I’ve been playing the Tide series since it started in 2015, and time and time again some mechanic, ability, weapon is misjudged, massively over-performs, is left to rot for months, and finally gets patched. This approach is the optimal-strategy for pissing off the maximum number of players possible: the initial frustration by the veteran players who immediately recognize OP thing in question, the slow discovery of the OP thing by the wider community, the long period of boredom for everyone not using the OP thing, the disappointment from players who find being OP extremely boring and don’t get to enjoy whatever class it’s attached to, and finally the meltdown of players who only ever used the OP thing when it finally gets fixed. Why?
29 Likes
Because Fatshark doesn’t want to put enough people on the game to actually develop it.
7 Likes
Funny enough after the recent micro buffs to weapons the balancing update before the announced DS nerf they said they’d keep a closer eye on balancing but they haven’t even nerffed the dueling sword yet.
3 Likes
Because we were actually the QA to help the game to get to launch state. They’ve been on catch up since before then as the game launched without weapons seen in trailers (probably where hedge got 70 weapons from because we definitely didn’t). Or the chaos spawn in the game’s opening cinematic…had to catch the next ship to Atoma 6+ months later.
I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.
3 Likes
For anyone familiar with tabletop 40k, I think this is just FS adhering to the Games Worskhop theory of game design & balance to a T.
It took GW a quarter century and 8 or 9 editions to make Ogryns an actually functional useful unit on tabletop, so at least FS is doing better on that count 
6 Likes
9 months of Sister of the Thorn. Nine. Months. Nine months of avoiding lobbies with elves, or only playing elf with a different career. And they radically changed her, its not like Fatshark disagreed with the players, they just didn’t do anything about it for NINE BLASTED MONTHS.
6 Likes
The slower pace of content would feel so much better if there were more frequent balance changes to keep the game from being stale. Instead we’ve been playing with the same stale meta for a year, with the Ogryn rework and addition of Arbites just making it worse.
12 Likes
They have structural, institutional and managerial issues where they have versioning issues, the inability to add small, iterative balancing changes with their ‘hotfixes’ and the overwhelming desire to re-invent the wheel rather than the aforementioned small iterative changes. And if they can’t re-invent the wheel for an issue, they just remove it completely.
15 Likes
Did it with VT2
Did it with VT2 Versus
Did it with DT
They’re extremely slow
For Reference, They nerfed Pyromancer in Versus like 9 months after the release of the mode, and wasn’t even announced (They didn’t nerf the extremely OP stuff still)
2 Likes
At least they did nerf Radiant Inheritance after 1 week of Sister’s release
1 Like
They took months to fix Wigglemancer, AK Huntsman and Fist of the North Star Kruber. Years to fix Bounty Hunter’s actually infinite ammo and Battle Wizard’s lingering and famished flames combination.
Cause each time there are news of nerfs the steam reviews turn to 
10 Likes
One its not sexy on a resume. Ergo it gets very little in the way of attention as staff jockey for projects that in one bulletpoint catch a hiring managers attention.
Two, most people have a hard (to put things very mildly) admiting when they fouled up. Software people are even worse, to the point where the egomaniac developer has become a cliche/ meme/ etc. Having to tweak something is effectively the same as admiting to screwing up the first time. To the point where even staff who have no reason to be involved in such decisions throw up every roadblock possible to keep their “perfect project” from being “broken by some visionless twit”. And yes that last part is a direct quote from a certain ex-coworker of mine.
Three. Odds are they just don’t care about the game. Darktide has for a while been nothing more than a cash-grab. A very poorly done one at that. Frankly my guess is that they know that their golden goose - the license to Warhammer - is very unlikely to be renewed after three debacles in a row. So they’re trying to get as much cash as they can now to throw at their “new IP” before the goose finally dies.
1 Like
This is the truth.
6 Likes
go easy on them they’ve only had 3 years
7 Likes
2 Likes
Basically the reason why I still don’t have Arbite. And won’t buy it until this crazy OP crap of them is attended.
2 Likes
I’m average player myself - I still understand that the proper solution here is to nerf everything in unison - both OP classes/abilities and mobs/hoard intensity. Constantly bumping it all up to match each other doesn’t make any sense.
3 Likes
Most of the community will unironically tell you that outrageous stuff is “just ok”, then it becomes the baseline to them
So for example to these people, VoC spam is now considered weak, the plasma noobtube is just ok, and the arbite crutchgun is in a good place
That’s where Fatshark gets their feedback from because spoiler, they’re just as good at their own game as your average redditor
That’s why they come up with game design pearls like “never nurf, only buf“
Their only goal ultimately is to sell overpriced skins to washed up millennial and genx dad gamers, and brainless power fantasy is a means to that end
Just look at the reddit cash shop addict metheads every two weeks
3 Likes
You’re not wrong on most of this, and Darktide absolutely has its balance issues, but I think there’s perhaps some misplaced assumptions here and some unconnected strings.
Yes, the game is a power fantasy. Always has been and always will be, it’s a coop PvE game where a quartet of expendable Inquisitorial henchmen cut through 3 or 4 digits worth of cultists, veteran guardsmen, ogryn, daemonhosts, and chaos spawn on the regular. The game is modeled explicitly on Left4Dead, a title where the players take on the roles of characters in a zombie movie, so power fantasy is pretty baked in.
Yes the game appeals more to Millenials and Xies than Zs or Alphas, if you look at Darktide and similar 4 person coop games like DRG and HD2, their average players are typically more in their mid 30’s, not so much teenagers or university students. I don’t even think any of the NPCs are under 30ish, and there’s practically no representation of young people in the game. The game isn’t, and was never intended to be, primarily aimed at the college-age tryhard crowd in the way something like Dark Souls or Elden Ring are, it’s absolutely aimed at the more casual “dad” gamer in that sense.
Likewise, Yes, the average player is “bad”, and this is where we see issues arise. If you hop into a Heresy or Damnation game, you’ll see average parties wipe on these difficulties with regularity even with full-meta builds, even with all the Arbites complaints one can see full parties of Arbites wipe on Heresy with regularity. Darktide has immense amounts of room for skill expression, and the difference between an average player and an ultra-sweat is insane, but as most titles have found, developing primarily for ultra-sweats usually doesn’t work out as well as catering to the bulk of the casual playerbase.
When you see people talking about the PG being fine, well, the Plasma Gun on Heresy isn’t particularly impressive when you aren’t getting a dozen shotgunners spawned on the same spot to blap with a single shot the way you might get in Auric or Havoc (or have to deal with huge Havoc ammo shortages and damage reduction that the PG can mitigate). For the casual player running normal difficulty modes, the PG doesn’t come off anywhere near as capable as it would for someone running Auric and high Havoc games, where the cleave and ammo efficiency of the PG plays a dramatically more outsized role. Thus for the average player, it genuinely does feel fine, hence the strong divergence of views between the more casual and sweat player bases.
I don’t think the game being a power fantasy mostly aimed at “dad” gamers is the problem really, that’s simply the choice of target market demographic. I think the issue is that DT tried to be too many things with its ancillary systems without a real plan. Ultimately I think this title would have worked better with simpler systems, and simpler difficulty scaling. Large expansive talent trees, triple digits worth of distinct weapons, dozens of perks/blessings for said weapons, and enemies that have different stats at different difficulty levels, all add up to a lot of complexity that I don’t think brings an equivalent level of real depth to gameplay, especially when most players don’t have a clue about mechanics like Cleave or Rending or Power and how they work in detail (and no in-game way to find out more). Complexity != Depth, and this is a problem with Darktide, just as it’s been a problem with many aspects of Tabletop 40k through the ages.
The resulting power ceiling inflation the upper levels of players use it to carve through swathes of enemies ever faster while the average players flounder amidst that mess gets us the awkward difficulty scaling we get today with FS deciding that “moar enemies” is the answer all the the time over making other adjustments.
2 Likes