One week from launch, no statement? (edit: We had an update/statement but it's uuuh...)

[Jon]

Was expecting to see some comment or direction regarding the state of the game today but naturally we get nothing. Load up the game to maybe see if anything interesting is happening with the zones, but obviously not.

With that out of the way let’s hit the highlights.
This is a live service game that goes days without significant interesting modifiers or game modes being switched up. You don’t even have that many to begin with so what exactly is the problem?

Your game is sitting at a review score of 66% after people got to play the “final” version that is definitely not early access. This raised up a bit during the week but has since dropped off again.

You’ve also haemorrhaged half your playerbase in about a week, with even the Weekend of release only managing to retain 75/80% of players a couple of days after it was pushed out. You arbitrarily keep weapons out of the players hands with insane levels of RNG/real time wasting and there’s really no post level 30 content to keep players going. We can’t even really play around with different classes because unlike VT2 we only have one subclass for each and the build possibility is so rigid it’s quite frankly dull. You’ve thrown all this unfun grind on top of an otherwise fun co-op shooter and alongside lack of base content it’s really hurting it.

In that week the only comment from yourselves has been through PC Gamer about the “misunderstanding” of microtransaction store and your inability as a team or your game directors inability to recognise the greater problem of the games condition, both content & performance, being the trigger factors in setting people off about your predatory cosmetic store. The only thing we have to go on for Crafting (which doesn’t fit the game according to your community manager) is that it will be rolled out going into December? Week one still no idea when we will get these re-roll features.

You’ve got an aggressive marketing campaign going on with your pop up adverts and courting of streamers. Maybe make the core game interesting and you won’t need to lower yourself to this? Although it is fitting practice for the mobile game inspired direction the title obviously underwent.

It’s just a really odd way for a company to behave a week into a launch for a “live service”. It just makes me think “live service” is a bolt on last minute idea for you to ship a directionless/unfinished game and you’ll figure it out as you go along. I’d suggest this is a very bad idea considering your day one game breaking toughness rework which the majority of the community here asked you not to do.

[Keln]

Good thing Beta left such a “good” impression and that feedback was “listened” to
/s

[Jon]

The line of grim realisation.

[JanZamoysky]

Didn’t V2 had mixed reviews also at the launch? Thanks to all the issues we faced? Tbf the amount of V2 content CRASHES Darktide easily. No pun intended.

[Jon]

@JanZamoysky

Didn’t V2 had mixed reviews also at the launch?

I see this come up a fair amount. Is this meant to mean something like “wait a few months/years and the game will be in a good place”?

[heretic_soup]

I am not playing the game until the following are implemented

1. Private/Solo lobbies
2. Gear progression that does not rely on an hourly shop timer (I loathe the way gear works at the moment)

[JanZamoysky]

No, this is the Fatshark experience for you. ALL their games where a buggy mess. V2 still suffers from some issues even today.

To be frank, whilst I RECOMMEND the game on Steam, I feel Fatshark dropped the ball with amount of content when compared to V2. Especially when it comes to classes and maps. Stability and performance are also poor.

I would imagine the smaller scope was intentional as it was with V1 and to avoid the issues they had with V2 release…yet here we are. Just imagine how much more broken the game would be with more classes / maps.

I can only speculate, but I wonder how much the V2 development hell and the Tencent’s major stake https://www.gamereactor.eu/tencent-buys-major-stake-in-vermintide-developer-fatshark/ influenced what we got at the release. I mean after all the major players at Fatshark are likely set for life with the Tencent deal…their priorities aren’t necessarily ours.

[Jon]

I see what you are saying but it just makes me think FS are incompetent.

[HK77]

I’ve said it a few times: the slience is a PR nightmare. We should have been on hotfix x.x.18 by now. How hard is it to fix contracts tracking in-game binaries?

They need to acknowledge concerns, just state “we hear you” and not be defensive about it.

[Kumori]

The thing that frustrates people is that VT2 is the game they should look to for what works.

But instead of learning from it it seems they threw away literally everything and decided to do it again from scratch actively avoiding everything that worked well for VT2. It’s such a bizarre move.
It’s a bit wrong to say that VT2 had issues at launch thus Darktide isn’t so bad. Because the lessons from VT2 should help make Darktide better, not the inverse.

[JanZamoysky]

That is rather harsh in their case, game dev is hard and their resources are limited. I admit, even if I consider myself a massive fun of their Warhammer games, Darktide state is rather…disappointing. The cosmetic shop practices and their official response to our reaction are just insulting.

[JanZamoysky]

I know! This brings back memories of EA/DICE back in time I used to play Battlefield. It was the same story. The same issues were patched all over again with every new release since BF3. Lessons learnt were forgotten and delegated to the post launch fixes instead of being addressed during the initial development. Some were clearly ignored all together.

For any Fatshark dev lurkers, I stopped buying DICE games all together BECAUSE of those attitudes. So did TWO whole BF gaming communties I used to hang around with, easily 50+ players. It used to be the game series which was pushing my PC upgrades. Not anymore.

[Jon]

https://jobs.fatsharkgames.com

This is not an insignificant amount of people working there now. It’s not massive studio size but you’d assume with an increase in staff the ability to produce content would go up but apparently it leads them to become less efficient? Sounds like managerial problems to me.

[heretic_soup]

I was looking forward to this game and come launch week, I was dismayed to see the similarities between the Battlefield 2042 launch and Darktide launch

This includes community statements like “it’s only the beta” to features from a prior game being removed for no good reason

To give Darktide credit, it is more or less what people were expecting. It’s a 40k horde shooter made by FatShark and feels like it.

Battlefield 2042 is ‘Battlefield’ in name only

[JanZamoysky]

I really don’t know what to tell you Proto-ogryn to the rescue I suppose:

[Mike_Rotch]

Look at VT/VT2 stats and launch, and you’ll learn that FS learned nothing and is OK with this.

[Salo]

But we dont´t have to …

[Merdoc]

Gotta wonder about the size of their HR department.

[AsukasHeadphones]

Thank you for the post Jon. I had a cathartic experience reading it. I’m curious on where Darktide goes from here. I don’t want this game to fail, yet, at the same time, I am frustrated with Fatshark. I am annoyed that we’re starting all over from the beginning. I am beyond exasperated that the developer prioritized monetization at the expense of end user experience - at least provide an enjoyable experience before fleecing your players. I want to believe in this game, I do, however, Fatshark is making it really hard.

Their communication, silence on core issues raised by the community, their vague promises of improving performance, that “interview” with PC Gamer about the cash shop; it’s all so cynical. It’s hard for one not to be upset when reading into how this game is being managed thus far. We gave as much feedback as reasonably could in pre-“beta” and it’s a shame to see all that feedback being repeated yet again in release. Those issues should have been addressed, period. At the very least, the game should have been delayed and performance marked as a high priority item to address. I could have ignored most of the problems I had with the game if I could run it without fluctuating fps that results in gameplay inducing nausea.

In spite of all this, I still want Darktide to succeed. As a casual player I love the Vermintide games, they’re super fun to play. When I played Darktide I could see little shimmers of brilliance from Vermintide in it, yet, it’s being bogged down by so many issues that it makes the experience unfulfilling. If they can address those problems I can see myself rebuying the game again, spending more time with it, and changing my negative review to positive; but I’m leery with Fatshark’s track record. You know the saying expect nothing and you won’t be disappointed, so we’ll see I guess.

@JanZamoysky

Didn’t V2 had mixed reviews also at the launch?

You can check the steam reviews at store page for this. It doesn’t specify exact ranges but it gives you monthly estimates. From March to April:

The red box up above covers March the first to April the first, this roughly covers launch as well, it launched on the eighth of March by the way - you can verify this yourself by looking at the graph from steam review: Save 80% on Warhammer: Vermintide 2 on Steam. From those two data points the game had more positive than negative review ratio, which alludes to a solid reception. Memory is a fuzzy thing so too is self-confirmation bias, thus I could be wrong, but the data lines up with how I remember it. Anyways, I came from the first Vermintide and very much loved the sequel. The Gameplay is a huge upgrade compared to the first game, in my opinion. I stuck with Vermintide 2 because of that, it’s a fun game to play for a few hours a day then log out. I have over one thousand hours in Vermintide 2 now but that was over the stretch of multiple years.

What you’re probably thinking about though is when Winds of Magic released. That piece of content was a catastrophe for both the community and the developer. I think it impacted the overall score to mixed, some people that I know left the game because of it.

[Twick]

Yeah it did, and far be it from me to assume they learned their lesson with all the growing pains and feedback from VT2. They literally had years worth of player comments and feedback for VT2, they knew what their community was looking for in a game. And they threw ALLL OF IT AWAY for DT. Doesn’t make sense at all.