I have remained hopeful and positive for a long while, but even I’m starting to suffer from the critical low of the morale that the playerbase currently seems to have. I’d like to know how everyone is actually feeling going forward into the summer.
I want to explicitly clarify that I don’t want this to be an attack on Fatshark or any particular developer, manager, or relationship the community might have with Fatshark.
I do not support developer crunch and do not want to encourage it. That being said, transparency and honesty should be important in this moment.
So far, we know that:
There was an ambiguous confirmation of developers going on vacation for the summer break
Crossplay release will (probably, most likely) come with the next update
There will be “a few” (vague) blessing balances to look forward to
A new mission condition that empowers elite enemies
Another vague statement of reviewing feedback for crafting, resources, and missions
Xbox release seems to be their priority right now, most likely manned by the senior devs
I want to actually gauge how players feel right now about the game and its future. I know this is probably coming in the wake of many threads and public grievances players have had, but there’s a lot of talk spread out across multiple threads and I’d like it to feel a little more central.
Questions will be yes or no answers. I’m trying to avoid “maybe” or “kind of” responses. Feel free to elaborate your nuances in replies.
As of June 21st, 2023,
Do you feel…
Confident in Darktide’s Future?
Yes, I’m confident in the game’s future.
No, I feel like I can’t be optimistic at all.
0voters
That Darktide has improved in any significant way?
Yes, I think the game is in a better place overall now.
No, I think the changes have not improved the game.
0voters
Like contributions or feedback have been acknowledged?
Yes, I think the community is making a noticeable change.
No, I feel like we’re not being heeded or taken seriously.
0voters
Fatshark is being honest or transparent enough with the community?
Yes, the communication feels informative and honest to me.
No, I feel like they are only telling us what we want to hear.
0voters
Fatshark is working on changes the community asked for?
Yes, I think most changes coincide with our feedback.
No, I feel like they aren’t working on anything we ask for.
At this point I’m not expecting any real good news from this game at least until the console port is out. It’s clear that’s where the majority of their resources are being spent (f*cking better be lmao) and we’re just stuck with the junior dev scraps until then. Maybe it’ll get better after that, time will tell.
Glad Sweden has good labor laws but the summer break is certainly not gonna help the situation FS has gotten themselves into and it’s probably just gonna result in more ill will from the players. Maybe they’re banking on crossplay juicing the player count for the summer but idk, looking at the comms link it just seems like another instance of “too little too late”.
Q3-Q4 of 2023 has some huge game releases, FS really needs to step it up and wow me soon or I doubt I’ll even be thinking about Darktide by the end of September.
I just go by results and nothing’s really changed. They put a bit more of the things they advertised with the game into the game eventually. Some of the weapon variants we’ve known about since launch got added, only 40 or so to go. We got another map on Chasm Station instead of another zone, so I guess for the foreseeable future we will not get any of the teased content like the 2nd city. Like 10% of the bugs or bad balance have been addressed (and in some cases the balance has ended up worse). Old bugs reappear as others get fixed. New bugs appear when things get fixed. Bugs appear when nothing gets fixed. Amazing QA enables updates like the one that caused your shader cache to dump with your frames or the one that crashed AMD + Win 10 on start up.
If they were supposed to be taking a victory lap for a job well done with the ‘rejects unite’ skulls promo, then I have no idea what to say. I can’t even imagine working in an environment where this kind of incompetence just becomes the norm. I guess Fat Shark have actually become acolytes of Nurgle and been consumed by rot.
I do recognize that’s it’s gotten “better” since launch but that’s like going from “awful” up to “mostly bad”. It’s still below the the mark.
Communication on all fronts in terms of honesty, transparency, and actually responding to community feedback is about as toxic as it can be. It feels so bad that one wonders if Fatshark is deliberately trolling their community.
Vermtinde 2 was rough at launch, but an order of magnitude better than this. Given the stakes and IP involved the pressure should be greater. I just don’t know what FS is thinking.
This week was the peak lowest daily player count to date.
With this being the summer of nothing burgers, and looking at the steamcharts every day as the avg player numbers continue to drop, it could get tough to fill some lobby’s soon
Despite the bleak outlook, the results do seem interesting. I know it’s sort of confirming the overall sentiment the community has right now, but it’s nice to see that most answers to the game’s general improvement are positive. I felt much the same way, despite all the other issues.
Yeah, I think this is historically normal for Fatshark releases. I suspect things will pick up quickly once they’re done with the console port, but that may be a long while away right now.
It definitely feels like a lot of changed AI behaviors got reverted over the last two or three updates. I thought about a separate poll about the overall bugginess of the game, but I think it was better to roll that into the game being improved or not for people.
I’m not really sure how to feel about it. It definitely feels like they’re holding back far too much info for us to really understand what’s going on or why. I’m not sure it’s deliberate or malignant, and can be a result of trying not to rattle the beehive too much around here.
I will say that I’ve already been experiencing this consistently on expired missions, and this may be due to a recent change to mission expiration system-side due to a mod. Failing a mission due to a player disconnecting at the final event and not having a fourth player really sucks.
The active player count is definitely dropping. I’m not sure it will affect being able to fill most missions yet, but it can start getting close to that. I can’t imagine how MSS players are doing.
I have a hard time answering a yes/no to any of the polls truthfully. A lot of them are simply unknown, or yes to some things but not others…
I fear that they may make it good, but it may be too late when they do. Or they just aren’t willing to budge on certain things and server operating costs require a model I just don’t want to support.
They have shown that fixing “simple” bugs (weapon and class features) takes them an incredible amount of time meaning, FS either has a very incompetent development team or is extremely deep in technical debt, non of which gives me any hope for an increase in new content delivery any time soon if at all. I mean seriously, we past 6 months from release and there are still a load of weapons and even some class bugs around…
Balance changes are either extremely questionable or non-existent. No new classes since release. Only 1 big weapon pack. Extremely bad communication (a bit understandable by me, but there is no content coming that would make this okay).
I’ve got a good time out of the game, but now with several games I’m interested in coming soon (BG3, PoE2) I’m already halfway out the door.
It’s more about the recent dip in overall player activity with the game in the last few weeks, especially since the Skulls promo. It feels like player morale dipped tremendously after that update.
It’s a pretty loaded question, but the best way to answer it is if you genuinely feel like your experience with the game has improved as they updated it. Did you still feel as though the game just wasn’t in a good place no matter what they were doing?
If you have to stop and think about your response, then it’s working. When you’re confronted with a question where there isn’t several degrees of “maybe,” you’re made to make either an instinctual choice or one where you really have to find how you truly feel about the topic.
The point, as mentioned directly above, is to have you answer without a “maybe.” When polling a consensus on something, having a “maybe” never works and is functionally worthless. This is as honest as you can get with what you think of the game.
We had a lot of those before. I wanted something a bit more punctual this time. That’s all.
This is also just meant to be dated for the current point we’re at. Sentiment will obviously change in a year. I just wanted to gauge how everyone feels right now.
At this point i don’t see fatshark doing anything significant until the console port is done. Those few minor devs still working on the PC platform are clearly not enough to handle what playerbase wants from them.
In my eyes its yet a other tide game that’s had its potential wasted by corporate decisions. Yeah Fatshark will eventually start pumping out actual content, but by that time its already been forgotten by most of the community.
In short, no i’m not particularly confident in darktides future. I’ve had my fun and i’m not going to take other vermintide2 ride. For those who wan’t to remain, strap yourselfs in since you are going to be here for a while.
console port needs full game engine review and map changes to meet hardware specs of slow consoles. not to mention netcode. game currently runs way worse one amd cards than on nvidia (stutter and load times), xbox uses amd so go figure.
thats gonna take them a lot of time to complete. i would not hold breath for cosole release, since every senior dev is working on xbox port we gonna see nothing for long time on pc side
Can’t say I have been positive before or after release. That is in part due to the discrepansy between what Fatshark communicated before the relase and what they delivered with the release of the game. Previous experience with the company made me less positive/optimistic.
My frequent visits to the forum will probably stop at some time during the Summer. I think it’s unlikely that I’ll get engaged in the game again after that. By engaged I’m only talking about forum presence and not about playing the game. I haven’t played it since early 2023.
If I abandon it entirely I might pop up at the time of their next release with a warning to new customers. That warning will be ignored and 6 months later, whoever remains will experience Fatsharks glorious development cycle post release.
It will likely still be a very slow process and if communication doesn’t get better they’ll keep struggling with the part of the community that remains.
That is also a lesson they learned, and forgot, during the Vermintide 2 development (post release). It took them years to get decent communication going, just like it took them years to realize that it’s a stupid idea to put heavy limitations on player agency. Shame they don’t have the memory of a FatElephant but rather a #FatGoldfish.
My hesitation was mostly due to the wording of the answers. E.g. “That Darktide has improved in any significant way?” is an obvious no for me since I haven’t started playing the game again since some time pre-crafting release. If I were to choose an option that makes sense it would probably be “No, but I think the game is in a better palce overall now.” which is a morph of the answers. If the answers had simply been “Yes” or “No” I wouldn’t have thought twice about any of the choices. Yes, I ask plenty of questions during phone surveys even if I’m fully aware that the interviewers isn’t allowed to explain or weigh in on the choices,
You know what’s wild? The feedback people post nowadays is far too similar to the complaints we all posted during “Beta”. So much so it gets repeated ad nauseam on a daily basis. I sometimes think the game is still in “Beta”. That’s the impression anyways. Can’t comment on how the game is currently since I haven’t touched the game in months and have absolutely no desire to do so. I still hold resentment over how terrible of an experience “Beta” was.
Fair assessment. Personally I do think no matter what the game has improved, and that is what I want the question to convey. The majority of it certainly hasn’t really changed the experience at all for me, but I will say that from December to March, the game has changed significantly, and then stopped making those content jumps immediately. The mission conditions were cool, but not enough.
At the time Vermintide 1 and subsequently 2 did not click at all for me. I had no real grasp on the game and the way it wanted you to play it. I have a total of 14 hours across both games (11 and 3 respectively).
It’s sort of funny in a morbid way; if I actually played the games with reliable friends, I wouldn’t be here right now.
I bounced between raw “yes/no” and then opted for the more verbose versions now, which is just a curse of me being such a wordy person who fails to be concise when he needs to be. I think I like them as they are because the statement structure helped me parse the questions better in order to ask the community. It’s food for thought for next time if I ever poll the forums here again.
I will say that I have gotten an extreme amount of mileage out of this game. I have 815 hours and after making this over the afternoon, I decided I want to take a break from Darktide for the foreseeable future.
The game is fun. If I had stuck to VT or even just came back when they finally got properly developed, I would have loved both games as well. I genuinely look forward to Darktide finding its full potential and finally standing on its own two feet—perhaps in time for Darktide 2 to be announced in a couple years or so.
I think what little content we got sparked my optimism, but I definitely need a break. I am an extreme user that they are not catering to, among the thousand or so still playing, and that’s okay. I can’t imagine most are as patient as I am as an MMO player of 15+ years, however.