For my own part, I have never played any non-WH Fatshark game, nor even heard of them before getting into Warhammer based Tide series. Sales and playrates of FS non WH titles are dramatically below their WH titles. The only reason anyone I know got into any Fatshark game was because they were already Warhammer fans. I dont personally know anyone who played VT2 or DT that wasnt already a longtime warhammer fan or at least acquainted with the setting.
If this game were instead “Battlesmasher 50 Million: Blackwave” instead of a 40k title, I wouldn’t be here, and I don’t think most other posters here would be either.
Total War was already a well established IP before getting into Warhammer, but the Tide series is entire tied to Warhammer.
It seems that there are different teams that work on different version of the game with different features.
Tbh, I have bought 3 kingdoms, and hated it. well, must say that I hated everything they have done after Shogun total war, except the warhammer ones. However, I would not say that the TW Warhammer have the spirit of the total war at beginning.
I must say that they pushed me to the point where I don’t even follow what they release.
But that’s just me… I feel that battles are less tactical and that the campaign mechanics have changed for the worst.
I agree with the battles. As far as campaign aspects, I hate the Shogun style of developing settlements. More tedious and annoying than fun.
As for the current system of building, it is simple. However I believe that mods show the current settlement system can have potential to have strategic thought and choice, without the annoying nature of the classic settlement system.
This discussion probably doesn’t matter because I don’t believe CA will ever make another good historical Total War title.
I loved the settlement system of Rome Total War 2 (mainly cause it is simple) and the tactical aspect of Shogun Total War.
Shogun has less different units, and that’s great. Also, all the units are like playing paper rock scissor. It was that in the first (that was not even in real 3d) and this was adapted to the 2.
Larain are legends they’re the game studio we need not the one we deserve gamers have really let out standards slip so far we almost forgot what a good game is. Then baulders gate and Helldivers two dropped and now gamers remember what it’s like to have fun and be respected as a customer instead of milked dry.
I believe that one of the issues is metagaming and progression.
Metagaming and progression did not exist when I was a kid. We just played games.
Many of them were poorly designed, making them extremely difficult, or they were ported from an arcade machine, meaning that even though you played them on a NES, they were designed to force you to spend money, making them unfair, but we still had fun.
You could get upset if your friend beat you in Mortal Kombat, Clayfighters, or Killer Instinct or when the computer tortured you in Nintendo World Cup as Brazil, but we always had a good time.
As a boomer (I’m not that old in reality), I despise progression systems and metagaming because if the games are good, those excuses for systems are unnecessary.
Ice Climber is as good today as it was when it was first released in 1985, and the game has no progression systems at all.
Alas, if you gather enough Fightan’ gamers together, you will definitely find metas for games like old school Mortal Kombat. Preferred fighters, ace movesets, etc. The only thing that kept that from being more apparent back in the day was the fact that most kids didn’t get a chance to play tons of people or play for long periods of time (especially if they only ever got to play in the arcade at the pizza shop or the like) and there either was no internet or no big easily accessible online communities had developed yet.
Newer MK titles, even without RPG progression systems, absolutely have metas that are widely discussed. The meta discussions around games like Super Smash Bros are legendary. You can even find metagame discussions around purely single-player games.
Any time there is choice, not just progression, you get metagame considerations.
Likewise, tabletop RPGs and wargames have always had metas of various sorts going way back to their inception. I can find articles on metagaming topics for hex-based wargames from the 80s, I recall a game called Ogre (about large nuclear-shell firing cybertanks facing off against whole companies of conventional armor) made by SJ Games (of Munchkin fame) having an article written where the author just said “just spam tons of light hover vehicles, don’t take any of the big heavier units, take a few casualties until you break the treads of the Ogre and just immobilize it halfway up the board and it won’t be able to win the game after that, works every time”.
Sure, but we didn’t have the interwebz yet and we lived outside the city (which were more like a village) so there were not a big number of kids to interact with outside of school and we had no places with Arcade machines. You needed to live in a bigger city for that.
We used to pass around sheet’s of paper to each other were we wrote down the combos for different characters and later we borrowed our parents printers to print out combos for NEO GEO fighters: nope none of us owned a NEO-GEO, but we had it on emulator.
That’s what I’m saying: people have been beaten into submission by the idea of metagaming and progression systems, and as soon as a game has a finite end, people go crazy over “devs sucks because they do not add content forever in a single player game”.
I agree, but my friends and I have never played metagames. Take Warhammer, which we played very casually because we were young and didn’t have money for paint and miniatures; we just played what we thought looked cool, and the majority of the gameplay consisted of homebrew rules; both because we didn’t have enough money to build armies and because, why not?
The most fun I remember having with my friends was playing the PC game “Die by the Sword” and, before that, “Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight” on the Amiga, which was a lot of fun in multiplayer.
Double Dragon was also enjoyable, but it never reached the level of “Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight” level of fun.
It’s not a big deal by itself. GGG has Tencent involved too, however Tentecent runs separated PoE client in China, with boosters and stuff. So it’s more about type of agreement. Fatshark it seems is in slavery, considering mtx and player retantions mechanics become worse than in V2.
ice climbers that takes me back to my very first gameboy advanced. When I got it, it was the first experience I had with games other than flash ones on neopets and miniclip.com when I was little. When I got my first gameboy advanced it came with a bundle of games called "the classic nese series. Donkey kong, super mario brothers og, Ice climber and the first ledged of Zelda all of those were some of my first real games.
I think progression systems can be done right its just the problem is these progression systems are lies, they aren’t progression systems they’re gatekeeping by grind to make you pull out your wallet. Heldivers has a progression system. A pass with fair prices and levels of grind that you can fill out at your leisure without fomo to keep you grinding day after day after day in a row unable to play any other games that you might want to.
Once fomo kicks in its no longer a progression system it’s a gate keeping system. They say they are making the rewards exclusive to pass completion so that we feel like we earned them and have value but if they were actually standing by that statement the pass wouldn’t have a time limit and they wouldn’t sell those skins in the shop separately after or give you the option to buy your way through the pass and skip the entire grind with more money.
I could easily point at overwatch 2 and diablo immortal as examples but the truth is blizzard is just one company out of hundreds that do this kind of crap as much as possible, I mean Bethesda put their reputation through the shitter after 76 and they still keep `doubling down on dishonest crooked business no matter how mad the fans get.
I’m never buying a Bethesda game again until Todd and the entire corporate management pushing this BS are gone so therefor I’m never buying a Bethesda game again because they have shown they would rather sleaze their way into bankruptcy than take accountability for multiple illegal and many, many more unethical business practices.
They’ve effectively pulled them before. More specifically by allowing the license to expire without even entertaining a renewal. Which is functionally the same - if note meaner - since when a license expires ALL items sold under it have to be pulled from sale. Plus GW did something smart - they don’t give the buyer a license to Warhammer or 40k itself. That way lies the whole Macross/ Harmony Gold mess etc even without exclusivity. They license specific parts (orcs, space marines, etc) for a specific project. Then if the guys they sold to proves too inept too many times they can just walk away. And right now ObeseTuba is on two strikes and one ball. I know I would hate to be the person who has to make a sales pitch for yet another license with that sort of track record.
My suspicion is that initial sales numbers are enough that GW is content. It would surprise me if GW at any stage monitors the mood of the playerbase on reddit of forums. They’re probably also not terribly concerned if long-tail sales are low, if the initial sales were ‘good enough’.
They might check on player numbers, but… It’s not an MMO with a monthly recurring payment, or a battlepass game with monthly recurring payment.
I have no inside knowledge of GW at all, but I suspect as long as reviews were OK (and they were), and sales were decent or even good… they don’t care.
I mean, hell. PC Gamer even managed to give Darktide an award for launching completely broken and unfinished, and then taking a year to partly introduce features that were missing at launch.
In the eyes of the hopelessly inept gaming ‘journalism’ world and as far as GW is concerned, Fatshark probably did just fine.
