For some reason when I hear “FatShark” and “game development”, I imagine “Occurrence Border” repairs…
“Telling your boss that you are going to be late for work because ninety-nine percent of your Mechanicus contingent had been possessed by daemons and subsequently purged is very awkward.”
Anyway, I’m still going to monitor FS progress on Darktide…
The nature of randomization and repetitive actions sometimes seen within crafting is something that we are steering to avoid in the crafting system within Darktide.
To be fair, buying large batches of weapons from Brunt is a repetitive action that players take to mitigate (one part of) the RNG at play in crafting.
Maybe it does not categorically exclude the current crafting system, but the current system doesn’t steer to avoid RNG, it goes headfirst into it then tries to undo some of the RNG after the fact.
I, for one, would certainly be interested in hearing more of the “why” behind the system. I personally don’t mind crafting in its current form, but I’d still like to know more
I’m going to give you (Fatshark) a great idea!
I know you try to do Hack Weeks a few times per year, but obviously it is difficult to find the time to allocate a whole week to experimentation.
I will now introduce you to the new concept: Hack Lunch 
This upcoming Monday, you can host a Hack Lunch where the team(s) are given 30 minutes to come up with a better itemization and crafting system for Darktide. I am confident that the teams will still have 25 minutes left for eating and socializing. It’s a win-win-win!
Then, Next Week you can host a Hack Lunch where the team has 30 minutes to discuss the most glaring issues and bugs with the game, especially with a focus on bugs that it would take a simple LUA edit to fix.
And then, finally, the following week, you can host another Hack Lunch where the team discusses a way to communicate the results from the previous lunches to the customers, that isn’t silence!
Literally what GGG did (haven’t kept up with PoE lately so I’m talking in the past tense).
They would talk about the development process, and why some seemingly simple things could be …immeasurably complex.
It really quelled community speculation which at a certain point a mob will always become restless without any info, and then get angry. It’s inevitable.
Instead it seems FS - DT division seems to be content with throwing their CMs to the wolves armed with vague nothings.
They got caught out in several lies. Their fault, btw. Now they punish us for rightfully calling them out with icy silence.
“They’re going to use anything we say against us so we give them nothing, and then anything they actually get will be a pleasant surprise.”
Probably not verbatim, but close enough. Childish really.
Maybe I’ll be corrected by a dev.
Fat chance.
GGG is a giga chad studio. Chris, Jonathan and Mark are gamers. Even their senior graphics programmer, dude with phd in physics, is a gamer. And all of them play PoE.
I doubt Fatshark CEO play games and obviously Darktide devs don’t play their own game.
I’m not even a big PoE fan, but damn their podcasts with PoE streamers is something else, if PoE devs think they are right about some system in the game, they drop such solid arguments and explanation so even if you personaly don’t like the idea you can’t deny there is a vision that makes sense.
GGG also proves that being acquired by Tencent is NO excuse to become as bad as Fatshark has.
@FatsharkCatfish does a lot of effective damage control, but Darktide’s main issue is that it’s supposed to be a live service game with an in-game store but is hardly getting the support it needs to stay relevant.
I am not one for plugging other games on this forum, though I have been guilty of it in the past, but @FatsharkCatfish, you and the Darktide team should give Helldivers 2 a try for at least 10 hours and experience that the pain points of Darktide has been solved over at Arrowhead Studios and Helldivers 2 is much better designed overall from cooperative play to how the microtransactions work.
In Helldivers, full armor skins cost only 1.25 dollars (or 13 SEK) when converted from Super Credits (Helldivers currency) to “freedom units”.
You can gain currency by leveling up the free battlepass, which also includes weapons and a plethora of free cosmetic sets, emotes etc. You can also find Super Credits in-game during matches at about 10-20 each match.
The paid for “premium” battlepass costs 1000 Super Credits and will never disappear (no FOMO), which means you can grind free Super Credits by just playing the game and unlock all battlepasses entirely free in a non-egregious grind method.
I understand that you are not the same studio and you do not have the same design process, but as a former restaurant chef, you cannot simply hide your head in the sand and pretend that your competitors do not exist.
My head chef was constantly on the lookout for what other restaurants were doing, where we needed to improve, and what we could do differently by comparing ourselves to them.
Comms link
I notice people always ask about comms link.
Probably a good idea if they had mailing list to subscribe to and it will simply send them an email once it is up on their news page.
UI interface
Surprised UI isn’t on the radar. To be point mods are required to save UI interaction time. Work has already been done and simply can integrate these mods natively.
Crafting mechanics is one thing. UI to interact feels like a lot of work in itself. Feels very one by one actions instead of bulk.
I mean if say look at Microsoft Outlook. Good example of bulk actions, filtering view on certain criterias, search etc.
Currently inventory feels like a doom scroll.
Interesting that PoE has a separated client in China - runs by Tencent, not by GGG. It’s full of mtx stuff like boosters. So considering DT is full of fomo and rng, we are playing China DT client.
This is a really good point I never see anybody else make.
It isn’t Tencent, you guys. Fatshark was awful at communicating before and they are now too.
Being acquired by a corporation doesn’t automatically make you bad, as you’ve pointed out with GGG.
As a POE player since closed beta with 1,000s of hours, I can say the capital and resources GGG acquired when “bought out” was used very well and I think it made the game better tbh.
I think we are complaining about design choices at a fundamental level. It is FS choice to do what the complaints are accusing them of doing.
Like I said before, I’m not convinced FS is making choices only because of profit. They seem to just move at a snails pace, have a larger “gameplan” they are working towards, and fail to communicate any of this, which leads to frustration
I’m going to disagree with that contention. You don’t end up with a combat system as badass as darktide’s without a ton of effort and understanding of your own game.
I feel the question is more about whether the developers (Fatshark) are still playing the game and at Auric Maelstrom difficulty to gauge performance.
Playing it during development is one thing, but continuing to play it for feedback, like GSG does with Deep Rock Galactic, is entirely different.
In my opinion, anyway.
There’s also the fact that huge amounts of the combat system is lifted wholesale from V1 and V2, designed by people who no longer work at Fatshark.
Hell, even the latest batch of “new” weapon marks had at least one example of animations lifted 100%, frame for frame, from V2.
Nah, whole studio probably was playing V1, some people probably were playing V2. And very few devs played DT.
I don’t believe you can log in, play for one hour and will find amount of loading screens, missing basic UI features, prologue that don’t teach you how to play (most people, or at least many don’t play optional tutorials, and tutorials also don’t explain how things like slide works), unintuitive and unexplained item stats and stats inside stats, as it all something that good or ok.
And it’s even before facing gacha and crafting. Not even about balance or bugs.
Like I can’t get a t2 blessing - flechette, cause t2 blessings are harder to get than t4.
It is so cause devs don’t play their game, they might be simulating something in psykanium.
Whenever you watch Fatshark devs play Darktide, they always give their Rejects obscene amounts of Diamantine, Ordo Dockets and Plasteel.
I’d go so far as to argue that even though they do play their own game, they’re virtually not playing it if they can just give their Rejects whatever they want, thus bypassing the horrible Crafting System and all that.
It’s more that no one in Fatshark plays it like a normal player.
They don’t have to wait for a certain mission at a certain difficulty with certain modifiers. They don’t have to gather enough resources (since they spawn effectively infinite resources) or wait for the shops to refresh to give them what they want or to build specific combinations of gear. They don’t have to wait 30+ seconds every time they load into the Mourningstar.
They may have the theoretical numbers for how long it’ll take for certain outcomes, but they very obviously haven’t experienced it as a normal player does.
They are very insulated from the typical player experience by their dev kits and tools.
That’s exactly the point that I’m also trying to make.
The Devs that DO play Darktide abuse their ability to just GIVE themselves whatever they’ll need after they max out their characters by default - that’s why they don’t have the motivation to actually fix those issues.
They don’t understand what it feels like to spend almost 2 days worth of gameplay just to level up ONE of their characters, they don’t understand what it feels like to get a good RNG weapon just to have Hadron brick it, etc.
They did drop a set of chinese new year cosmetics yesterday. Red and gold recolors. Skulls were also removed from those, of course.
Having to call THOSE Chinese New Year Cosmetics makes me feel kinda… mad?
The Witcher 3 recently dropped some mean Chinese Cosmetics with the next-gen version of the game for absolutely no reason, meanwhile the Darktide team specifically planned those Cosmetics for Chinese New Year and yet they look the complete opposite of what anyone would describe as Chinese.