My own personal history with Fatshark, and their games has been a little checkered in places.
This ranges from spittle-in-the-corner-of-your-mouth Fanboi to downright petulant child but overall I suppose with almost 4k hours in VT2 I could be considered a big fan of their games and the company.
I’ve seen the highs and lows and the weird patches, the addition and removal of bugs – seemingly on a whim - and witnessed the horribly Bru-Ha-Ha about armour skins with Bogenhafen. This usually quite tolerant and nice community really descended into the bowels of Nurgle’s personal Midden there and if there’s ever any event that needs Saltzpyre to expunge it from the record, that was it.
I therefore have some optimism about their release of Darktide, in the same way as people getting on a fairground ride thrown together with nuts and bolts and duct tape, assembled in a matter of hours by a man with few teeth and an even lower IQ are optimistic.
Am I going to have a fantastic time? I hope so. Am I going to end up depressed, cold, wet, face down in the mud having been flung from the giddy heights to land in a hedge? Possibly but highly unlikely.
And Yet…
Fatshark are not the company they were in 2018 when they launched VT2, to a massive surge in sales and an interest in the game that appear to far outstrip the companies ability to deal with it.
The Launch stream saw members of the company chugging Red Bull so fast the offices of FS boosted the share price of Red Bull by 0.7% on their consumption alone. None looked refreshed, all was frantic. Martin Wahlund appear to age several years before your eyes.
Game launched with some immense sales and some fairly spectacular bugs, Stagger/Cleave not working being a fairly hefty one. Patches came quick and dirty, fixing one thing to break another, Krubers Greatsword broke Keri’s Greatsword. BW was… pointless. Huntsman was loads of fun because you could get the handgun to fire 12 shots like the repeater handgun. Fun times, except for the … you know… actual game balance and stuff.
My therapist says not to talk too much about the character grind because it might cause me to have another one of my ‘red mist episodes’. Neither I nor the UK Hampshire constabulary want that.
Onto Winds of Magic, a thing that really got me excited for the mode, only for my currently hard-won gear to be entirely redundant, and a mode without random spawns ~possibly the greatest thing that keeps the gameplay loop fresh. Baffling.
Winds of Magic triggered red mist episodes™ across the globe. A huge Misstep by FS and in my opinion caused by simply attempting too much at once spreading their team too thin and over-promising and under-delivering. The new stagger mechanic got rid of the dodge meta though, and for that I’m grateful.
You might be thinking this is just a post digging up old troubles, like a lunatic spouse pulling up
Things Wot You Did since 2018. Hear me out.
These are hard lessons learned the tough and painful way, and the company are significantly better now. Things that would’ve been announced from the rooftops as something FS have achieved are now becoming business as usual. This is a good thing.
The most recent remaster patch almost slid under the radar, where a remaster was a big change to the game and would’ve been a fairly large annoucement even 18 months ago.
Nurglings in Geheimnisnacht is another thing that just popped up and happened that would never have happened 2 years ago. Lohner is engaged with the community a lot more after literally years of silence. Fatshark even employed a bona fide VT2 gamer to be a community manager and assist Hedge in fighting on all fronts. Another big step in the right direction.
Warrior Priest was also a fantastic class that was relatively bug free and brought something great to the team from the offset. There is much happening lately to be happy and pleased about.
And so onto Darktide.
Although I’ve got grave concerns about the character progression and making new characters grind from level 1 each time, there’s absolutely mountains of stuff that is now business as usual.
Dedicated Servers, Removal of Weapon RNG loot as you can save up and buy it, Better Key bindings, Character creation, abso-bloody-lutely fantastic graphics and atmosphere, announcement of a crafting system, a community hub area, individual armour skins and the ability to build your own look, all on top of the fantastic gameplay loop we love.
Everything I’ve listed has been screamed about and requested by the community for VT2 since day one in 2018. FS do in fact listen and have seized the opportunity to solve a lot of the deep-seated problems in VT2 so I’m definitely prepared to be far more optimistic than downcast.
I’ve heard DT described by some as ‘This could be my new Destiny’, so that’s the kind of game size and community that might explode when the game launches. No small thing.
There’s still a tiny nagging feeling however, that someone who’s working on this fairground ride is still running around adjusting bolts with the wrong size spanner, holding things together with planks of wood and duct taping things in place to be addressed later, only to be baffled when something important goes boing and the ride grinds to a halt.
So please FS, resist the urge to duct tape something together and throw it out the door[edit] I’m not advocating a delay!]. There are many of us here who really really want you to succeed on a phenomenal level. It could be the game that propels you into the big league.
