Seriously, man, come on. How hard can it be to just tell us what you’re working on.
I’m embarassed to be a fan of your guys’ work. So rarely do I find within myself such a gulf of respect between a title and the people who make it.
I want to love your game. I want to tell my friends to play it. Hell, I want to give you my money. But you’re making that incredibly difficult because I’m not going to spend money, time, or conversation on a title with an uncertain future.
Please, for the love of Mike, just tell us what you’re doing already. If what you’re working on is so set in stone that you can tease us with it, it’s set enough to tell us what’s going on.
Stop shooting yourselves in the feet and just get on with it already, good lord. It’s like we’re collectively in a frustrating will-they won’t they with a videogame company, it’s ludicrous. I get none of us are Daddy Shareholder but they give you money when WE give you money. MAKE IT EASIER TO DO.
It’s like the number one thing they ask any new possible recruits if they feel it.
If they do they’re politely asked to leave
If they don’t they get the job.
I just can’t comprehend this level of pathetic failure to do the simplest things as a business any other way and the ability to just fail to meet their own basic deadlines and expectations over and over and over and over.
I encouraged a good friend to try out Helldivers 2 recently, going over the pros and cons and really discussing the merits of AHGS as a company, underlining their communication and responsiveness.
The pal says “If you say this, I’ll try it!” and I immediately recoiled, remembering how many people I advertised Darktide to… I literally had to put in a disclaimer saying “Yeah, well, don’t take my word for it. I advised DT as well, so…”
FS have really become the flagship of poor launches and the worst of GaaS where coop shooters are concerned, haven’t they?
Oh, they will get there. And I do know the drill.
Which is precisely why I’ll never spare any person I know the story of VT2 and DT. I will warn anyone, in any conversation where it comes up, and I will never suggest any product or service with the FS logo behind it.
Whilst I do agree that that is almost certainly the case, I still don’t think it excuses this type of operation. The things they refuse to do to help themselves and everyone else are so simple that I can’t fathom another explanation for them not doing them other than incompetence. And I don’t know about the rest of you, but when it comes to things with these stakes (large sums of money and large sums of time spread between hundreds of thousands of people) I think this is kind of unacceptable and should be dealt with firmly, if not for the sake of principle (which in a righteous world would be enough) then at least for the sake of the guaranteed long term health of their business.
In my pessimistic moments I do wonder if FS is just stringing us along. They have a pipeline for releasing premium cosmetics and apparently enough people buying them to support some level of continued investment in the game.
So long as they keep dangling the carrot of big improvements out in front of us with an ambiguous timeline attached, they can keep people thinking it hasn’t been “abandoned” and they can keep the whales harpooned. The second they announce any sort of scaling back of their own investment then they put that revenue source at risk.
My guess is there are a cpuple of devs hammering away on system improvements that can basically be financed by the MTX sales, and the rest of the team is moving on to something else. The pace of improvement here is not consistent with a team of 100+ people working on a flagship product. I don’t care how “flat” the organization is. Something is up at Fatshark and they are trying to keep the wool over our eyes as long as possible.
It’s incredibly unlikely that they will announce that the game is left to rot. Previously when Fatshark has left games for dead, Paradox were the ones to say (or not say) that dev had stopped, and then to shut down the servers. Fatshark just pretended the games didn’t exist, and had never existed.
This game is self published, so it’s all on Fatshark. It’s not in their interest to admit the game is left to rot, because then they will lose what few whales they have left.
The game is abandoned, though. Wanna know a secret? It always was.
They knowingly vomited out a completely broken and half finished game. The amount of full-stop bugs preventing people to play in the first months were staggering. Entire systems were missing. Entire things they had talked about weren’t in the game. Every single twitter account for every single Fatshark employee went completely dead on the day of release. They knew exactly what an unfinished mess they were releasing.
They then had a skeleton crew working on the game and the console port for the next 10 months, where they glacially introduced some of the things supposed to be in at launch (more maps, talent tree etc) and finished the console port, so that they could fulfill obligations to MS and to sell the game to a new group of customers.
Once they had done that, and sold their shovelware to as many people as possible, the skeleton crew was further reduced, to the point there’s barely anyone at all working on Darktide anymore.
It is realistically the only thing that explains the glacially slow development, it explains that they’re not willing to communicate, and it perfectly explains that the only functioning part of their game, the only thing that is updated without fail ever 2 weeks, is the cosmetic store. The store where they sell their outsourced cheap recolor slop for absurd amounts of money.
I love Darktide and the game experience it provides. I recommended it to friends and even purchased a few copies to get them to play, that’s how much. I continued to be optimistic about what was going on, but lately I can’t find a single reason at all to be. The game performs worse and doesn’t seem to get better. Flames and Psycher effects make this game slow to a crawl and really affects my melee play, just as an example.
I love the 40k universe and what the developers have given us. I hope more developers will create more of it! At this point though without an update from the devs and their history with mismanagement it really seems to be going poorly. I can’t be sure, but I’m sure someone can confirm or deny, but it seems they patched, a measley patch, and there are more cosmetics? It really seems like a big middle finger to the community while they grab for our dollars once again just to make some easy money. I’ll be honest I want to actually get all the cosmetics I saw in the store and almost decided to buy them…almost. But then I remembered an echo from another post where someone commented on the same exact thing. No game updates other than to put out cosmetics to make money in a cheap fashion rather than in substance.
Unless they’re paying almost 200 employees to afk then I’d say they’re 90% focused on the new unannounced game. Seems like the profitable thing to do since their games do tend to have a good amount of sales before falling off due to lack of support.
They don’t even have that. They have an external studio they hired for that. All FS does is change the albedo color on the materials to create color variations from the looks of it.
You know, the one mentioned in their job listings.
It would also be kind of unheard of for a game developer to not immediately go into development of a new game. There’s a lot of positions in a gamedev that are very focused on preproduction and concepting, and unless you want to always fire and rehire those people, you need to have them working on something.
Not to mention the time it takes to develop a new game means you can’t wait for a year or more after release to start the next one.
Then of course there’s the very obvious, that no people are working on Darktide.
