Dark Tide is currently ranked 98th on the Top 100 games played on Steam.
Left for Dead 2 is ranked 28th, another horde co-op shooter released in 2009. There are currently 23,767 more players in Left for Dead 2 and while writing this Dark Tide dropped down to 99th.
Edit: And it’s gone.
Edit 2: While writing this post last night, I refreshed Steam and Dark Tide disappeared before my eyes in the Top 100. I love the game but release content was slim, I could have lived with the RNG if content was deeper, a lot deeper. The RNG felt a lot like being in military. That isn’t praise but it did bring atmosphere and force players to use best equipment available. Real adapt and overcome type of play style. Too bad Fat Shark didn’t have content and hot fixes lines up. Game is trending severely downward in the rating department.
Another fun thing about L4D2 is that there’s no progression in the game, at all. You can only replay maps to become more efficient and increase difficulty for challenge.
That said, the modding scene in L4D2 is huge and that’s a major reason why it’s still going strong.
Nobody cares about steams 100, what’s really damning is the pathetic 42% review score that will turn away a ton of people. Unless it’s a franchise I love (and I mean LOVE) I’d never even look at a 42% game twice. They done frakked the pooch
really dont think steam scores matter much to most people , there going to see 50k reviews and be like oh it got bombed wonder why?
its certainly recovereable, no mans sky, diablo 3, gta online, skyrim, rainbow 6, cyberpunk and lets not forget the disaster of ff14.
were all arguably worse off at start, now i doubt it will rise to those heights but im still actually fairly confident it will end up better than v2, well actually for the core loops already a lot better imo. theres some isues with the end of mission pacing but then its all just extra content and extrinsic stuff and thats a lot easier to fix.
so yeah bad launch (he says with near 300 hours in) but its not fatal. well yet.
I’m convinced a tide game with proper modding support which includes an map editor and a reasonably convenient way to import models, would be a popular ever-green like L4D.
The core combat and spawn mechanics of Vermintide and Darktide are rock solid and make for dynamite gameplay. It’s just all the nonsense strapped around it, which is kinda meh and lack of content which holds these games back in my opinion.
Someone who’s interested in 40k or tide games is likely to give it a bit more slack, but the average person who just stumbles across it in their discovery queue or whatever is going to look at the orange “mostly negative” and click “next”.
Humans are hard wired to work that way. We’re discriminative pattern matching machines and when the rest of our tribe thinks a thing is bad, it takes a concerted effort on the part of the individual to overcome that.
I specifically don’t buy anything that’s mixed, and Darktide is mostly negative now. Even games that are in the positive often turn out to be not worth the money, so mixed is a death sentence.
I have a few trusted reviewers who are my primary source for whether or not I’ll check out a game but I also don’t normally buy anything unless it’s at least “mostly positive” on steam. Pre ordered Darktide because I like VT and wasn’t aware of Fatshark’s long history of consistent problems until after the game was out. Safe to say I’m gonna wait until I see the reviews on their next game.
I bought it on the first day of the beta when it had no reviews, then refunded it on release after an hour when I figured out that they updated nothing, except they added a phone game tier cash shop. This is one of the reasons why I’m mad that they managed to farm a bunch of positive reviews by delaying the cash shop by a week, knowing full well that the largest number of players will buy and review on release.
I hope steam will come up with a mechanic against that specifically. Though from what I’ve heard, if you cite it as a reason, and a person looks at your claim, they can approve it even after the guaranteed refund period.
I bought it because weirdly enough, I had no issues with VT2 from the beta through release, pretty much all the way to today, so I figured if the release is just as janky as VT2, I’l still be happy. It wasn’t like that, and I’m not happy.