Goes over the state of the game, 4 months in. Perfectly covers the stuff that’s working in the game, and all the problems. The final words pretty much sum things up:
“I’m not angry at Darktide, I’m just disappointed.”
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Fully agree with the points made in that video. Pretty much everything surrounding the moment to moment gameplay makes the whole experience feel like such a chore.
The funny thing is, the game has all of these player retention tricks that just stink of artificial metric inflation and corporate committee meddling, all these things that I’m sure the money guys thought would keep people hooked on the slot machine and it’s those exact mechanics that are almost unanimously driving people people off and making it a struggle to get any actual enjoyment out of this game.
Show this to the devs, sure, but then show it to the executives and get them as far away from the creative process as humanly possible.
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After the devs are finished watching it, Fat Shark’s Executive and Leadership Team should watch it too.
I agree with pretty much everything in the video. The core gameplay in Darktide is incredible! It’s just a shame virtually everything else (progression, penances, etc) ruins the experience. 
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Good point. Adding Executives to the title! 
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Way too gentle TBH.
Fatshark’s willingness to “die on the hill” of deliberately bad design decisions while ignoring and not implementing good ones is making me question the sanity of the company.
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I can only rationalize their thought process here by imagining that they are looking at some giant dashboard of metrics, presented in such a way that it shows the game meeting their intended goals and retention/engagement targets and coming to the conclusion that it’s all working according to plan.
Couple the above with the fact I’m “sure” they are working on hard on the console port so they can drum up another influx of cash from unsuspecting customers.
As a community, continue to be outspoken about the game and it’s problems. I want the game to succeed, but I want it to be clear to potential console buyers that the PC community is NOT happy with the state of the game and that the game is not living up to its “hype” and potential in any way, shape, or form.
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As a product manager this is actually a hobby. I’ve been keeping tabs on the sequence of bad decisions and bad recovery plans. Most fun I’ve had in a long time in my industry. The trash fire keeps me warm at night.
Its actually somewhat interesting to me that they’ve essentially been delivering what i suggested in a thread a while back. In many cases the response was what i expected too, praise or silence (aka no complaining). But a few decisions definitely boggle the mind. Like “reworking” the crafting system into basically exactly what we already expected just adding brunts and tweaking some RNG values. Also everything is lagging behind my projections. So far the response pace is about 25% my expectations on how quickly things could be done. So thats interesting, and probably accounts for a lot of player negative views. A shorter time window on delivery would have bought favor and player retention. I’m not a game dev so perhaps there’s complexities i am not aware of but development seems remarkably slow. I’ve had the pleasure of being a PM for a 15 dev enterprise team and a 5 dev enterprise team. My current team of 5 could pump out 4x the ammount of systems work completed in the last patch in the time it took to get it. Which leads me to believe there’s probably other stuff going on internally that is eating up key dev resources. The most experienced devs are almost certainly working on something key to the business strategy like console launch, thats my guess.
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iirc FS has around 150 employees, not sure how many directly work on game development, but whatever that number is is currently split between working on VT2’s final batch of content, DT’s console port, and DT itself. Remembering how often we’d get months long content droughts with total silence from the devs during VT2, I was really worried it would happen again when they announced that this team would be working on all three of these things at once. My #1 theory is that management is probably stretching an already slow dev team too thin, they just bit off more than they could chew and we get worse products because of it.
Pretty sure it is something like that. It is the same in many other development sectors. In the Programming sector it is more hidden. Other industries like Animation series are more open about the fact, that the real reason for the time the audience has to wait for new seasons in Animation series is the fact that the studios and the artist are gonna work on new project, as soon as one season is complete. They do not care what the audience desires the most. They have projects in line for the next 2 years already.
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