No.
TL;DR : Not only because I’m a bad grim Russian person who hates everything, but because of FS’s history of developing VTs and maintaining them.
And don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to downplay your love for the IP you’re using or the dedication of your art and game design team - they were the ones pushing VTs forward and actually making us love it. But as a software developer, I’m convinced that no matter how much I love the area of expertise I’m working in, the software won’t write itself. It’s a stubborn bugger like that. And unfortunately, FS’s track record in the actual hard skill department is lacking.
When I think ‘DarkTide’, one of the first things that come to my mind are:
- the game will not run on anything but the most advanced gaming PC hardware;
- the game will have user interface that will have errors in its state machine, will lock up, loop, and generally irritate the living souls out of the players;
- the game will probably have this big tumorous growth on its side in the shape of ‘progression’ which will hinder how a player navigates and explores the forms and possibilities that the gameplay provides;
- it will be full of even kind of essential features that will be poorly realised for various different reasons.
But you might say: ‘Orson, why so glum? Isn’t that a clean slate project that will be free of all those deficiencies?’ - And my answer to that is ‘Probably not’. And that is why: VTs were around for long enough - years in fact - that we can actually try and analyse the trends at hand:
- The game was always poorly optimised. FS chose to forego using existing game engine technology (and probably for good reasons), but what they ended up writing on their own is just significantly lower quality that we are used to seeing. And I’m not even talking about big money projects - there are a lot of examples where way smaller studios managed to pull off feats of good programming and software design. It just so happens that FS does not really fall into their ranks. And the deciding factor for me is this: whatever architectural problems their engine had - they are still there, and that tells me that there are no experts to refactor them, there are no technical advisors capable of managing a project of this complexity, and most of all there is not enough will to actually hire those people to rectify your problems, which is extremely common in other branches of IT development like high-load capable cloud services etc. You gotta ask for help sometime. For that, I’m quite skeptic about the future of DT.
- The UEx is a bane of VT2, it was kinda rough in VT1 too, but the second game breaks all records in my book - I’ve yet to come across an interface system that boils my blood quite like early VT2 had. And the trends are kinda weak here as well. We were begging to be able to skip the motherloving CHEST ANIMATION. God, why do we even have them? Don’t you think we know what they look like by say a 100th run? On numerous occasions the active and supportive playerbase asked, suggested, nagged and plainly begged FS to do something about this - let us skip this, let us vote to return to the Keep or to proceed to a next mission (JUST LIKE IN VT1!). Let us not watch the freaking furnace grill drop down every time I want to convert 10 dust. But what has been done to the day? - They let us speed up this fecal matter a little by holding down spacebar. To me it looks like an absolutely cruel joke that I will never ever forget or understand. Time is the only commodity that is priceless - the total number of seconds until you’re worm food. Why do you waste them? And don’t tell me that playing games is a waste in itself - it is recreation, consumption of an entertainment art product, but staring at absolutely meaningless animations is not. Nothing in this world will ever make me change my mind, so don’t bother.
- There is enough things said about the progression, how to make it better etc. I’ll just reiterate something I’ve already posted here: L4D2 has no progression whatsoever - all the players are exactly equal from the very first second they launch the game. Did it hurt the game? - Well, if you consider that 10 years later there are 6+ times as many people still playing it than VT2 2 years into it’s life cycle, than yes, it did. Once again, nothing really changed since release, so at this point I consider it a given that the option to change that just isn’t there in the developer’s mind.
- I mean really - how hard can it be to code in player outlines so they don’t bug out? How many years should it take a paid professional developer to make a thing like this work? Is there even a real answer to this question? Enemy animations? Players joining in? Freaking bot AI? Pathfinding? The list goes on. And it goes on through years of dev time once again. You’re getting away with it only because in our age game development is the bottom feeding layer of software development, and everything else out there is so so bad.
‘Hey, Orson, why did you take all this time to write this up if the game is so bad?’ - It’s not bad. It’s just that all these shortcomings always stand out more against an immaculate background of character crafting, lore completeness, graphics design, voice acting and core gameplay fun. It is maddening how a thing so beautiful as VT2 can be marred and bogged down by trivial problems that get fixed left and right in any other branch of software dev. It is maddening how a project this well-conceived can have such poor sense of direction on the part of its maintainers. And that is the essence of FS development for me.
It’s been and continues to be an extremely fun journey for me, but I’m absolutely terrified of getting into another game like that, and I’m not entirely convinced that DT won’t be like that at all. Cheers.