Psyker has now had the dubious honor of being unique in two respects; they are now not only the only class whose short story blog was delayed without cause (and delayed twice as long as the only other blog that was delayed at all), but now also the only class whose short story was not immediately followed up by a class spotlight on the following Saturday (the latest previous spotlight, the Zealot, was released by 11:30 Eastern U.S time).
And this after consistently being the redheaded stepchild of the marketing team, always receiving the least amount of screentime, only having two unique weapons so far revealed, and only having one staff in the insignia leak.
Can we at least acknowledge that something has clearly gone wrong? Is the class just riddled with bugs? Did they, for whatever reason, not finish it when they were supposed to and are now scrambling to catch up? Did all the footage get corrupted because someone didn’t properly shut down the servers? Is the existence of the class just some sort of mass hallucination that we’re all about to snap out of?
EDIT: Well, looks like I was a bit premature in my doomsaying. They did, in fact, release a spotlight - just two hours late. And in fairness, it looks awesome!
The answer is simple. The whole class system was reworked shortly before release. I’m guessing that because we see the 4 Guardsmen in the reveal trailer it was supposed to mean that there would be no classes in Darktide. In the many interviews the developers clearly stated that there will be no classes or careers like in Vermintide. Later we get a trailer with an Ogryn, a Zealot and two Veteran Guardsmen. That’s because these 3 classes were more or less complete and the psyker wasn’t ready yet.
That’s also the reason why there were only 2 Psyker exclusive weapons. The rest wasn’t ready to show and definitely not ready for testing. This must also be the reason why Psyker was the most buggy class of all and could spam brain burst. If you look at the media Fatshark has released you can see that at first there was just 4 characters with no classes like they said at the beginning and as we got closer to launch there was more and more classes ready to be revealed. Here’s a few examples of media in chronological order.
A quick reminder that it’s just my theory but everything I just mentioned and more is pointing towards this speculation being at least somewhat right. The 4th character in the second art I posted looks as if it’s vague for a reason. If the Psyker didn’t work they could quickly substitute a sniper class character and nobody would bat an eye.
My pure speculation is that system without classes either:
overwhelmed them. You would need to create tons of skill trees etc. for people to be able to build way different character builds without classes. This would not only require way way more creative work (making all talents and different effects for them, different ultimates etc.) but also absolutely mess of balancing post-launch with all synergies and broken combos players would discover. Way safer and faster was to copy a lot from V2 that worked.
They did close/internal testings and feedback was simply that classless system is just bland and boring (or simply too basic) and that subclasses from V2 felt way more distinguished and unique vs what that made for Darktide. If feedback was overwhelming they had to scrap the whole idea, accept that it’s better to have unique classes (that are also easier to balance/rework/fix). That’s why so much is just copy pasted from V2. They had to have ANYTHING on launch and making from scratch 4 unique classes was easier by copying from V2. Hence why so little on launch and so many delays.
But that is just my pure speculation but I have seen in my dev career many examples of whole systems being scratched at last moment becasue closed testing showed nobody liked that and it would be disaster on launch.
