already confirmed that different blessings have vastly different droprates even at the same level, without giving specific numbers of course.
Not sure how both things would be possible at the same time, since i used the same odds for both calculations.
Maybe i misunderstand what you mean.
Anyway. The point of my calculation was not to be 100% accurate.
The point was to use optimistic probabilities but show that the odds are still awful, and that the update did not change all that much for anyone who wants a full T4 item.
It was a good change if you are fine with T3 perks, or one good perk though.
We should end this here, since it is not the main issue of this thread.
My point is that the most unlikely natural rolls possible in the game are certain blessing combinations. If you assume I’m right, the odds change across the board compared to what you provided, and the gap between the old system and new one widens because it is now possible to entirely control blessings (provided they’ve been learned).
