My suspicion @ curent state of the game

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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Hello everyone,

I’ve been monitoring this (and other forums) for a while mainly as a lurker. At the end of it, 90% of the complaints people have (and I share) are about the weird design decisions the studio has made - especially when comparing it to the state of VT2 and the experiences that they should have had from their previous product.

Now to me there is a certain trend that keeps getting clearer in clearer the more people discuss this and this is the following:

The games launch was too early. If they could they wouldn’t have launched on the date where they did.

And I think if you ask the Devs at FS they would agree! Not about the brass and business roles at FS but the hands-on developers and designers. I think this was a pure business decision.

I’ve been working with software and software development (albeit not gaming) for a long time now and I can see some trends here.

Most of the mechanics that we as players find odd / a regress from VT2 are not by accident. I can not believe that anyone that works in this field will disregard any learnings from previous projects and completely disregard them just bc it is a different setting. They are deliberate decisions made for a specific reason.

And the reason is (imho): they want to buy time (…and get some MTX money while they are at it)

All these randomness and time gate mechanics seem like they are an obfuscation attempt to pad out the game and buy FS some time they need in order to get the game to the state that “they” envisioned it to be. They have been slapping ridiculous amounts of these padding mechanics on top of each other to a point where it tarnishes the player experience and undermines their reputation as a development studio. And I think this is where management gambled too high.

I can not believe that people at FS sat around the table and decided to remove player agency and well-designed systems just because (… don’t nail me down on this… I do not know what to expect of FS anymore).

  • Remove the ability of players to select specific missions
  • Make various stores work through a countdown (and randomization)
  • Make the gearing process (“Emperors Gift”) ultra-random and unreliable
  • Eliminate crafting
  • Do not share weekly progress between characters // do not share Curios between characters
  • Lack of deterministic crafting outcomes // crafting systems
  • etc…

And what do all these things have in common? They are layers of padding. There is no “good” thing about these design decisions. They are all objectively badly designed and bring no element of fun or engagement to the table.
This is such an odd and monumental regress from what we already had in VT2 that I can only see two reasons for this:

a) They totally messed up their Project Management and are now reeling to get more time.
Which I can see after the many launch-date-postponements. At some point along the development cycle Product/Project Management is going to raise the point of “how many more postponements can we do without losing face and what is the reputational/monetary loss/gain if we push something, not 100% finished out vs. we are losing player/buyer interest”.

(imho this is the more likely reason)

b) They stuffed their team with Gacha/Mobile-Game devs/managers and wanted to try more aggressive MTX systems. At the moment the mechanics (not the core gameplay) looks and feels 1:1 like a f2p mobile game (and before this is brought up: I don’t see Tencent as the culprit here. I think this would still be with FS).
Just layers upon layers of countdowns, resources, and rng. Sad.

Whatever the reason might have been, I don’t want to defend FS here. What I would like to get out of this is a discussion and (most importantly) some feedback from FS themself.

In my years as first a developer and then a manager/business owner in the IT world, I advise FS to be a bit more transparent. I do not think you can just “sit this out” and keep working in the hope of winning back the good reputation of your company.
If my assessment of point a is right, make a statement. Have an open and honest discussion with your player base. Or at least please explain to us what exactly the design philosophy of Darktide is since you keep referring to it in your “Update posts”.
I honestly feel like game dev took some of the business processes and practices from regular software development but did not go “fully professional”. The expectation management (which should not be with the CMs imho) is really really really not good - but it is so important!

This post could go on for much longer, but I leave it at this.

I am looking forward to the discussion.

and @ FS: if you need someone external to come in and get this whole mess sorted out, you know where to contact me. I’ll even do it for a “friends and family” discount.

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I think the extreme RNG will have the opposite effect that they want. You will hemorrhage players until you only have a very dedicated core left who are willing to grind (crafting resources) and wait (lottery shop) for the things that they want. I certainly won’t pay for anything other then the base game when I’m not even sure if I’m going to be around in a month or two.

Their layered RNG is already grating on me and I came from Warframe.

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You have to buy the 2400 Aquila pack first before Fatshark will acknowledge you.

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Good luck. There probably won’t be one with Fatshark :smiling_face_with_tear:

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You’re right. But FS aint gonna do anything. Stop playing the game, refund it. The only thing that matters now is money and numbers to them.

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I think you nailed a number of concepts here. I would like to add that I think the game went through a massive reset/rebuild and that’s why so many systems are incomplete. I mean, I literally had keys rebinding themselves DURING THE MISSION. How is that even remotely a thing??? How? What in gods name spaghetti code was implemented that required multiple reads of the configuration file and can change settings as a result? How was basic binding not a thing? Mouse inversion? How!?!? They had the entire recipe for a great game in VT2 and it seemed like they completely went off script and decided on something else. I suspect they did a complete engine change mid development and so had to remake everything.

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I simply cannot understand why the Psyker has access to so many weapons that they shouldn’t use vs their own psyker weapons? I mostly get guns/pistols from my rewards when I want Surge or Voidstrike staves. The Psyker feels like a very incomplete class when compared to the Ogryn or Zealot.

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Yes… sadly.

There is the obligatory “update post” every week and some clarifications. Besides that, there is little in the way of addressing the community’s concerns.

I’d like some post-mortem (IT lingo for “what did we do wrong”) from like a Chief Product Manager or some C Level on what is going on. That they know what is going on, what their plan of action is, and what the timeline is.

Not some “Community Twitch Stream”. That is the wrong format. That is not the right tool for the situation. You can use that to engage with your community and “have a bit of banter”. But as it is now, the chat would just be spammed by upset people and the CMs (again - not the people I’d like to get some communication from in this regard) would just infuriate the community more by ignoring it or putting out some “PR speak”.

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I feel like if they didn’t want to delay to cash in on the Christmas period they should have just renamed the release to early access.

they wouldnt have got as much backlash as they have now as well as given them the time to still work on their game and get some sales and valuable player data.

Then next year just do a full launch and cash in on a super polished product. Just totally mind boggling to me why they have flushed their reputation and any goodwill they built up over vermintide 2 down the toilet.

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Psyker is my main, and I am super disappointed at how few force weapons there are.

However, I think it it kind of had to be this way. With the ‘everyone shares weapons’ style of gearing they are doing, it would probably be considered wasteful to have a ton of psyker only weapons. As it stands, they have 5 unique weapons which i think is fairly similar to veteran / zealot.

Unfortunately it stifles the heck out of psykers identity, and also forces really weird feats that cant be too staff centric (which is why so much revolves around BB).

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I hope this thread gets more attention, im sad because i dont think it will get that attention from the devs

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I too look forward for some clarifications that the OP so eloquently discussed and hope this post receives more attention.

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Aqshy says her and Hedge read them all but who knows?

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Aqshy and Hedge have a very specific job that they are paid to do. That job is to “handle” us not make us happy.

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100%. My biggest issue now is that a couple years of the ‘content rollout’ will just be delivering what we saw mined in the 2nd beta. And seeing them write condescending blog posts about them ‘hearing our concerns’ when its simply asking for the rest of the ‘70 weapons’ they sold the game on, delivers absolutely no faith. Why wasn’t shock maul shipped with the game when its in pre launch footage. Or Zealot’s class description mentioning mauls and hammers, this is his only maul. Same with calling an extra scenario for a map that only had 1 scenario a new map. It is just expanding what was sold short.

I had these fears when the beta ended and that was the end of the enemy list.

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A post-mortem report basically stating ‘yeah, we botched this release, sorry. Here’s how we’re going to fix it and when you can expect it to be fixed’ would go such a long way to bringing this game back from the brink. It would make me feel much more confident in this, at least. While I’ve admittedly written a few angry threads on this forum already, I still want this game to succeed because it could be so good.

It’s sad, really, the core gameplay, environments, voice acting and music are all great. This game had a lot of potential and they have another few weeks or months I’d say before the majority of the current playerbase just drops it and either goes back to VT2 or some other horde shooter game, leaving a diehard minority that is OK with the mobile-gacha-RNG progression mechanics they’ve stuffed in for no good reason.

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here’s a good idea for fatshark to monetise: how about sell skin/gear/whatchamacallit that protects your character from error code 9999, 2007, 2001 etc during gameplay?

/sarcasm

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So I think with what happened today we have another strong pointer towards absolutely dysfunctional management.

The PR keeps pushing out announcements and releasing trailers for content that is not ready. I’'ve been reading some reasons of why they couldn’t deploy as planned but again → buying time.

Its the central motive.

What I think is going on is that the company is working on some sort of agile development framework. There is a lot of tasks in the backlog (the features we are missing). At the same time, there is a lack of proper prioritization (which can result from Programm Management and Product Ownership having a lack of synchronization). And the most important one: I honestly believe that there is a cultural problem where the Devs are pressured to “close tickets” (in JIRA terms) and report the closing rate as the main KPI. And as a Dev, if you can not voice your concerns @ the timeline properly you try to close as much as possible and hope nobody does a thorough review. Quantity > Quality. And if some hiccups should arise management has to give you more time (for the fix). It’s the desperate solution for getting resource allocation if you are hesitant to confront management about their shortcomings…

Focusing on the closing tickets as main KPI + lack of prioritization (imho) + the “messed up” (too early release) timeline is the true reason I believe FS is struggling so much with DT.

And to me, this would also explain why the CMs have to edit/amend the Updates. There is simply no structure/timeline at the moment. It’s total mayhem internally and I believe that management is struggling at the moment.

(Again FatShark. I know what I am talking about. I can help you guys. Just DM me. Let us sort this out properly. My company is in the EU :wink: )

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I worked for Wells Fargo back in the day and this was 100% how they operated. It was infuriating at all times. Any attempt to talk about ticket times was met with the most outlandish push back from Project Managers. At the same time if a ticket was closed in what they deem in an incorrect manner you were held responsible for it. But if you try to actually do your job per ticket you are again in trouble for not closing enough tickets per day/week/month.

Absolute insanity and the turnover rate was literally a new contract employee every single day in the office. I’m sure nothing has changed lol.

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Thank you for your insight!

This is the modern corporate version of “agile”… It is so dependent on competent middle management that is willing to escalate upwards if something just does not work. But ofc most of the middle management is also judged by KPIs and the nail that sticks out gets hammered in…

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