Honestly I just have to…boggle, at the developmental clusterf*** that must have taken place to make Darktide what it is.
Seriously!
They had the game engine, they just had to reskin and redevelop it to fit 40k! This should’ve been a shoe-in! Heck, half the game’s enemies are just recoded versions of the Skaven, it’s not like they were being innovative.
Literally all they had to do was make new art assets, rebalance around ranged combat being more common, and apply the lessons learned from VT2 with regards to UI, blessing balance, and what players liked.
And they proceeded to do essentially the exact opposite of that last one.
How do you even begin to screw up that badly? What is going on over there? Did their money vanish into some executive’s yacht fund? Did their management see a buzzword-filled TED Talk and decide the game needed ‘retention mechanics’ six months before release?
I honestly don’t think it’s that simple. You still have to make new skeletons, rig new animations to them that fit, get the timing for the attack hit triggers right, etc.
Even if it looks like a “reskin” to you, it might not be under the hood.
A lot of time probably also went into the networking. We went from P2P to baseline dedicated servers.
Seems like a lot of time still goes into networking (with little success). Network (authorization) issues was the main reason people couldn’t play VT2 for the first 6 months or so. It got better but kept coming back with patches. Sound anything lile DT?
I wasn’t there for either VT launch. But i did love the improved VT2 several years later. I could have known better but i just assumed they would have learned some lessons from VT2.
The mind wonders how with 200 staff, it is just 2 maps with reused graphical assets after so many months. Yes, last few months bug fix, re-balance, QoL etc etc. Still it is 200 staff. Can spare at least a few for new map assets?
Open this game up to modders officially. Someone will create some crazy total conversion of weapons, mechanics etc, let us use in private games i.e. everyone in squad has it installed to play together in private game. They will see what passion can achieve. Then reach out too those modders to give recognition and reward them and integrate natively.
If anyone here plays Mechwarrior 5. You will know what I mean. Those modders have turned the game into something else beyond belief than what that company of 70-80 can do. Crazy thing is that they do maintain contact with major modders in case of game updates that will conflict, which is nice. Why they didn’t bother integrating natively. It’s like they just left someone else to do job for them for free. The developers themselves play with their mods now.
It’s 200 staff for the entire studio. I have a feeling at least half are still updating Vermintide 2, the rest are mostly working on porting the game to Xbox, and a skeleton crew is managing PC - because that’s what happens with every single fatshark game.
Yeah I also wasn’t aware of their history until after the debacle that has been DT. They really went from “confident pre order” to “buyer beware” company overnight with me. FS might not learn from their mistakes, but I do.
They knew exactly what they were doing when tencent “invested” in them. (More like acquisition).
Founders/Owners just wanted short term quick money. They don’t care what happens to their workers reputation or their career stability. They won’t care if FatShark goes down, moneys in the bank already.
Look at the “Great Resignation” or China’s “Laying flat”. People have realised they were just working harder for their bosses to profit with little impact to salary. People are now being selective and would rather earn less and be more happy and proud of where they work.
Fatshark founders/owners - They knew what they doing. Personal gain is fine, but not so at the cost of unhappy developers forced to be thrown in same boat that players scold at. They don’t have luxury of that tencent investment, for them it’s finding next place should company suffer downfall.
This is what founders/owners did. I’m sure Fatshark, majority of people are honest. If anyone to blame, better it’s those names sitting in Fatshark wiki, not as a whole.