I know that Darktide is going to be an online ONLY game, since fatshark is seeing themselves has a developer of online service style games since Vermintide 2, but can we at least see the drawbacks of this for a fatshark second?
Realistically I dont see fatshark going under or pulling a Ubisoft for the forseable future, but what if they did? They can’t support regular updates, keep the dedicated servers running, or just want to take the servers out back and give them the Emperor’s Mercy because it has become an older game. Now we have a game we cant play at all. Sure they could go back to peer2peer, but that brings up my original issue with Vermtide. Want to play the game and have a crappy internet or have no internet at all for the time being and maybe forseable future? Whelp that sucks…suffer. You boot up the game and are promptly required to close the game because you dont have an online connection.
I know that there is only a few people that may have this issue, but random “they’re not gonna do it, stop complaining” people aside it’s worth considering. Having played the beta, the gameplay alone will keep me entertained, not just the coop experience, especially since what we saw has been confirmed to not be all of it.
If even, we are talking about Fatshark going completely bankrupt or a minmum timescale of ten years. We dont know what will happen in that time. Its perfectly possible that we would be already on Darktide 3 when the servers for Darktide 1 would go down, its also perfectly possible that other companies would buy the Tide-series or that privateservers would be enabled. Considering that Tencent owns a good amount of Fatsharks shares, its also possible that they will keep the games alive.
what is the -tide series? coop games.
coop = other people → other people means online.
if you don’t intend to play with others, thats fine you can play like you want
however its out of place to make demands that aren’t aligned with the concept of the game.
and sure Dedicated servers have disadvantages obviously, but they also have many advantages that honestly make a lot of sense for a coop/multiplayer based game.
overall i think the advantages heavily outweight the negatives
There is quite literally no good reason for the game to not have offline play or support for peer-to-peer / private servers. Other then a fear that players will avoid the primary servers to play with mods and so on, allowing them to bypass the intended progression grind and paywalled cosmetics.
Which is a silly fear. Fundamentally. Because even if offline play, peer-to-peer play, and private server play is available, the overwhelming majority of players will play on the primary servers, or whatever way there is to play the game that requires minimal effort or setup.
Hopefully the developers will come to their senses and add necessary preservation features so that the game can be played, as all games should be able to, indefinitely into the future.
There are no arguments against these basic features that aren’t anti-consumer, anti-player, and honestly, they are to the detriment of the game itself and just insecurity from the developer / publisher.
It’s not out of place to want the game to survive indefinitely into the future. If one day you can no longer play the game because the official servers are down, just because basic peer-to-peer, private server hosting, and offline play features weren’t added before said official servers went down, it’s just silly… there’s no reason for any game to not have basic preservation features.
Even MMO’s, which are far more defined by being online, as you are playing on a large server with hundreds or thousands of others, often have server emulators that allow them to be played after the official servers go down.
Darktide is a four player coop game, inspired by Left 4 Dead, and should take notes from Left 4 Dead, which will be playable basically forever.
There’s two main kinds of online game. The one where there’s a server and the ones where you host. As I’m not any kind of programmer I can’t say too much on this topic, but the ones where they set up to make it easy to find each other/run solo/whatever are forever games.
The ones that are hard locked to another computer somewhere, even if it’s just for the hub or matchmaking, die.
Titanfall 1 is dead. Totally dead. Rumors have it that hackers angry at EA are ddosing and they don’t think it’s worth it to secure an older game. You can’t even get Titanfall 1 to touch base with anything.
Normally they’d be online-only because offline players don’t spend money on MTX and the like, but DT is asking full price for the base game. I think it’s reasonable to offer an offline option.
he/she only could be “right” if one method is objectively superior, wich it isn’t. both have advantages and disadvantages attributed to them.
and yeah sure you could always argue “just do both”. but that’s just not practical from the
perspective of the developers.
any hour a developer sits on their pc programming/implementing something, costs money.
so its only natural they have to decide what gets put into the game and what doesn’t.
to put in a system with the only benefit of it is to fail-safe an perfectly fine system and to ensure longevity would be a huge waste of money wich might or might not be worth it ( i don’t know how much yearly sales V1 or V2 have at this point.
and frankly dedicated servers have many many advantages over peer to peer systems.
both for consumers and devs.
PS:
EA as an argument, lol don’t buy crap from them, they have stopped caring for their communities 20years ago
No, it’s not about whether or not one method is ‘objectively superior.’
It’s a simple question of game preservation.
“Will I still be able to play the game in ten years after its release?” If the answer is not a definite “yes,” there’s a problem.
Also, many games you can run your own dedicated server. And in regards to Titanfall, Titanfall 1 is dead, yes, but Titanfall 2 has survived because modders were able to create an alternative multiplayer client (Northstar) due to the official servers being largely unplayable.
Game preservation will be an important issue in the coming decades. There are games you can buy right now and can’t play because the official servers are permanently down. Sure, you can refund them if you buy them off Steam, but what about the players who owned the game, played and enjoyed it, then come back and can’t play due to an arbitrary always online “games as as service” requirement?
Hopefully as generations more familiar with online products, gaming, etc. take the reigns of the world’s courts - which is unavoidable - we’ll see some legal landmark cases which prevent more games from dying for, well, no reason at all.
Anyway, if Fatshark is player-centric - as they claim - then I’m sure they’ll set up ways to play when their official servers are no longer available, if that becomes the case.
This, but they will see those as non-issues or “too little playerbase to care” problems. I went a full year with vermintide installed and no internet. I sat there looking at a game I put way too many hours in with which I absolutely could not play because of circumstances out of my control. It makes zero sense to have more and more games keep this online service mentality with zero wiggle room for people that want to play an ultimately fantastic game alone. People will defend it, but ultimately it is the largest disregard for the consumer considering the devs have a killswitch, whether they consider it one or not. Teams change directive and underlying motives and agendas surface over time, Ubisoft and EA shutting down servers for games still being played. Tencent is not a great reassurance.
Considering that they are shutting down stuff that is used by like 100 people, i dont see much of a problem. You guys are making it out like devs release an online game and immediately delete it after the most profit has been reached. Its never going to be like that, but it was always expected that not every online feature for every game will live forever. We already have more than enough MMORPGs that closed their official gates.
Yeah, but if I want to play a game that I bought long after it is popular, I should be able to, same way I should be able to read a book way in the back of my closet that I haven’t touched in years.
1. Grant of License.
THIS GAME IS LICENSED TO YOU, NOT SOLD. Ownership to the Game and all intellectual property rights in and to it remains at all times the property of Fatshark and, as applicable, its licensors.
Subject to your compliance with the terms and conditions of the EULA, Fatshark hereby grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, limited, fully revocable right and license to install, access and use (and to let members of your family or household to use) the Game on your personal computer or any other game play device on which the Game is used (“Unit”), strictly for non-commercial purposes only. You may install the Game on different Units, but may only run the Game on one Unit at a time.
(emphasis added by me). So you might think, that EULA bounds FS to keep the game accessible, but by the time you get to paragraph 10:
Fatshark warrants that the Game will provide the features and functions generally described in the product specification at the time of your purchase and in the product documentation.
FATSHARK DOES NOT WARRANT THAT THE GAME OR YOUR ABILITY TO USE IT WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED OR ERROR-FREE. TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, WE DISCLAIM ANY IMPLIED WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
So, any experts on Swedish law can maybe chime in on this one?
P.S. Paragraph 11 is an interesting read to the guys arguing about EAC in other threads
i took this from EU law segment consumers/unfair contract terms
if you bought a game with the intended multiplayer function but had this function removed or is not accessible for other reasons and have not made an effort to inform you pre-purchase you are eligible for refund.
so this is a bit tricky, but as far as i understand,
to sell the license to you they have to promise that all the advertised functions are usable, including multiplayer
and changing this promise in an ongoing contract without specified end (wich all games are afaik) without proper justification is unlawful
question remains is it justified to terminate online functionality when you don’t profit from it?
and how long do you have to provide all promises made until someone is not eligible for refund?
The best part about all of this legal speak is that it still doesn’t make an arguement against an offline mode. Vermintide 2 doesn’t even have offline compatabilty and I can play with only bots if I wanted to. It doesn’t make sense to not have it in a PvE game, coop or not.
The only reason I could possibly understand this decision is if they just want to throw advertisements for microtransactions in our face at all times playing the game, and even then that’s not a great reason.
Take Blight: Survival for example. The devs have been making it a point that since the game is strictly PvE, which i assume Darktide will still be unless we are damned with a darktide battle royale, the idea of an offline mode is something they are definitely considering since the fans want it…and it is PvE.
There are zero good reasons for it not to be a thing.
This is basically it. By forcing online-only, players are constantly presented with new things to buy. This is also why the hub is set up the way it is.
If they added an option to play solo or with bots instead of players, but still online, I think many (though not all) of the complaints about online-only would go away. Hell, they could even kit your bots up with cosmetics you don’t have yet if advertising is a main driver.
If they’re setting things up like other live-service, online only titles, it’s also arguably better for anti-cheat since that function happens on the servers rather than the player’s local system.
