I’m not frustrtated with them not removing locks, it doesn’t mean much for me, since i have all i want for every class. But it’s just nuts how some people in this industry are unteachable. Why they even think that making monetization as a priority, strange player retention strategies will bring them money and success, while it never happend with any game? Untill you are an ActiBlizzard for sure, then you can milk normies. Do Fatshark think they are on that level? Lol.
Meanwhile look at Baldurs Gate 3, DRG and Witcher 3 as examples. Customer friendly games got chicks, scummy GaaS got their death in the gutter. It’s 1 year after release soon, and game isn’t even close to V2 in terms of content, we are still at the “breakthelocks” drama, ffs.
Where are new enemies/faction, new biomes, new mission types, some new progression/daily quest/system, free battlepass like in DRG, new weapons, new classes, prestige levels etc. Where is a SERVICE? Well i can say where, it’s only in the players wet dreams. There are probably were more dev streams for V2 recently, rather for DT. How people in charge are getting their positions in this industry is a mystery to me.
On their own forums there are multiple threads telling them that the locks are bad and need to go. Yet instead of removing these locks they double down and keep the locks and change nothing. They threw in that curio change to shut us up.
For me the locks prevent me from wanting to play. My idea of fun is to be able to experiment with different builds and stat combinations in missions. For a game like this the grind is simply a means to an end. Hopefully they learn someday.
Not that I’m arguing in favour of keeping locks, but the changes they’ve made do help.
By allowing us to pick any perk we like, they’re removing the need to spend potentially hours upon hours of manual rolling to get the perk(s) you want. This part is a win, no matter how you paint it.
By changing the locks to be any two features instead of one perk and one blessing, they’re increasing the chance of getting a weapon that’s useful as a base to modify. Instead of needing one perk and one blessing to be good in order for the weapon to not be trash, you need any two features to be good. It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely an improvement.
They’re working on the Xbox port as it’s the next biggest cash injection they can get, and there’s also probably a Microsoft contract to fulfill.
It’s what they’ve been working on since before the open letter from the CEO that promised that they weren’t working on the Xbox port until PC was fixed.
They’re just stringing everyone along with spaced out “communications” and bare minimum updates while they try and fail to work out how to port things to Xbox, add crossplay, and also not water things down for the PC market because the consoles can’t handle the amount of horde mobs on screen as PC can.
Best thing to do is to drop the game for a year or two, or until they announce the first season. Things aren’t going to improve much, or at all, until that point.
The thing is who thought that fast cashgrab is a better way than building a solid reputation for a small company, when market clearly shows it’s reversed every time. Best cash injection is to make a good project, it doesn’t even need to be a complex game, if there will be a roadmap, quality and consistency people will return and pay money again. Game needs just to be fun, and it will sell itself, like some Vampire Survivors or Only Up. Sure it’s a much more simple games, but it’s the same formula - game should be fun, being customer unfriendly isn’t fun. People will reccomend fun game to their favorite streamer, streamer will promote it to a wider audience, yet companies act like troglodytes that driven by greed. DT also suffers with same problems as V2, despite there wasn’t tencent and microsoft involved in V2.
It feels like the order of priorities was the monetisation, then the core mission gameplay, and everything outside that are just whatever dregs they threw together.
Imagine if they did a simple number change and now instead of rerolling 2 things, the other 2 get locked, you reroll 3 things and the last get locked? They already changed the logic for it, and this would make a lot more people happy.
what keeps me wake at night is the reason.
why would they keep the locks there’s no merit for it…
it doesn’t archive player retention (quite the opposite)
it doesn’t create a “worth grinding for” mindset in players (carrot on a stick)
it doesn’t create depth
and it actively harms a big portion of what is/or could be a huge strengths of the game (variety of weapon’s and builds)
so what does it actually trying to do?
i can’t come up with anything but, “that guy in charge thought other games had similar features and since we are going to copy that style of game we need too”.
Maybe it’s 4th dimension warp karkery to decrease company value, so small one-man company created 15 minutes ago could purchase them for 10 eurocent per stock, go bankrupt and after multiple other questionable transactions re-emerge month later as ex-employees owned entity?
One can dream…
Why they even think that making monetization as a priority […] will bring them money and success, while it never happend with any game?
Because it does, at least monetarily. It’s the sad reality of today’s gaming landscape. EA games led the way over 10 years ago and showed how profitable internal monetization (microtransactions) can be with FIFA, and though the quality of the series has steadily decreased ever since, the valorization of the company and the dividends paid to investors have increased massively. Now so many games have lootboxes and whatnot, some even basing their entire revenues around this system with tremendous economic success despite poor game quality. The gaming industry is today’s most profitable entertainment industry and it’s not because games got better.
Fatshark’s size as a company is not very relevant here. This practice is scalable, both up and down. They would not have spent money implementing it otherwise.
It shows that there is little to no consumer-oriented ethics behind the directions taken by the management of Fatshark. They are not trying to deliver a good product. They lied, then released an unfinished product instead of delaying development. They caved in to the money and have made their money back. If it wasn’t for international laws, they could’ve gotten sued for false advertising and would have lost rather fast in a few europeans countries.
I feel sorry for the developers who would like to see the game they’ve worked on being praised by its community rather than berated.
Where are new enemies/faction, new biomes, new mission types, some new progression/daily quest/system, free battlepass like in DRG, new weapons, new classes, prestige levels etc
Delayed because of all the fixing this game needs and the port to console. This was the case for Vermintide 2 as well, but it’s even worse this time around. At least that game had gotten 2 DLCs this far after release, with 5 (+1 secret) maps and a bunch of weapons.
In what way do crafting locks help with monetisation?
I honestly don’t get it - a mechanic that makes people stop playing also makes them stop buying skins…
Like, my theory has always been that it’s there to extend gametime, since more gametime = more sales, but surely they can see how badly this particular element has hurt people’s perception of the game.
I wonder if it would be so poorly received if they didn’t show us that they absolutely do know how to create a player-positive gear system. Athanor was there. All they had to do was recreate the weaves gear economy system and tune it for DT.
I’m not going to knock the change until I’ve tried it though. A lot of the problem with the current system is just how heavily weighted it is against us. This change does alleviate that a little. Whether it’s enough to curb the vitriol or not, we’ll see.
I may be being unfair, as I know not everyone has English as a first language and I respect that most Europeans have a level of English far higher than my (combined) French, German and Spanish.
But…
[quote=“FatsharkCatfish, post:1, topic:82164”]
These changes mark the next step in our support to the game
[/quote] – from the recent announcement
“Support”
It’s such a business term, used so as not to acknowledge that something isn’t complete. The fact the game still needs finishing, needs developing with maps and a crafting system of note. It doesn’t need support, it needs fixing.
You support something that is finished and whose users are having “local” problems. It’s a nice turn of phrase, but it’s disingenuous.
Quite clearly Fatshark believes there is merit to denying their players the ability to have what they want. And there’s plenty of justification for that idea in the abstract, just look at all of the very successful genres that do gear treadmills as a matter of course: ARPGs, MMOs, gacha games, etc.
These games wants people to play for very long periods of time. They want people to stick around for months and years on end to buy as much of their DLC and MTX as possible. There are a variety of ways these various games have engineered to keep the interest of their players for as long as possible, and the biggest ones tend to be quite successful at it.
A lot of Darktide’s problems come in form of the rushed, slapdash, and careless way Fatshark apes the systems of more successful games. And they do so seemingly without much care for the nuances of those systems nor any concern over how those systems will interact with their game and their players.
Some of it is understandable. Almost none of those successful games got every aspect right on the first go, their current status is the result of years of work to refine their idea. Plus, we know for a fact that Darktide’s whole crafting system was rushed out of the door late in development. We also have statements from very shortly before the beta that describe currently non-existent aspects of itemization, which would lead me to believe that items as a whole were put together at the very last minute.
The biggest issue that Fatshark is extremely recalcitrant to address these things in a timely ****ing manner. Probably due to some combination factors like: needing to put most of their resources into the Xbox version, not wanting to repeat perceived mistakes from Vermintide 2, and the general management issues that seem rife in the company in general.
