Man, were you around for the launches of VT1 and VT2? They were horrible, bug-ridden messes that required years to salvage. Granted, Darktide now has reached a low that neither VT1 nor 2 ever reached, but it’s really not as much of a step down as people like to think it is. Both had essential systems not working at all. Such as the hero power of VT2. Much touted, and heavily advertised by fatshark as a revolutionary new method of balancing difficulty and player skill. It took not just the players, but also the game devs MONTHS to figure out that the system was actually not working at all, or it was giving the players the ability to dish out 200% or more damage than they ever should have.
Most legendary lobbies were basically just poor man’s Darktide matches where nobody bothered with melee because bugged weapons allowed their guns, bows, crossbows etc to have unlimited ammo, causing them to slaughter everything in sight from afar. And this had to be done, because even trying to engage in melee caused even the tankiest classes, such as the Ironbreaker, to crumble to dozens of bugged phantom hits from mobs whose animations didn’t play even while they attacked the players. Some mobs were just plain invisible, untouchable, invulnerable, but still able to attack the players.
That doesn’t even go into the multitude of game-crashing bugs where we had months during which a significant percentage of the player base would crash at the end of matches when they entered the bubble, depriving them of all rewards without recourse.
Fatsharks games never had a polished start. Even VT2’s much-vaunted 15 classes and many weapons had problems in that their internal balance was horrible. An eye-watering amount of talents in each class was either not working (such as the Unchained’s power-gain-per-heat-gained, the CORE of her entire class, was not working at all for months, making her functionally worthless as anything but a squishy, explody beatstick) or simply wasn’t a contender due to being absurdly worthless. Choosing talents in a class’s tree wasn’t a choice between “what benefits my playstyle?” it was “what isn’t worthless and/or bugged?”.
It took years for Fatshark to solve this. It’s why Darktide’s launch is so painful for so many fans. We have been submitting feedback for years, and we were so hopeful that Fatshark might have learned a lesson from the previous launches, from the feedback, from the passionate appeals.
But no. Nothing was learned. Worse, even: It seems they outright regressed. Regressed in that uniquely Fatshark way. Which is why I am all too capable of believing that Tencent has been completely hands-off with Fatshark during the development cycle.