Both Helldivers 2 and Darktide use the same engine.
Obviously, I can’t say if the engine is to blame for the bugs because I have no experience with game development other than fooling about in the Neverwinter Nights creator as a teenager, but I can say that Darktide and Helldivers 2 share some of the same jankiness and bugs at times.
I don’t think there’s even a debate to be had. It is factual - Somewhere in that content development pipeline of Fatshark, there is one gigantic bottleneck that’s causing massive slow-down. I’m no process manager consultant and I don’t know their inner workings, but it’s been dragging on so long - They need to optimize that. They need to find the bottleneck and plug it, because this is just uneconomic.
Fatshark’s been tracking on with the heaven’s graces and despite all resistance, not because of the way they work. They’ve got something unique, but they don’t utilize it as much as they could. They gotta iron that out or it will become their undoing eventually.
I say this not as a critic, but as someone who loves the stuff they put out, WHEN they finally get around to it.
I know we don’t agree on a lot of stuff, but it really has to be a mix of policy, process and management that is just… not working.
It seems clear and factual that policy and/or process around communication is also deeply flawed. Not just to the point of losing out on hype/goodwill/customers, but to the point where their comms policy is actively harmful to their company and their products.
If glassdoor reviews is to be believed, they also have a problem of underpaying their staff, and not providing enough advancement opportunity - leading to a revolving door of senior staff leaving, and new people coming in.
That is a huge problem. The long term effects of losing institutional knowledge is, just on it’s own, an enormous downside. On top of that, it generally takes a very long time to onboard new developers to internal process, tools, engine, and all the rest. Doubly so if the new hires are generally inexperienced as well.
Obviously, as has been demonstrated dramatically across the industry in the past 12 months, Fatshark is hardly alone in not putting value on institutional knowledge. Firing and hiring is depressingly common across the industry.
But yeah, if one assumes (as one must at this point) that they have something deeply flawed in their process, then churn of staff and loss of knowledge would compound the issue even more.
Ironic really, as institutional knowledge is the core benefit of the established franchise formula - Having baseline work, code bases, animation rigs and such already done to build upon it.
Yet that is precisely something that cannot be utilized without institutional knowledge.
This would also explain why ‘solved problems’ from VT2 cropped up again in Darktide: none of the teams communicate already, so the senior devs leaving means that the people left for Darktide would have to rebuild stuff from scratch.
fatsharks patches and all other games patches do that too so as far as I’m concerned Arrowhead gets the win they’re for speed and efficiency. Darktides patches add bugs too the difference is it takes months for fatshark to do $h1t. Fatshark on every level scream “The people on the top of the totem poll are morons.” I feel bad for this games dev they probably feel like a dog getting blamed for their owner crapping on the neighbor’s lawn. As far as I’m concerned, the entire upper management at fatshark is beyond incompetent and they need to be fired.
Very true, but I think the key difference is “severity” of said bugs. From my experience the bugs in HD2 have been rather obvious and obnoxious, while the bugs in DT have been… “subtle”, by comparison.
If anything it may be that DT has had time to mature since its very rocky release, and by now has already delt with the biggest issues…
Huh?
There was basically a whole month where the director broke and wouldn’t spawn anything in the upper difficulties.
How is that a subtle bug? Literally multiple people reported this and it was a huge problem.
As someone who changed from Nvidia to AMD about mid-2023 and spent a good month trying to get darktide to cooperate without flip-a-coin crashes on elevator transitions and other weirdness, they 100% share bugs as i had to do the same thing on HD2’s launch week.
That being said, support for DT was basically shrug and “AMD problem”, whereas Arrowhead came out pretty quick and aknowledged that the game had issues on AMD hardware and they were working on it (with AMD).
The mid-feb '24 drivers from AMD with HD2 fixes also fixed a random frame rate stutter issue i still had in DT with RT on at medium+ as well as no longer needing to downclock 100mhz to avoid random crashes in DT (and only DT prior to HD2).
And yea, neither game was particularly subtle, at least not if you had a 7900xtx.
DT you could at least reconnect and finish the round if you disconnected, HD2 was essentially unplayable for anyone who couldn’t get it stable by downclocking the first two weeks, and for some entirely unplayable the second week no matter what end-user tricks you used (including me, crashing when the extract came in like clockwork was… not amusing).
The lack of a reconnect in HD2 however, means that you’d play 20-30 minutes with no issues, then lose the lot when the inevitable crash hit on extract.
Do that 8+ times and realize you’re still the same level you were 3-4 days earlier with only a couple of pickup medals to show for it and no samples, your motivation dips somewhat.
While I like Swen, he’s still bit of a cnnt for silently selling 30% to tencent and trying to keep it hush hush.
a lot of the bugs in both games are subtle but If I’m being honest in my experience fatsharks server stability isn’t any better than helldivers I’ve had basicly the same amount of crashing in both games
I’d say
in fact I think if there had been gamer management instead of a corporate mindset there since launch we’d be playing a very different game and having a very different conversation the devs have talent it shows bright as day but upper management is making their job a freaking nightmare and they’ve turned this game into heresy
Must say I supported AMD for more than 20 years… and I had Radeon graphic cards when it was not AMD…
Switched to intel + nvidia. Won’t come back to AMD.
They may have fair prices, I want something stable and prefer paying more.
I wait for arrow lake (everything is ready to assemble miss only motherboard, cpu and RAM (to be sure to take something compatible with my CM)) and new Nvidia graphic cards…
Nvidia is insanely expensive, but again, I am tired of crashes and unexpected bugs / errors that you can meet with AMD GPU.
Well, what do you know…
I didn’t know. And just as I was giving them praise for giving WotC the finger.
Tisk tisk.
That’s very outdated. Tencent owns a majority of stock by now.
But I guess Swen had to finance another yacht or something.
I almost miss Bobby Kotick, almost.
Official records, as far as I can see, show the above distribution of shares to still be in effect.
Some official records don’t even show Tencent to be within the shares. Others show nothing past 2019.
Maybe I’m just bad at researching this stuff. Regardless - I was surprised. And a bit more jaded now.
Business is business, after all.
The only source I found for Tencent is 1) in Swedish and 2) paywalled, but it is cited for Tencent having majority control of the studio. Google is, as expected, useless, but it is kinda funny to find that Swen owns almost all the remaining shares and does explain some of the stupidity.
