I played through MS gamepass, which I signed up for and renewed once just to play darktide. I guess that puts me in a unique position of being able to choose whether to give fs more funding, unlike all of the steam players who payed full price. I really enjoyed the core experience of the gameplay, so much that I sank 736 hours into the game over those two months. I have ADHD, and I could tell this game was designed to hook exactly my type of brain.
While I enjoyed the gameplay being tailored to my brain, I increasingly resented that the progression system was also clearly designed to exploit my brain. The hourly chance to finally see a good roll of a weapon I wanted to try out meant I’d log in to check just in case, pretty much every hour I was awake. Maybe I was unlucky but in all that time I didn’t find one great item. Some of the friends I made had got lucky though, so that chance was enough to get me to check every time just in case.
Just because I lack self control doesn’t mean I am not smart though, I understood it wasn’t healthy to be checking a dumb game shop compulsively, but that’s part of the unfortunate parts of ADHD. So when my sub expired after the second month I decided not to renew, and it has been so nice being free. I can play another game or watch another thing without interrupting it to check that cursed shop.
I want to play the game again. I miss the fun parts, I miss the friends I made. It’s dying on gamepass anyway and so I’m resigned to forking out the full price and starting again on steam to have anyone to play with, if I were to play again. But in today’s dev blog you’ve made it very clear that it is your design intent to stick to the mental trap of rng loot to force players into forever searching for upgrades, despite the overwhelming negative feedback against it. If you had backed down on this design decision and been more respectful of players like myself then you’d have got my money. But instead I can now see this will never be a healthy game for me to engage with, and so with considerable disappoinment I’m going to stop hoping and just leave the game behind.
I want to thank the devs and artists on the team who clearly poured a lot of love and creativity into building the core game, it’s some of the best fun I’ve had in ages. I feel so bad that your project has been ruined by decisions made by your management that have turned your beautiful game into a meme of a disaster.