the crafting materials are way too rare, the crafting interface is horrible, the crafting system is still unusable.
you put a large amount of talents, weapons and mods in the game with many stats and this implies fat shark wants us to be able to have multiple build paths, and to be able to explore different styles of play.
Then for no good reason you make the crafting system impossible to use, so that no one can explore different styles of play easily.
This means there is no end game and no reason to play.
the reason people still play v2, even if they have every weapon maxed out, is that they enjoy the game and playing different builds.
By forcing endless grind with no rewards you limit builds, and people get bored and stop playing.
thats why the numbers are bad for player retention.
the only clear motive for this is to save money on sever costs, now that you sold so many copies of the game.
this is why no one is happy with you, you are not that slick fat shark, you did not fool anyone.
You’ll find that Darktide has a very similar player retention history from launch with Vermintide, and especially VT2.
Vermintide was very unpopular on both of its releases, but VT2 had the backing of diehard fans shilling the title to their friends and family. It also launched with all the content they added to VT1 over the course of 3 years. VT2 at launch had very little new content over its prequel on release.
Most players come to a realization that the game either requires too much of them or too little.
While I might agree that they tried too much and achieved too little with Darktide, it’s going to be the exact same rollercoaster over the course of its lifespan.
this is almost every progression based game Tencent gets it’s hooks into; mandatory grind walls that do not make sense outside of the Asian market. If you buy a game Tencent co-owns, this will ALWAYS happen
its also problem of no vision, designers gave idea how crafting would look like, blogs and videos were made, even devs made “coming soon” buttons showing the hints of functionality…
the final product was something totally different than they described, seems like typical agile management issues…
Pivoting harder than a railway turntable. Same with the character progression/system. If DT had a completely different character system (like the one being hinted at pre-beta) I don’t think people would have bat an eye at there only being 4. It’s just the fact the format became a carbon copy of VT2’s and having only 27% of the careers/classes that it had is a sore point. Along with the frankly insulting blog post that tried its hardest to say that classes were not careers during the open beta.
VT2 at launch had very little new content over its prequel on release.
I mean we had a full set of new mission with no short mission so as much map content as VT1 when it launch (not accounting for dlc).
The full concept of talent tree and sub class came from here
weapon talent where rebalanced.
A whole new faction and several new bosses and special even for the skaven.
The deeds system while flawed was a new thing.
A bunch a free lootable cosmetic with some great look in it.
boss fight for the first time except a prototype in a dlc for VT1.
For something that was sell as the update for the one it did a lot of great things I would say. That’s why my friends stuck to VT2 when I was the only one around in the first game (still sometime miss my infinit gatling for kruber repeating rifle^^).