I’m betting they’ve abandoned this game, took all the content they had in the works as a base to make a Darktide 2 so they can have reviews higher than 30%.
But then as always, they’ll release the game with half the core features missing, have no updates for months as they work on a console port no one plays, and abandon the game once the reviews turn sour.
It’s the Fartshart cycle of idiotic development. I can’t imagine being one of the absolutely amazing environment artists or gameplay guys and knowing for a fact that all your work exists to get shat on by management and marketing.
Willing to bet that comm-link will have nothing of substance, and probably note how hard they are ‘discussing player concerns internally’ or how they can’t give us a road map because that’s far too complex.
If we are really lucky, they’ll announce how they are ‘re-balancing’ all the RNG mechanics to make them even worse. Then they’ll put out a promo video about the ‘mountain’ of content they been releasing.
Its slowly progressing to the standard we were promised at launch. Which means they remain a minimum of 8 months behind schedule. Tools Of War only brought us up to the 70+ promised weapons. Just as one example.
This isn’t meant to be an insult. But its meant to be accurate. The leadership team released the game, lets say, 8 months early. That means everything up until now for the most part has just been playing catch up. Its an early access experience being sold as a complete product. I really like this early access experience. But we were promised certain things as part of the released experience and we haven’t received them. Namely new classes every quarter. However, from my view, the game has reached what is nearly a release state. So if we start receiving new classes and (I hope) a few new weapons then I think we have entered after-launch release status level service. The game has its issues still but its not barebones anymore.
Hopefully they tackle the most pressing player feedback promptly so we can all run out to our friends and finally yell “its good now, come back”.
But at the same time, even if they start pumping out new classes every quarter, people aren’t gonna stay once they hit the longer strides of later level grinds. Darktide needs serious QoL improvements and they could do with an entirely new itemization system.
Extra classes aren’t gonna bring in more players if we gotta pay for them, and we don’t even know how they’re gonna implement them.
Darktide needs a VT2 style rebirth to survive, frankly.
if resources were unsiloed and (hypothetically) curios were able to be shared across characters. We could take advatnage of +EXP curios. But I don’t mind the grind to hit level 30. Just the grind to get a decent class weapon to try.
Honestly, it’s a bit ridiculous how stubbornly they refuse to acknowledge player feedback on wants and needs. If they finally do respond it’s 3+ months too late. They look completely incompetent at this point.
I do wonder what the flip they are even spending development and production time on at this point?
Everytime we get a new link post is all about how they are talking about stuff - when are they actually going to deliver?
If I had to guess, these design decisions are done via consensus and meetings, which suggests that there is someone or someones holding the whole thing up because they have concerns over X or Y, not realising that while they dither their game is dying on the vine.
I’d also guess that there are a lot of employees at FS frustrated and pissed off with that group, both from a developer and player perspective.
Returned to the game and forum after few months. Only difference I see is no comments from the fervent bootlickers and apologists in every criticizing thread(game’s no different, still only has the atmosphere right). I wonder why…
Fatshark prioritized monetization over making the game user friendly and rewarding. Just look at all of the FOMO and RNG mechanics that are stuffed in. People noticed how awful it was in the first month and left forever. I couldn’t even convince my friends to buy the game after they played the beta. I truly wonder how they messed up something so simple by being greedy.
They allegedly have no real hierarchy in management so uh…yeah. The managers aren’t doing their jobs, which means projects take forever and are a sea of bad compromises, last minute fixes, and interlocking bad features.
