Let’s load up ye olde copy pasta
This has happened for years. And Fatshark doesn’t change, and won’t change, until they die. Because they won’t learn, and when people finally wise up and stop buying their products they won’t have time to adapt anymore.
I have been with Fatshark since f*cking Lead and goddamn Gold. I’ve bought every single one of their games. Every. Single. One. Even Krater, which I really liked.
They always follow the same cycle.
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They overpromise, and tell us all the cool things they’ll do.
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The game will come out with serious bugs/issues. They’ll tell us they’ll fix them.
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To their credit, they’ll put out some fixes. They’ll bring it up to the point it’s acceptable, but still not where it should be.
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For current gen games, they will then 100% disappear and start work on the console ports. This will take anywhere from 3-6 months, where you will never see anything out of Fatshark. No fixes, no patches, no PR. The community will fully die off to sub1k numbers despite how popular the game was.
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The console version will finally come out with all the fixes the core game needs, and it’ll be a true 1.0 product. Despite Fatshark saying the console versions weren’t slowing them since launch of the game, their patching will improve tenfold. We will get huge patches/DLC every week or so, and the game will become amazing and stable in weeks. We will all be amazed by how much Fatshark has turned it around even compared to their first few patches, never realizing they had maybe 10% of the studio doing those first few patches.
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The console version will be immediatly abandoned and will never receive half the patches of the PC version. Even if they sell well. It is a mystery.
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If the game didn’t initially sell well, it’ll get disappeared and never talked about again. Seriously Fatshark will just pretend the game never existed and start talking about their next product on the corpse of the now fully dead game.
The thing that makes it hurt the worst is Fatshark isn’t assholes about any of this. They obviously care. They obviously listen. They obviously want their games to be great. They put tons and tons of effort into their games, and once V2 gets past the console hump and back into the V1 streamlined patching system everyone will get a chance to see it.
But they cannot stop doing this stupid fcking cycle. And it’s going to kill them, and it’s constantly ruining their player retention. They need to get their sht sorted now, rather then later. They need a better patching policy. They need to hold back their games until PC/Xbox/Ps4 are all ready to launch same date so they can put their full studio behind fixes. They need an actual QA team.
This hasn’t been as big a problem in the past. Few people are like me. Few came from Lead and Gold to War of the Roses. Few went from War of the Roses to Vermintide. But a decent chunk of people went from Vermintide 1 to 2, and they are now fcking baffled by how this has happened twice in a row. Thing is, it’s not happened twice in a row, it’s happened 5-6 times in a row, and I could write a fcking clockwork engine on how it’ll happen again for their next game.
There can’t be a next time. Fatshark needs to figure this out now, with Vermintide 2. And I doubt they will, despite how bad they feel about these situations.
So now we approach the actual 1.0 product, two years later.
This version was modified due to the situation being so bad FS actually did put out some work - having a 100k+ launch day drop to sub-2k was enough to make the suits panic and try to rush-release some placeholder features - but still largely accurate. Xbox port gave us the class rework, itemization happens just before the PS5 port.
