Please Stop Adding Content to a Dead Game Mode

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
102

Agreed, but the question is: will they fix it, how much will it cost, and how many people will engage with the mode if they do?

It ultimately comes down to money, and if something is more expensive to fix than to discard, the decision is simple.

That is why it is critical for any studio or business that sells something to sell something that consumers want, or to convince customers that they want something they did not know they wanted (telemarketing).

As a business, you cannot work like an artist.

You cannot paint just because you enjoy painting.

You need to paint stuff that people want to buy.

My father was a talented artist before he had a stroke, but the reason he never made it big (he had a lot of success and is still a member in the regional artists guild, but he never made it big) and had to keep his day job as a teacher was because he wanted all of his work to have a lot of political meaning and say something, and the truth is that the majority of people who buy art don’t care if the work says anything about the political climate, religion, or equality.

People in the majority care about if the product looks cool, is easy to understand (doesn’t have a lot of underlying themes), or is something that everyone wants because the artist is famous.

As a game developer, you cannot just sit in your ivory tower and do whatever you want since your job is to sell a product to you and me and profit.

Passion projects exist, but Fatshark is not a small indie developer who works on games that they are passionate about in their free time.

Fatshark is a relatively big studio that sells games as a service to produce revenue for its investors.

103

yes i get it. similar to Concord and Highguard. I am sure they were pretty passionate but did not understood the climate and so they sank and now all of them are mostly jobless. Still I doubt all those youtube videos shitting on thier work was necessary. Same here, we can perhaps not use the tone that is expected from a viral chaser youtuber. I think its best if we moderate in what we say.

105

In the beginning they did. One or two of the combat design devs would explain how things worked every now and then, but it was already a pretty uncommon occurrence.

Fun fact: one of the devs explained how they chose what stat bars to display for weapons: it was completely arbitrary and depended on whoever happened to be working on said weapon.

106

I defer to you then. All this shït starts blurring together after a while. I’m 36 going on 78.

107

… okay yeah you miss what the problem with those games was.

They weren’t sh-t because of ‘woke’, they were sh*t because they were soulless corporate products written to appeal to what a bunch of MBAs vaguely conceived as the modern audience. And because MBAs are the dumbest motherf-ckers in existence and understand literally nothing, they created something written by your average HR department and with about as much depth of personality.

No demons, no ‘infection’, no weird-ass culture war narrative like you’ve got going on here…just businesspeople being absolutely sh*t at things because anyone with actual writing ability or intellect got pre-screened-out during the process of making those things.

108

Brother, I didn’t think you were new here, but this betrays that assumption.

We have offered constructive criticism on many things, including expeditions. I’m one of the few that fell somewhat in love with it at the start.

But we, at best, get “we hear you” from julia, who is not even a CM. 99/100 times we get silence.

Several people asked the CM directly if they had any plans to stick with expeditions and bring out its potential and we’ve heard squat. Now we see it’s getting a “new” map and some new environmental threats (like that is what the mode really needed), which is the same treatment Mortis got, less so actually because they added 3 whole different indulgence types with its new map.

If they won’t talk to us, it means they don’t want our “help” and the best we can do is go with their historical behavior. That behavior is to half ass things no one asked for but that may have actual potential, drop 1 mid update, and abandon it.

Knowing that, the community has shifted from offering constructive criticism on a mode we didn’t want anyway into begging them to just skip the pseudo support for it and go back to main mode map bread and butter.

Simple as.

109

This!

I was cautiously interested in Mortis, it wasn’t my favorite mode and was kinda samey due to the stupid random unlock system for memories, but it at least existed…and it got abandoned.

I was pretty interested in Expeditions (before finding out the Tech-Remnants thing is totally pointless)…but it’s probably gonna get abandoned again.

All of that time and effort could have made at least three and with the new update four new maps that’d have pushed the story forward and at least been interesting instead of the same canned voicelines.

110

i’m still holding out for an actual overhaul to it, but i was thinking the same thing about mortis trials too so i’m probably just coping.
something i think is clear is that if they did any sort of overhaul, they would announce it, i might be wrong but i can’t remember fatshark ever surprising us with something like that. so right now the pseudo support thing is spot on

111

I originally planned to write up an essay level constructive criticism post in my modifiers thread about how it could be the mode where the modifiers could be freed.

But the absolute insult of making hounds the first prominent modifier and knowing that it would amount to nothing anyway made me decide not to waste my time.

Coupled with zero comments whatsoever about how poorly it was received and if they planned to do anything at all to remedy that rather than just plowing forward with more of whatever they already had planned just resigned me to its failure.

I’m basically just giving DT space on my SSD until i see how much the new enemies do or don’t change combat and I’m moving on. Done having more passion for the game than the managers will allow the devs to express.

112

To be fair, woke shît does often have a tendency to dovetail with laziness, though (and not to overuse the phrase) that could be another one of those instances of correlation does not necessarily equal causation…

113

you’re wrong, chaos wastes are chaos wastes, expeditions is hell divers with an open world sandbox feel, they are very different, and the augments you get changes how your class and character plays drastically depending on what buffs you get. Exepeditions has nothing like that.

114

L4d2 clearly instead of adding new campaigns should have just added off the cuff unfinished content poor modes that require their own entirely separate resources that takes away from making content for the mode everyone came to the game for in the first place

Being against such logical decision making is toxic.

115

as dev blogs? cause those always happen when there is something to talk about and the key word here is “beginning”

it makes very sense being active with the community in the early stage of a game just to make everyone involved for then being lazy and stopping completely and just not bothering anymore.

but it was never because community was toxic, it is purely due to laziness, as everyone seen since vermintide 1

116

yea this is just Fatshark, sadly they have their hands tied up and it’s weird as thing.

CM probably is forced to ask to the devs first before to even being able to say anything to the community, it just feels robotic and not very human.

it is also sad seeing actual information and progress of the game only through dev blogs which are just mono-sided because it’s like not listening what the community wants and just pushing whatever they are doing and going only with that.

but yea regarding about toxicity it is crazy that people think the silence of fatshark is due to the community, it is always been like this… they even talked about a dlc weapon pack for vermintide 2 for then going radio silence again and no more news about it. obviously it will happen but it is the fact they go radio silence and not giving any more news about stuff the problem

117

Not dev blogs, as in replying to forum posts here.

118

sometimes they still do it but only for technical reasons, and i don’t mean julia or lev, but actual people with the developer tag.

anyway back then as i said, it was just to make everyone involved. devs didn’t stop replying on forums because of toxicity from users. i joined this forum since 2022 because of DT and i never seen any users targeting individually devs. it was always criticism and never attacking devs directly in the forums.

i heard there were some stuff happened to aqshy but i think it was external to the forums and in the realm of the bad discord platform. legit beside some trolls or people going hard with heated discussions i never seen much problems in the forums

119

and i dont doubt about this, but probably like few posts and thats about it

if they were actually interested they would still done it, unless because of some internal policy they changed their way to communicate things and they learned that not saying anything is better.

this happened because of Hedge because back then it wasn’t very strict and CM had actually some free will of replying about things, there been many and multiple times where things said by a CM made community perplexed and upset because there were some incoherency.

so no wonder they are careful in what they are saying now just to avoid dramas and misunderstandings and rely only on the dev blogs as main source of announcements.

there are times where quickpaw iirc replies often to users on discord but also that, it’s when he has answers ready cause informed by the devs etc.

120

You missed the point, there isn’t any hard hitting weapons out yet. It doesn’t have to be an automatic if it’s a bolt action that does what it should and feels good it will be used. Or else it’s going to be home every other rifle in the game pointless and undertuned for havoc.

121

yeah havoc is supposed to be this way, everything should be undertuned for havoc, thats kinda the whole point of the mode, to be harder