In my defence I didn’t bother to respond here till I saw your “no censorship!” response and just thought that was taking the melodrama way too far. Anyway I will take your advice and duck out now.
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Nah I’m just having fun writing these posts up. I laugh a lot when I write them up. I do get dramatic in my posts because when i read them countless times, over and over, it entertains me 
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Oh yeah like a fully functional crafting system?
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Do you owe any company anything? This game costs 40$. Fatshark isn’t somehow doing us a favor by selling it, you understand? Are we obligated to sing praises no matter what?
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Actually, we paid twice the full price and for less content i believe, and some have most likely spend 4 times or more because of the cosmetic shop.
It’s similarly priced to deep rock, but that was overly expensive to begin with imo, same thing with destiny 2 and the other games they’re trying to mimic, like Anthem.
I think the best comparison to other games is actually Anthem, and people really didn’t enjoy what they got from that, after finishing the 6ish hour “long” story mode and than grinding the same dungeon for weapons that had a broken Power Rating, where the lowest rated and beginner weapons were more powerful than endgame weapons, and stats that lied and didn’t do what they said they did… Where Shields and Health was messed up and adding more shields/health actually gave you LESS… Anthem also had the EXACT same cosmetic shop. they were also very starved for maps/dungeons/content and never delivered on any of it as they scrambled to throw the game together in a year after 5+ years of toxic development…
It’s actually scary how similar all the experiences in Darktide is to Anthem… it really is… makes me wonder if this was also thrown together in the last year.
As all we’ve gotten at release are about 5 maps with route A to B, or B to A, copy pasted combat/mechanics with tweaks from vermintide and from what I’ve seen so far, no story what so ever… I mean I was pretty sure they gave us the random side mission grind during the pre-launch so we didn’t spoil the story… but seems we got the full experience… but i’m only lv17 on my highest so far, maybe it’ll open up in a bit?
however that seems like a very long grind to GET to the story, i’m close to 50 hours in game already, that’s a very strange choice when it comes to entertainment you have to purchase…
I mean, no one would go watch a Marvel movie if it didn’t begin with action and purpose. If it started with a 5 hour monologue lecture of how the multiverse functions, no one would watch it… apart from some diehard junkie fans who would be going, “one more hour! come on… I… I got these cheeseburgers man…” (If you get the reference, kudos to you sir!)
Sure, story isn’t everything in a game like this, so it’s easily passable and accepted, but it does help to put us in the setting and the game… so we need progression and some sort of character/player arch. It doesn’t have to be people talking and acknowledging you, It could’ve been through text like Mass Effect 3 with correspondence between missions and lore deepening stuff, but most importantly it should’ve been through loot and meaningful statistical growth.
We want to go, tehe, when we see a lv1 next to our maxed out character. Not be on equal footing with the dude and in the same bloody rags…
So this is where cosmetics comes in, which they’ve removed and stuck in a shop instead, lowering the value of our experience and game purchase, while increasing their monetary gain, because we want and need progression and rewards… so in order to get that fix, we’re forced to pay more money. Because the most expensive thing to buy with in-game money is actually cosmetic skins… because that is their biggest competition and they’ve gotta make it less appealing.
they should’ve instead rewarded the purchase of their game with, action, story and progression, then sprinkled in some grind to lengthen the thing and added some extra goodies once you’ve finished it all… you don’t go immediately to grind and dangle a never ending carrot of “maybe more later? insert coin!” and hope you’ll get whales and addicts…
Well you would, if this was Early Access… hmmm…
So the conclusion is that they’re using us as paying QA testers and it will continue for a few months at least. Most likely won’t be “full release” status until 6-12 months, and they’ll be spoon feeding us mechanics and probably held back story missions to keep us playing and coming back every week to keep things fresh and always with a new short-term goal in sight.
It’s not a bad progression choice, as more things to choose from leaves one choosing nothing, and they use the same mindset on weapon progression, but it is a bad choice when you’ve bought a game expecting 100%, not 10% every month for a year as a “surprise”.
Hitman did a version of this that I thought was a lot more upfront and a better choice, they allowed one to buy the full game from the get go, or buy each chapter as they were released. a lot healthier approach, than tricking the players. If the current state of the game was only 10 bucks, and you could pay another 10 when they finally release the actual story campaign… that would’ve probably been easier to stomach imo.
I’m actually surprised they didn’t introduce the cosmetic shop during pre-launch, but it makes sense because there they show us how much time we need to grind in order to get a blue vest, instead of a red one… so we’ll go fuuuck that! and buy from the shop instead…
I don’t mind a shop full of cosmetics and things to buy… I just want it 6 months from now, when new content costs more money… not when content that should be unlock-able or rewarded to us for playing the game we purchased is removed and put under monetary lock and key.
they’ve all but created a f2p game and given us the “choice” to pay to become early access game testers and calling it “full release”. To me that seems like Malice. Though I doubt it’s Fatshark driving this, seems a lot more producer/publisher friendly choices, under the guise of “listening to player feedback” and “making the game you want!” and “you asked for it, here it is!, but you didn’t know we were hiding it!”
I would’ve refunded if my friends and I weren’t so starved for 40k games. There really isn’t any worth playing, apart from the old amazing Space Marine game, so… they’ve got us by the balls… and this is most likely the reasons why everyone is so upset. We’re like a cop without a donut shop, so when we see that single donut truck drive up to the precinct… it really doesn’t matter if it’s old and rotten with mold dangling from it… we’ll wolf it down… oh yes… hook line and sinker…
I just wish it was more than a vermintide DLC with broken fundamentals, pointless perks, a deceptive progression system, a junkie haberdashery and no story… at twice the price.
But I will give them some kudos, because the game does LOOK and sound amazing, and the launch version looks better than the betas imo. But they’ve strangely made the game FEEL worse… and that’s rather dangerous. because looking at Destiny for instance, even though it lacked content and they lied about their content and they are horrible junky creators with FOMO and constant progression wipes… it sure as hell is fun to simply shoot the gun and aim down the sights… that isn’t something I can say about Darktide. A new weapon is fun to try out, but after a mission or two it isn’t as appealing, at least none I’ve tested… so I feel like they’re using the locked progression approach similar to deep rock, rather than fun gameplay to keep us interested, which seems like it would lead to people leaving.
I wished they’d tried to take more from the good parts of destiny 2/warframe/Anthem, rather then the boring and shitty parts of vermintide and deep rock. i feel like they’ve doubled down on the bad and safe parts instead of tried something new.
But maybe that’s the thing… maybe they were working on something new, tried it, it sucked and they’ve been force to backtrack and cut down and make SOMETHING before release, so… safe route and tried and true vermintide copy paste it is… the same thing destiny 2 did and anthem did and many others… or maybe this was the plan all along… idk
p.s if you’ve read all this… thank you, very nice of you. emperor’s light protect you, my ramblings be over.
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I wish I could drop another negative review for the game to drag it down further. It’s a shame that I can’t have both a pre-release and post-release review for it.
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Yeah, it is easy to “fulfil promises” when you move the goalpost after making them initially.
They told us there would be 70+ weapons in the game. Not the case as there are 65, the rest didn’t make it into the launch for whatever reason, as we know what several of them are based on leaks.
Crafting would be in game on launch. It wasn’t. We got a part of it, thus it is not full crafting as it is more just upgrading, we can’t make weapons, we can only upgrade the ones we already have.
There are many other promises they gave us but failed to deliver, such as the idea of weapon customization, being able to modify attachments on them, which has since then been removed out from their own dev blogs but have unfortunately not been removed from the various news articles made prior to the promise which when now you click the links they give you to the Hybrid Combat dev blog entry will give you a 404 error, as the original is no longer there.
Fatshark promised the players a lot of things and only delivered some.
They absolutely should be called out on this, not be cuddled into thinking the playerbase is fine to be gaslighted by their marketing crowd. It wasn’t until we got to Pre-order Beta and people started asking questions about missing features did they start telling us X won’t be in on launch or Y isn’t finished being worked on yet.
As for the cash shop, it is exactly what Halo Infinite pulled, and we saw how well that went for them. I really need to know the number of the dealer of the guy who greenlit the cash shop the way it is right now because that must be some of the best stuff to smoke if you somehow end up thinking what happened to Halo Infinite was a great thing to replicate.
They wouldn’t have gotten even quarter the amount of flak they are getting now if only they had done something very simple and not anti-consumer. Release the cash shop like it is now, but instead of FOMO timers, show us all the outfits currently available, let us buy them at our own leisure and have sales for certain sets, that’s it. That’s all they had to do, easy and everybody wins. However, they didn’t want to do this for whatever reason, and instead chose to go with the most effective cash grab model mobile market has proven to be effective in order to leech maximum income from irresponsible people via deliberately instigated psychological reactions. Again, this cash shop is not intended for someone like you or me who can very easily just not buy anything. It is for the type of people that is have mental issues comparable to alcoholics and gambling addicts. To give you an idea, the model is similar to setting up a bar next to a locale where recovering alcoholics gather. The point is to tempt people for easy cash grab, not exactly your average joe.
It’s not evil, it is just normalised business practice. That’s why it is called predatory, since that is the plan, but it has become so normalised that most are ignorant or jaded to it. I don’t agree with it and as such I am against it.
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I will admit that I changed my rating from positive to negative following launch. That said, I am clear in my written review why I did that. The predatory cash shop being one reason (it’s not only tone deaf given the state of the game, it is also just a needlessly hostile design when they already had a better system for VT2). The performance is also pretty much inexcusable at this point, and the lack of content/depth as well as all the nonsensicle RNG all over the place did the rest for me. Will keep playing, but mostly because we as a group of mates enjoy the minute-to-minute experience of combat in this game and have not grown tired of the repetitive quests just yet. But I am very worried for Darktides’ staying power.
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And that right there is the problem with the entirety of Games as a Service model. It values not the consumer but the money makers bent on squeezing as much money as they can from consumers for as little effort as possible. After all, just release a broken product now and use GaaS as an excuse to fix it over time. This type of model is so easily exploitable as it’s used to minimize the usual costs associated with ensuring a feature complete package on its launch. What’s that? Not satisfied with state of things now? Just wait a few years, maybe the product will transform into something resembling a coherent good in which you envisioned it to be when you purchased it. Customer be damned. Of course, we shan’t forget how players are actively encouraged to buy the highly inflated micro*-transactions. Making content is hard and the poor little developer do so need your patronage to continue working on the game. It is ludicrous to the highest degree on how rampant this is.
Now I need to state, for the record, this isn’t a condemnation of the model. It does present some value for end users; for instance, if a company has both an established infrastructure and an optimized delivery pipe line with hundreds of employees capable of releasing content within a consistent manner, then the result is: consistent patches, new content within a timely manner, and new complete features that further add to the enjoyment of the experience. However, don’t kid yourself: for every Fortnight, Deep Rock Galactic, there is a million others that happily abuse the model to their ends.
*micro: in some cases, the transactions aren’t so diminutive that they’re reasonable but, more often than not, the developer is making money hand over fist by overpricing such things at the expense of its players.
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My favorites are the “Game sucks…” posts with 250+ hours played.
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Good. Fatshark obviously doesn’t care about their community anymore. So we have to hit them where they/Tencent understand it now.
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MVP - Minimum Viable Product is a design philosophy that should have been laughed out of the room when it was first suggested, now it’s in everything.
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I think I just threw up in my mouth. To think people pay a lot of money to go to business school to learn charmers like this.
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At this point, like usual, this community wants this game to die. Just like Total War community pushed for WH3 to “fail”. It’s weird.
Obviously development takes time. But that’s not an effective deflection.
The game is missing content and is still full of bugs.
Best thing for the developers to do is admit that they’ve stumbled, tripped, fell and split their head open on launch, and treat player feedback and complaints accordingly.
They can literally buy back community good will by making the first new class, for example, free, instead of putting a price-tag on it.
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lol, and they love riding us…
Nobody wants the game to die? People want FS to get a wake up call and get the finger out.
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Spiderman, a boring game about a goody two shoes sporting a 10 years old boring game model and just as many performance issues got an overwhelmingly positive rating.
Mass market shows how dumb we are as a collective.
It always amazes me, watching these sorts of things unfold, at both how pissed off the gaming community can be about things and also how quick they are to forgive and be supportive when they feel valued by developers. The turn around can be pretty amazing.
It wouldn’t take much for Fatshark to get more into the collective good graces. Tweak the cash shop. Get crafting and private lobbies implemented ASAP. Give players an option to spend resources to craft base level items. Clean up the mission system a bit and have more predictable rewards. Give players some shared resources between characters.
Also, the power of communication and humility can’t be understated as a PR tool. If Fatshark just came out and acknowledged that they hear the communities concerns (and actually listed them out to demonstrate that they’ve heard, instead of hinting at things in discord channels) and said they want to work on it - it would be great. Just validating that they understand why the community is angry (“hey all, we hear you. There are missing features, performance issues, and the cash shop is rustling your feathers - we’re working on it and sorry the launch wasn’t as smooth as we ALL wanted it to be. We’ll get there!”) is really all most of us that are frustrated want. Just an acknowledgement that we’re not screaming into deaf ears.
Fatsharks communication problem is really one of transparency. They feel they’ve been burned in the past when they say things that get used against them later on or whatever. All you have to do to combat that is be transparent and level with people.
Example:
“Hey Vermintide people - we know we said we wanted to implement dedicated servers and that we’ve been pretty quiet about it. We’ve looked into it and it just isn’t going to happen. We tried, but we don’t have enough technical capacity to make that work at this point in the games lifecycle. We’re sorry. We thought it would be a great thing to have too but we just can’t swing it. As a consolidation, here’s a funny new picture frame. We hope we can make this work next time around.”
That’s it. That’s all they have to say. There’s a certain crowd of people that are going to be pissed off regardless, but I’m willing to bet there are lot more people who would appreciate the transparency and honesty and would lay the dead horse to rest. That’s all we want. Honesty and transparency.
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