As much as I hate to say it, this is probably true.
We joke about ‘Fatshark time’ but lets be real: them being slow isn’t a desire to polish things, it’s not a desire to be perfectionists, it’s just a lack of manhours spent on the game while they direct the bulk of the studio towards making the next pump and dump. Otherwise the releases of the new stuff for any given game would be perfect and bug-free: instead we get typos, bugs for the most basic of talents, and tons of easily avoidable problems with every update.
I’m still waiting for the Guardsman to start feeling like a Guardsman. How long is that going to take with a skeleton crew, when they can’t even stick to the deadline of an announcement of an update.
Fatshark moving on to the next projects certainly squares with their attitude towards and lack of desire to grow a base of players that will support the company overtime.
Lots of hype, great initial launch numbers, and then let it slowly whither out, milking what you can through MTX purchases. Seems to be the case for DT anyway.
VT2 launched in a better place (still had lots of issues) but did seem to have a better cadence of content releases, even if some of it like WoM wasn’t well received. Now with VT2 Versus mode it seems like they have more invested in sustaining that than DT.
They have, unexpectedly, dropped the actual devblog. It looks pretty good. It’s still oddly slow dev-wise and I still think they’re on a skeleton crew because it really shouldn’t have taken 4 months to say ‘we’re tying in more cosmetic unlocks to penances, automating what our support staff were doing to people’s characters, and giving that one NPC a job’.
Stupid question, but didn’t they make a Steam announcement in March on what they’re planning? I get that Fatshark is… questionable, when it comes to communication, and slow, when it comes to releasing updates… but with topics like this I can’t shake the feeling like it got ignored, as if they didn’t say anything…?
Or is it a case that people are now more used to the way HD2’s devs communicate (i.e. much more frequently)?
They said they were planning first a penance update, then a crafting one. In that announcement (mid-March) they said we’d hear more by the end of March.
sotto voce We did not hear more by the end of March.
They’ve finally released the devblog for the penance changes. It’s…well, it’s progress, but it’s underwhelming for 4 months of work. More ‘this should’ve been at launch’ kinda stuff.
To be fair, considering the articles about randomly generated maps out of tiles and a system that does not rely on RNG, I think everything they’re building is something that should have been there at launch. I think Darktide is not in Fatshark’s intended 1.0 state and won’t be until nearly 2025.
Someone pointed out that if Darktide had gotten the time HD2 had to release a polished product, it wouldn’t have gotten out until 2026.
I think the difference between the games proves that that level of development is pretty much unavoidable - either you put out a good product after that long or you release early and spend the rest of that time mostly playing catch-up.
I think one thing that could have saved sone of the bad press was early access but that ship sailed a long time ago.
The flip side of that would be that updates would need to be somewhat consistent and shoving in micro transactions would be a bad look.
I’ll see when other stuff comes out but so far I’m feeling very underwhelmed since battle passes and any “progression track” usually has a dumb amount of items that are entirely there to slow down progression.
I agree for the most part for the love of gods talk to us. An update where you tell us “hey we’re working on it but so far we are still held up and it will be a long wait.” literally that, literally anything but silence is better! The helldivers devs know this they have been very open and direct with the community and the fan base loves it myself included.
and content in this game upon delivery is not good enough to justify the waits we have and even less to justify the content added. Stims should have been here day 1, class trees should have been here day 1. A decent crafting system should have been day 1.
The whole point of live service is to add longevity to a game by engaging with the players on a dynamic level and directly engage them with exiting content. instead, game after game use it as a justification to release an unfinished game and charge full price
Karnak was good but not worth the wait same with the carnival districts. The lobbies almost feel more lonely by the day I swear every six months it seems like the player base is halved again and again.
I don’t think the game is “abandoned” quite yet. It took about 523 days or 17.19 months (1yr, 5.19 months) from the release of VT2 before updates slowed to a crawl (Release Date → Winds of Magic). Covid struck a few months later internationally. The next major update, not counting classes such as GK or Outcast Engi, was Chaos Wastes 616 days or 20.25 months (1yr, 8.25 months) later. I’ve seen lots of mixed opinions about Chaos Wastes from trve modded vermintide veterans, some of which are my friends, but to me personally CW was an insane update which I played for hundreds of hours with people.
Where does any of this information leave us with Darktide? Well, Darktide was released 1 year, 4 months and 5 days ago from today. A first look at how Vermintide 2 would tell you that we’re heading into a dark period of few notable updates but this assumption cannot be trusted for a big reason.
Remember that VT2 did not start with a cash shop - it was added in May of 2020 or roughly 9 months after WoM. Furthermore, as we’re all painfully aware, Darktide released in a broken, unofficial early access state with a cash shop already bundled in. I wouldn’t be surprised if the incentive of more money just by fixing the game over time changed their priorities slightly. Some of this is, in my opinion, already apparent in their desire to both overhaul penances and then also fix crafting in some major update many months from now.
A real cynical way of looking at penances is that it’s a way for Fatshark to increase the commitment of people who do play the game and over a long time scale. Just like people have a hard time quitting games they’ve paid money into, people have a hard time quitting games they’ve played much of. Penances can promote the latter behavior if done right. There wouldn’t be a point in updating penances unless they expected to take advantage of the temporary population booms brought about by large updates in some way or to introduce small / filler events in the future with rewards or both. It’s worth remembering that the last few little “events” we had often required nothing more than logging in or playing the game before a certain date or subscribing to that one WH streaming service, all of which are all generally quite different to VT2 events that incorporate event-specific challenges like, say, winning a few rounds on legend or champ.
And, of course, Crafting is by far the most complained about aspect of Darktide besides a lack of content and lack of weapon variety. There will still be people who dislike the game’s state after its revamp but there will be less to complain about concerning the base game and the complaints will shift to other categories that are less passionate and less controversial. I’m sure Fatshark can make some money along the way too.
i know for a fact there has been a vast gulf between what fatshark said the game was going to be and what the community developing interesting in it beleived it was going to be.
shame i don’t have any idea how to resolve it aside from making a lot of people angry so they’ll leave and improve the remaining playerbase.
they will never be able to give everything they promised they’re too dysfunctional and miss managed. Helldivers is out here dropping two patches a week sometimes and adding new toys and content all the way as well meanwhile in fatshark five bug fixes take a minimum of a freakin month. Darktide didn’t even feel like it was out of beta to me until they added stims and crafting still sucks a$$.
I mean still ffs all we got last year was updates for mechanics that should have been their day 1 or just token content that gets old in a couple days and goes right back to feeling like grind. I mean what meaningful content did we get last year? Karnak and the two carnival missions was basically it.
There’s never gonna be the promised single player at this rate and fatshark has broken many promises over the years and never talk to the community or take responsibility. Which again is something helldivers does a great job of. Basicly I didn’t realize how badly darktide failed until I saw what it could have been and now I’m frankly angry. They have completely bungled this whole game into a slow drawn out mess like star citizen.
I’d wouldn’t use HD as a “good” example of patching, as the amount of fairly big bugs they release (no pun intended) per patch is rather high. Sure, these bugs will then be patched relatively quickly with the next patch, but there’s a good chance you’ll get something else that’s broken…
Their content release schedule, on the other hand, seems decent.
just by fixing the game over time changed their priorities slightly. Some of this is, in my opinion, already apparent in their desire to both overhaul penances and then also fix crafting in some major update many months from now.