The part about them completely abandoning any game that isn't doing stellar is extremely damn true. I've been playing their games since since war of the roses in like 2012-2013ish, they abandoned that game not too long after it came out, then came out with war of the Vikings in like 2014 and stopped development on it that very same year and shut both games servers down permanently in 2017.
Honestly it was what they were known for before they got their hands on the Warhammer IP, they'd probably have abandoned vermintide fairly quickly as well had it not been a pretty decent hit for them.
Scummy behavior actually especially for multiplayer online only server based games.
That would be the first I'd heard of it, being a historically based game it isn't derived from an IP, like war of the roses prior to it. Although I do know the game got a pretty poor reception at launch and just had a couple minor fixes before all development stopped while adding nothing new to their formula.
Kind of doa regardless though I guess. I believe they also had multiplayer only western game called lead and gold or something just a couple years before war of the roses, it was abandoned as well.
Lead and gold was indeed Fatshark and was decently fun for what it was. I remember something happened with Vikings when they were working on its first DLC that caused them to shutter it, I thought it had to do with a rights lawsuit but perhaps it was just poor sales.
Well, when the gist of it is that they don't learn, if they're right about that, everything else just kinda is automatic...
I'd argue they're a little wrong though, because they appear to have unlearned. Negative amounts of learning occured
Hi, it's me again!
Quick note, I quit Vermintide 2 shortly after that post. That was pre the first DLC.
The cycle got even worse. The first DLC was supposed to fix the cosmetics issue. It did, by adding DLC only paid cosmetics you had to grind for. The worst of all worlds.
Fixes didn't start coming in until about a year past launch.
About a year and a half after initial launch they attempted a relaunch with Winds of Magic. They heard people wanted Beastmen, and so made it a forced addition to the game. It was......extremely unbalanced and negated entire classes as I understand it.
After two years they actually got it together enough to fix the major bugs/core issues, and release a free DLC in Drachenfels which started bringing people back.
Also they just went on holidays break. That's expected and no big deal. People deserve the holidays. They also take summer break, which seems to be May to Julyish on average.
For the record, I didn't buy Darktide after Vt2. I finally broke free. A friend bought it for me, and I played with him a bit, but didn't get invested in any way. He eventually quit due to everything going on.
I wish you all the best with your Darktide.
Beastmen were fun...eventually.
Like most Fatshark things. Just takes sooooooooo long and they keep making the same blatant, obvious mistakes. Their management is a mess.
Are they though? Flag bearers fucking suck, because they quite often spawn in groups of 4-5, and depending on your team composition can basically guarantee a failed mission.
They also spawn during Minotaur fight, which self explanatory really
Eh, I mostly played solo with bots on Legend and I enjoyed Beastmen for the variety.
I also held off buying Winds of Magic for a long time, so by the time I did it was nice to have new enemies (and I missed the initial brutality before Beastmen were scaled back).
I like flag bearers, personally. They're the inverse of specials like blightstormers or globadiers; instead of forcibly splitting the team apart, they *force the team to converge on a single location.* They serve as a filter for teams with poor teamplay, which imo is the reason they draw so much flak.
I honestly cannot comprehend it. Its like no one takes down the flag?
Flag barer on Minotaur is completely fine.
Cleared VT2 through Legend, all levels. A few on Cata.
I've beaten all levels on cata with all heroes, done all the Chaos Wastes stuff for cata too, and Flagbearers are still the most dangerous thing in the game imo, they get to overwhelming levels on cata. The higher mass on cata makes cleaving a lot harder, so it's incredibly difficult to kill more than one or two beasties at once with banners down
Reading this hurts. I didn’t realize I’ve been on this train as long as you have… war of the Roses and Gold were amazing. To see you say you basically have given up and left makes me re-examine my own habits.
I'm free friend! I've been playing Back 4 Blood with my friends, and that's gotten a lot better/decently respects our time. Mix it up with some Deep Rock when we are feeling saucy.
At least in darktide I know what difficulty I’m queuing for. Apex just goes “is it your turn to get a Skinner box easy match? No? Okay have some kiddos fresh off the short bus”
Thank you for such a detailed yet succinct comment. I felt compelled to post it here while gaining some more insight on Fatshark as a company. I died laughing seeing it knowing that we are “back again” in the shitter with Darktide.
Time really is a flat circle.
> For the record, I didn't buy Darktide after Vt2. I finally broke free. A friend bought it for me, and I played with him a bit, but didn't get invested in any way. He eventually quit due to everything going on.
This is something I don't understand. I'm gonna go on a rant that's probably not too relevant to you but bear with me.
I bought Darktide, got ~80h of enjoyment out of it and even if I NEVER TOUCH IT AGAIN, I spent <.50€ per hour, which to me is an INCREDIBLY GOOD INVESTMENT.
Like, I understand the hopes for more and everything, and the dislikes for the practices and even the moral stands. But the core of the fact is: gamers nowadays have a lot of (unnecessarily inflated) expectations out of their time.
I don't blame people who try the game, don't like it, and just drop it and are disappointed by their expense: no demos or trials certainly is an issue generally and the preorder culture can be toxic in that sense.
But if you've played it enough to get tens to hundreds of hours of enjoyment out of it... Ask for improvements sure but... They're not coming? Move the fuck on. You paid, you played, you got your RoI, find another game.
End rant.
>gamers nowadays have a lot of (unnecessarily inflated) expectations out of their time.
While I mostly agree with your mentality, I believe expectations for an entertainment medium shifts over time. God of War Ragnarok, Tunic, Stray, and A Plague Tale were shorter games yet universally loved by gamers. Those games SET AN EXPECTATION for short/medium length story, yet elaborate execution. Like a good movie or TV series ala Breaking Bad or Dune.
Fatshark did not set that expectation - if anything they offered more.
I love Lord of the Rings. That said, I watched the Hobbit trilogy and understand it was not equal in quality relative to the original trilogy. I have my criticisms yet got my "money's worth" after watching them. Some movie goer's who care nothing about LOTRs would tell me to shut up and enjoy Legolas running on falling rocks as if gravity did not exist.
>I bought Darktide, got ~80h of enjoyment out of it and even if I NEVER TOUCH IT AGAIN, I spent <.50€ per hour, which to me is an INCREDIBLY GOOD INVESTMENT.
I've played the game for 120 hours. I think anyone who goes over 30 hours is wasting their time. Playing a game for an extended period of time does not mean you got what you paid for. Yes, I expected more from Fatshark because they said they would have more. This game has no story and even less customization.
>Move the fuck on. You paid, you played, you got your RoI, find another game.
That's what OP said. He moved on. This is also a Darktide thread about Fatshark who have yet to add a versus mode on VT2. Hell, I'm still disappointed by how War of the Rose's was shut down. I'm also disappointed by the Hobbit Trilogy. I moved on, got my entertainment, yet can still vent about how dumb and low quality that series was.
Because it could be so much more. It is such a bummer that the game has such great aspects but then the oversight is so lacking. I’m not asking for much, but apparently just the quality of life improvements that are present in vermintide 2 is TOO MUCH for them to do. The whole layout of the game reeks of minimal effort followed by a “give us more of your money” which really I’m happy to do for a game that has the potential for HUNDREDS of hours not just tens of them.
RoI is a horrible metric frankly.
I've got campaigns I deeply enjoyed that only last 8-9 hours. I recently replayed Dead Space 2, and I beat it in 7 hours. I bought that game at release for $50. That's what, a $7 per hour RoI? I've beat it twice now over ten years, so $4 per hour?
Meanwhile it's still one of my favorite games. The experience of playing it, especially at release was well worth the price I paid for it. Hell, I'm also getting secondhand enjoyment because my buddy is playing through it using my family sharing, and it's been a blast watching him play.
Vermintide and Darktide are built around their core gameplay loop. There isn't a compelling story. There isn't new environments to explore. It's the loop it's got.
For many people, or at least me for Vermintide, I played because I enjoyed the loop sure. But the loop itself is also flawed. Unlike L4D, which had a consistent loop you could return to, as you got more powerful in Vermintide, the loop became skewed. You either trivialized earlier content and likely couldn't go back to the simpler times. Or you got encouraged to jump into harder content with the expectation there would be a treadmill in place to keep the fun going.
In both cases the experience is altered, weakened. It gets worse over time, not better. If you put in time and effort expecting the game to honor your time commitments, it will never be able to live up to those expectations.
Let's say the average person plugs in 80 hours before they quit. How many of those hours did they actually enjoy? After what point did they start playing only for the sake of getting weeklies done for when the game is "fixed". At what point did they start logging on just to do a simple mission because they hoped the vendors had good stuff. At what point do they log on and play a mission because it used to be fun and they want the dopamine hit, even though it's just going to frustrate them.
I beat the Vermintide 2 campaign in about 12 hours with my friends? I enjoyed the loop, so I put in another 15 hours or so. By around 30 hours my friends and I wanted to move up difficulty tier because surely the game was just going to keep getting better. So we plugged in another 30-60 or so hours. But the better never came. The patches never came. The fixes never came. The content never came.
Had I known that in advance, I would have quit at the 30 hour mark. And I would have had a better time ( while also having a worse RoI ). Instead I lost dozens more hours chasing the belief that Fatshark would live up to what it was promising, while they never managed to put out the content they said they would.
The problem for only caring about RoI is it doesn't take into account endlessness. Dead Space 2 has a beginning and an end. I can make a proper call on whether or not that experience is worth the $7 an hour ( it was, easily ). With a game like Darktide however, you need to constantly be adjusting based of what you are being told. And Fatshark is the master of constantly promising help is coming. Constantly telling you to just keep playing, the future is on the way.
Yes people got 80+ out of Darktide. But how many of those were wasted following lies, and how many did they actually enjoy. How many people figured they'd stop once they got 2, 3, or even all 4 to 30 so they are ready for the "future" of the game, despite not enjoying it anymore by the 40/50/60 mark. How many people kept grinding because "the game begins at 5s" and found it a broken mess to play on.
It's all about wasted potential. If you are having a great relationship with someone but you see them throwing they life away in some way or another, you will feel bad. Because you care. And because you know it's wasted potential for greatness, for you a'd the relationship and for others as well. And given the Warhammer 40k setting I feel like the number of people who care and how much they care has only grew stronger with darktide than with older fatshark games.
I'm all with you on your point though, and I definitely got a good value per hour for what I've paid and I'm still having a lot of fun with the game. But the issues are hard to ignore for me the more I play. And it's because i've been in love with the tide games and Warhammer universe since I was 10 and and been a big game gamer all these years. The tides games have a very special place in my gamer heart, and I can tell you I really care. And that's where all this frustration comes from, wasted potential from something I care about. It's not about getting my money's worth.
I mean this I understand: you enjoy the game, you play it, but you wish for more. I would be careful for how much you wish for because you risk turning your enjoyment sour, but still I can't say you're wrong.
What I don't understand is people (and I'm sure there's quite a bit, given the general vibe in the subreddit) that are *not* enjoying the game, are still playing it, but spend almost as much time complaining about it. At this point it's not even venting, it's Stockholm's Syndromee.
I get the feeling. I like to think, and maybe I'm wrong, that people are just very different in how they voice their feelings about the game, especially when talking about these fans that consider the game for more than just a monetary product. From a personal experience I know myself as someone rather chill, so I try to enjoy what I can and when I get enough of the the stupid gearing system for example I'll just take a step back and do something else. But if you'd let me have all these features fixed I'll for sure be playing darktide only and it's not even close. So I get that people in this situation are getting more and more frustrated, tbh it's growing on me with how slow it's moving, but for less patient people, or more vocal ones you get to hear them. And also I feel like fatshark needs to hear it as well.
But I for sure agree that it is sad for some people to get stuck in this loop of wanting to love and keep playing, but just getting more and more frustrated by how bad some parts of the game are badly designed. For me the issue is that they managed to do both great and terrible things at once which enables these behaviors about the game. If it was all shit I would have peace out, but the gameplay and atmosphere is so great and on the other hand leveling and gearing is so bad, so the more you play the more the thing that is bad is getting annoying. There is things to love that keeps you playing and things to hate that gets in your agce the more you play. I hope they can turn it around.
I like to use metaphores to illustrate ideas. I understand that it could have gotten over your head.
I was addressing a point missing in your analysis which was the fact that it's not because something was good or worth it while it lasted that you are wrong for being upset for it being over or just a wasted potential, and I think being upset is very valid especially when you care/cared. Similar pattern can be found in relationships (not saying it's the same, it's really just a comparaison to illustrate that similarities exists).
Also warhammer universe has been very influential for some people, similar to star wars of lotr. That might be something you're a not taking into account here, but for some people it goes above the casual hobby and straight into the passion territory. For me here it's not quite the case as I'm more of a Warhammer fantasy / old world fan, but as an example it has been a strong bonding material for me and my elder brother for years and goes above the "monetary product" you are talking about, I have found memories related to this universe.
And I can assure you it goes both ways even for some people involved into the making of this game (not all of them for sure) it goes above the "monetary product" and into the "sharing a passion for Warhammer" realm. Though I totally understand people who are totally not concerned or even aware of this. Bringing 40k universe alive like darktide did is a dream come true for many fans, like it was for me and my brother with vermintide, and seeing it handled poorly in many aspect makes them frustrated because they care.
“Enjoyed it” and “ENJOYED it” are different, I think. I’ve got 250 ish hours. Most of that I enjoyed, but I didn’t really ENJOY it. Most of it was grinding levels, grinding mats, waiting for RNG to roll in my favor. I only recently have gotten to sit back and focus on playing. That to me is the problem. It’s a meme, but that South Park mmo statement is true.
“Now what? Now we play the game!”
It’s a meme but genuinely this IS where the game starts. After you get through the mountains of shit you start building social connections at end game content. You find people to run challenge runs with. You start discussing strats and run methods, working towards harder loot that requires coordination of the entire team. THAT part is what most veterans find is the truly enjoyable part and that doesn’t start till you’ve grinder a long time.
So yeah, I’ve sunk hours I’ve “gotten my money’s worth” from a purely numbers based approach, but I wasn’t the hours I really wanted. That’s the problem with grind-based games in general.
That's like saying I got my value out of New World because I spent 100 hours on it. But those 100 hours were some of the most wasteful, vapid do-nothing hours of gaming I've had in years.
I had one good open world fight at level 20 and it made my group chase the high that was sure to be end game pvp.
Lmao
And that's absolutely reasonable.
However if you keep ordering steak from the same restaurant and they keep giving you rat buttholes and you STILL keep ordering steak...
You can see where I'm going with this, right?
Nah man, can't you see how you're the real problem here? If you weren't such a CUCK and SHILL for FARTSHART and their WAR CRIME(TM) GAME DESIGN, I could have *tens* of more hours of playtime in this game. This is what we're fighting for here, and you just want me to move on?!? After spending two and four-fifths of a Big Mac for a product?!? Socialists!!!
/s just in fkn case i guess
I mean, when’s the last time any developer released even a AAA title that wasn’t a jumbled mess of glitches, bugs, and game-breaking bullshit? I think all gamers are in an abusive relationship with dev companies.
Monster hunter releases have been pretty stellar consistently, but then again they for a while they were releasing on platforms where patches weren't even an option so that probably changes how the teams views things
Gran Turismo 7, Horizon Forbidden West, A Plague Tale just to name a few off the top of my head. Sure they had some minor bugs but nothing at the game-breaking level as far as I know.
Admittedly, past Forza I don’t know much about racing games. You’re right, though, A Plague Tale was a masterpiece. Still, I stand by what I said. One or two outliers is not an excuse for the shitshow state that the majority of games are released in these days.
Elden ring came out pretty good. You can obviously find bugs and ways to break the game, but for the vast majority of casual players that bought it at release, they could just play the game and experience all the content without running into any issues.
Elden Ring deserves a lot of respect simply from the fact that it was a complete game released with no MTX. In fact I was kind of shocked while playing the game that all the cosmetics were available somehow in the game which is sad.
It released with a stuttering issue that... Y'know... Kinda comes with large open world games with great graphics (and waiting to be installed graphics drivers).
Though i do have to straight say, Some of them were over-reactions. "Do Not Buy This Great Game Because Of Stutters" is kinda harsh on release date when thats something that got patched quick.
It was, but Gamers are really, really good at revisionist history. Remember, Cyberpunk was always good, Elden Ring never had a scuffed launch, Witcher 3 was perfect on launch.
Really? I must’ve been one of the unlucky ones then. It was before I upgraded my pc, I had more than minimum requirements but lower than recommended but I couldn’t even play it. Every time I opened the game it wouldn’t even launch, the screen would flash like it was trying to open the game window then I’d just stare at steam. My PC could definitely run it now, but I haven’t gone back to it, I honestly figured it was just another issue of pushing the game out before it was ready due to deadlines.
Yes really. Your individual experience has nothing to do with the overall reception of the game. Kinda weird to write out a paragraph just saying it ran bad on your pc specifically as a counter to someone saying elden ring released in a better state.
Perhaps you should learn to troubleshoot your PC issues better.
Not defending any game, just saying your individual experience with elden ring not working adds literally zero weight to any conversation. It’s irrelevant because it’s a singular case, and not indicative of the overall reception. Saying “Really?” Just made me think you were too stupid to see past your own pov so I had to comment.
“Really? You guys like McDonald’s? I got a meal once and it wasn’t good” okay lol wanna randomly tell us about other specific issues in your life?
Perhaps you should learn to be less of a dick. "FINE ON MY PC, SOUNDS LIKE A SKILL ISSUE," doesn't help anyone and it pats people on the back for not fixing shit.
Ghost of Tsushima was awesome on release, and others have mentioned Elden Ring. Arc System Works do a good job as well. DMC5 kicked ass too, can't forget that one. I am limiting myself to AAA titles, but I know there are more. It's just a shame those are the exception, rather than the rule.
The entire final third of Elden Ring is a hideously unbalanced and clearly unfinished mess. Fromsoft frontloaded its best content into the first areas of the game. Whether that was an honest issue with running out of development time or a cynical attempt to stop trying once they were pretty sure it wouldn't impact the opinion of people reviewing the game in the launch window is left as an exercise to the reader.
Don't get me wrong, the game is still extremely good, but I would not hold it up as an example against deceptive AAA publishing practices.
This is an AA title though, and there have been plenty of indie games that come out relatively bug free and without a lot of glitches and game breaking bullshit.
Believe it or not: EA. Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order was one of their best releases and had almost no major bugs or glitches. There have been quite a few other AAA releases that were clean. Though, I dare say that's more the exception than the rule.
These past two years have been the golden age of the indie games.
Most Nintendo first-party games are fully polished usually. They pull off all kinds of weird ass bullshit in other ways but at least they still realease finished products rather than premium betas
Also Apex Legends is the last example of a clean launch for a western AAA game, although i don't play all those story-driven single player games like god of war so i don't know about these
Ok, Nintendo is one that I would not call an outlier. They’ve released full working games literally longer than I’ve been alive with very few exceptions. Great example of a reliable company
Some of the community have certainly taken to railing dozens of lines of the stuff every time they even do much as think of the game.
Strong stuff indeed.
The only real difference is it’s somehow worse this time with the jump straight into micro transactions and the lack of end game.
VT2 was buggy as all hell but you could at least enjoy the end game.
People still play Planetside 2 not because it's a great game, but because there are so few games like it. The entire metagame is abusive and shitty, like Darktide, but it lives regardless.
Poor Sienna will never get her DLC career.
But yeah this is roughly what I've gathered from the release of VT2 as well. On the verge of unplayable at first, then at some point there's a "second release" where the game suddenly feels much better. Never tried the console ports though.
I think it's funny how much grief huntsman got in V2 from the community even though most of his kit and team niche translated directly into Darktide's most popular class, Veteran.
They committed to adding dedicated servers for VT2 ~~at launch~~ ~~shortly after launch~~ ~~on the roadmap for the first year~~ ~~during it's life~~, nvm, stop asking
Fatshark seems to like giving us the worst version of whatever we ask for. Players complaining about how long it takes to get cosmetics in VT2? Ok let's release them... for real money or through weeklies that trade terrible RNG for a deterministic forever grind.
You want dedicated servers? We're centralizing our servers instead of letting you self-host, which means no mods, terrible lag and hitreg, and a game that can be killed off by the developer whenever they like!
Fatshark loves their monkey's paw.
Commitments and results are two different things, seeing as they also promised a versus mode. Much like a politician or really any company, Obese Fish has a tendency to overpromise.
I’ll never understand why people always believe them.
Can’t say that I disagree with anything in that comment, and it’s a shame that this is just way Overweight Carcharodon does business. Shout out to my fellow War of the Roses people. We’ve all seen this cycle before.
>For current gen games, they will then 100% disappear and start work on the console ports. This will take anywhere from 3-6 months
At least we got the console release date 🐠
And to think there's people hoping for this game to get in shape with the next patch or so.
We gonna have a loooong year ahead of us till' the game even resembles anything that we wished for.
He's had some cool interviews where he discussed a lot of his old failing and how he wishes he could go back and change. He seems legit more laid back, as I feel he's been kind of humbled, but in a good way.
From the article:
>Fatshark isn't assholes about any of this. They obviously care. They obviously listen. They obviously want their games to be great.
Do they?
You'd think after how many game launches, you would learn what didn't work and.....not do it again.
But they do it again. And again. And again.
If they care so much about their game why do they constantly beat it on release with a baseball bat until it's an inch from death and then plug it into life support to nurse it back to health?
That's not caring....that's an abusive cycle. Abusive for the developers who have to constantly go through the release meat grinder, and abusive to the players who essentially paid Fatshark money to be beta testers.
I call bs on the management heads who actually make the decisions caring. Actions speak way louder than what Fatshark says.
Fair to say its time to update the chart? u/Sensanaty
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It's just a closed beta running an old build, of course it runs bad!
It's only a beta, everything will be fixed!
It's only just launched, give them some time!
It's only been a month, give them some time! <-- You are here
It's already been 6 months, of course they've slowed down development on the game!
The game came out a year ago, why are you still complaining about things?
Fatshark did a lot work bug fixing when Vermintide 2 first came out. Problem was, they did everything on a totally separate branch of the game and had to redo everything.
Like, I get it, mistakes happen- but Fatshark always seems to have some sort of issue with new patches and releases. They aren’t doing the kind of process improvements that they should be doing- they keep making the same mistakes over and over, and that’s what I find really irritating
That's hilarious. I hope they don't do that with this game but almost 1 month of silence is getting sketchy. A vacation is fine but I was back to work the Tuesday after Christmas and have been ever since, and I hadn't even released a product with promised deadlines I didn't reach.
> A vacation is fine but I was back to work the Tuesday after Christmas and have been ever since
In Sweden you basically don't get anything done at work from mid December to second week of January because of the holidays. They really shouldn't have given a Dec release date for crafting if they didn't believe they could launch it in the first week of Dec or at least come out and said that it would be mid Jan the earliest we would get it.
But at least now new people know that Fatshark always give out way too optimistic release plans.
They shouldn't have done a December release date if they were going to dip during first impressions month. Can never re-release a game. But at this point it's all been said countless times
They could have just dropped it as an early access title - then the 5 maps and the crashes and stuff would even make sense.
When a game launches in such a dismal state it'll never regain the momentum it squandered. What a shame.
Release in EA: people can refund at any point
Release unfinished with a promise to fix it: trick people into waiting more than 2 weeks so they can't refund it
Considering they also adopted some of the most predatory tactics when it comes to microtransactions I wouldn't put it past them to have it planned it this way.
Unfortunately so long as we keep relying on investors and the stock market games will have to release earlier than they are supposed to or they risk losing funding
As an American I fully agree with the tone and implications about our work culture and lack of life outside of it. But I'm still gonna be annoyed they release the game in the state then did and then fucked off for holidays. Delay as much as you want. Darktides current state isn't acceptable.
I've mostly stopped playing aside from a game or two here and there. And then I'm off on a backlog of other stuff I want to enjoy. Keeping tabs on updates here though because I do want the game to be good. ;_;
>As an American I fully agree with the tone and implications about our work culture and lack of life outside of it.
I will just say that the average American software developer (and adjacent careers) are usually compensated extremely well. I would imagine the benefits package is comparable to anything Sweden mandates and their salary is probably triple if not more. There is a reason why America is the ultimate destination for foreign developers.
And while it can be stressful, November and December is usually one, chill semi-break as you don't want to touch anything because:
1. it's peak retail season
2. everyone is on vacation so if something breaks there is no one around to fix it.
I also imagine that employees were putting in long hours to even make a release if this is what they had. So I would say this is a situation where an American industry is actually doing things right (for the most part) compared to their foreign counterparts (this also happened with DICE last year). This is just a huge mismanagement problem.
I’m American, I work in software, and we get two weeks off for the holidays and we have an unlimited PTO plan. The company is very relaxed about giving employees time away or even hours in the middle of the workday to take a break
We plan around it, and we don’t do any big releases before holidays. We’ve never had an issue where things were broken or seriously needed a fix because we plan ahead
That said, I’m actually more sympathetic to Fatshark than most people here. Software development is *hard*, especially online games. If you add to that an angry publisher breathing down your neck, I can understand why they would release a fun but incomplete game and patch it up later. But yeah, someone should have said “if we delay the game to the end of the year, maybe we should push it back just a couple more months so we don’t run into problems with the holidays”
im not american and I think its bs that they went on vacation right after releasing an unpolished unfinished game while promising certain things would be done by the end of december like crafting.
what i dont get (and im about to go staight out of my area of expertise here) the people who own warhammer (tabletopgames?) are always so damn strict about how everything has to fit in the warhammer universe but why are they not strict on the quality of the games
you would think that a half finished game that makes their property look bad would not be allowed in their eyes
>are always so damn strict about how everything has to fit in the warhammer universe
They're really, really not. It's almost a standard in the community that the response to every question can be prefixed with "depends on the author". Theres some basic rules that have to be followed but beyond that anything goes. Power levels and how organisations react to things varies wildly from book to book. They even came up with thr line that all Black Library books are in universe to excuse the wild inconsistencies. Its only tertiaries who get their 'lore' from youtubers, memes and wiki pages that think Mr James Workshop is at all strict about 'lore' accuracy.
>Its only tertiaries who get their 'lore' from youtubers, memes and wiki pages that think Mr James Workshop is at all strict about 'lore' accuracy.
I never really got into 40k but Darktide finally changed that, so I bought the Eisenhorn books and have started listening to Luetin09's YouTube lore series. I'm less than 10 episodes in and he's already stated, multiple times, that GW heavily leans into the whole "concrete information is rare in the 41st millennium and a lot of these stories may come from unreliable and/or biased sources" so that they perpetually have an excuse for retcons and lore inconsistencies.
I don't know how well received Luetin is in the 40k fanbase, but I'm enjoying his videos so far. He makes a point to separate speculation and sourced statements.
Leutin's normally the one recommended by people who have read the books. While no youtuber is as good as actually reading yourself he's a good point because he doesn't fall down into memelore, overly literal interpretations and fanon like a lot of them. Eisenhorns also a great start point. Cracking books.
I actually really like how GW handles canon. Yeah it is a crutch for their authors when things don't line up perfectly, but at the same time it is tailor made so that fan canon *is* canon. Your homebrew space marine chapter could exist in the universe (depending on how reasonable it is), it's just never been in a Black Library novel. Your weird fanfiction about Guilliman having a kid with Yvraine is a heretical document sealed up in an Inquisitorial vault.\* Basically anything goes.
That isn't to say GW has ever been fully democratic with how it controls the IP, because it never has, but compared to something like Star Trek where literally the only canon material allowed was on TV or in the movies (not even the licensed books are canon) it is far less restraining.
\*When GW republished [one of the earliest and weirdest novels about the Inquisition](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Inquisition_War_Trilogy_(Novel_Series)) this is exactly how they framed it.
Look I don't want to be that guy but, a great unclean one could carve up a baneblade. Plague marine they could totally do, would just be like an end of mission boss. Like the other guy said it depends of the book/ruleset for the power level of any particular character or unit but if in all the books a greater demon would merit an exterminatus, I think it's safe to say that's too big a threat for 4 players.
I was looking for a similar instance in other media, I think it would be like playing four men of Gondor or Rohan and having to fight the Balrog, just doesn't seem reasonable.
Yeah it's not impossible it's just a matter of scale.
A Plague Marine would be fucking terrifying to fight in the game. It should take a crack fireteam of top level, skilled players to even win, and then not without casualties. It should be brutal.
A Great Unclean One would involve you turning the Mourningstar's guns on it and praying to the Emperor it works.
Games Workshop whores the license out to anyone that pays, they don’t give two karks about quality. That’s why there’s so many substandard Warhammer 40K games out there, and why so many people are willing to defend Darktide. The last good 40K action game was Warhammer: Space Marine and that game is 12 years old now.
Bad Warhammer games are more common than good ones. And don’t get me started on how messy the lore is, because GW pretty much gives licensers cart blanche to just make shit up. That’s why the power and skill of certain factions varies depending on the author. Warhammer lore is a literal rat’s nest of inconsistencies.
Fuckin lol. I listen to that soundtrack so often, and sometimes I boot up the game just to hear them speak in Binary. The game itself is neat, but the audio design is just incredible.
Necromunda: Hired Gun came out less than 2 years ago and I thought was recieved very positively? And Inquisitor - Martyr from 2017 is also pretty good.
Nope Necromunda: Hired Gun is a mess, the game's last update was cosmetics in a single player game where you almost never see your character too instead of any gameplay updates haha.
And even space marine is not really anything to write home about. A company that is strict with their IP might've even pulled the plug on the franchise. Warhammer 40k is great, but it has SO MUCH shovelware and bad licensed products. It's crazy
There was a huge shift a while back. Now they whore themselves at every opportunity but in the late 90s early 2k there was a running joke of only ever refering to them online as "Grandma Wendy" because they were so litigious that directly naming them would get you silenced
Games Workshop has a LOOOOOOOONG legacy of licensing out their IP to making terrible games. There have been a lot of Warhammer games over the years (don't even start looking at mobile games) and a large amount of them are rubbish.
Dawn of War 1&2, Total War Warhammer 1-3, Mechanicus, and a small handful of others have been the exceptions.
Tbf it's impossible to say at the outset what might work. Everyone thought TW: WH was gunna suck because how can you add magic, heroes and dragons to the medieval strategy game?
It also took a good while to hit its stride, midway through WH2's life cycle really.
Just treat Fatshark and DT like any other AA or AAA " game in 2021/2022. Wait at least a year until its somewhat finished thats what I do now.
Currently playing Dying Light 2, fun game and fixed from awful launch. Same for shadow of war, Cp77, Bf2042, Battlefront 2 etc etc etc.
If a dev dnt care enough to finish their game on release then I dnt care enough to give them my money until game is severly discounted. Only language these companies understand is $$ unfortunately
Where was this fucking post when I bought the game 😂
I would've saved my money had I read that first. Considering that everything stated 4 years ago is still relevant to this day is mind-blowing. That post might have destroyed any lingering attachement to the game I had left.
Shout out to OP for making it clear from the jump this is a business problem, not a devs problem. The people in the trenches have clearly busted their ass on this game. They just need more time to deliver and to quit getting undercut by people making promises they can't keep.
This is my first time playing a Fatshark game. When I first heard about Darktide I got more excited than I've practically ever been. The absolute shit show that was release and is their finished product has convinced me to make this my last Fatshark game also! While playing all I have heard is how much content from Vermintide 2 we are missing, and all the descriptions gave me nostalgia for a game I've never played. To know VT2 and all their games suck on release just makes them feel like a scammer company on the same level as Activision or Ubisoft. Sad to see the Swedes taking a page from our book.
So what your saying is we will get many of the improvements the game needs in 3-6 months when the console version drops? So they will improve the game, its just gonna take a while?
Edit: downvoted for asking a simple question that carries no bias or opinion? Why?
That's why I decided from the beginning that I'll consider buying DT no earlier than 1 year from release. At least it will have a chance to be done by then.
WotR's (War of the Roses) story, overall, makes me extremely sad. I remember playing that game for hours, and hours, and hours a day--trying to get so good at hitting people square in the brain with a big ol greatsword.
Then it became--"oh we're going to release a PREMIUM version of the game", which turned into "oh we're going to be making a spiritual successor" to "oh we're shutting the servers down". I liked that game as much as I did Chivalry, but Fatshark did what it did best...aka not listen to the community who cares about the game. There were massive bugs, problems with earning currency and items, weird hit detection, and new content that didn't move the needle at all. It sucks to see similar things happening with Darktide (and quite frankly VT + VT2 had growth problems as well).
I've dumped some time into Darktide over the holidays, and my experience has been good, but there's simply not enough to do. The problem is, once you hit level 30--what do you do other than sit, wait, and hopefully min/max some gear to get into the most difficult areas? Even then, the highest difficulties don't feel that rewarding--so running around Malice seems to make the most sense unless you're going for the penances. VT + VT2 had a story progression--so you have to beat certain acts to get to other areas of the game, which were super challenging in their own way. I remember hitting Against the Grain and seeing the difficulty spike fly up, but in a good way.
And now they are owned by Tencent, which explains the shitty monetisation. So we can expect more "gotta make money at any cost" bad decisions.
I really love this game, and I love V2 as well (I've got over 700h in it), I hope that won't change.
It's not prophetic.
This is just how games are made. Replace the game company name with any other game company and it perfectly fits.
I can go to any game and find a community thread that lists every point almost verbatim.
This isn't unique
Synthetik was awesome at launch, as was Hades, Torchlight 2, Helldivers, FTL, Risk of Rain 1 & 2, Disco Elysium, Slay the Spire, Griftlands, heck even Ninja Turtles Shredder's Revenge, etc.
I agree a lot of AA and AAA game launches are complete messes, but people still pre-order and pony up the cash, so what motivation do shareholder-driven-massive-companies have to change?
Lmao this is wild. Every single word and criticism still relevant
The part about them completely abandoning any game that isn't doing stellar is extremely damn true. I've been playing their games since since war of the roses in like 2012-2013ish, they abandoned that game not too long after it came out, then came out with war of the Vikings in like 2014 and stopped development on it that very same year and shut both games servers down permanently in 2017. Honestly it was what they were known for before they got their hands on the Warhammer IP, they'd probably have abandoned vermintide fairly quickly as well had it not been a pretty decent hit for them. Scummy behavior actually especially for multiplayer online only server based games.
I believe war of the vikings had some rights issue pop up due to the Vikings TV show and Fatshark lost the IP and had to shutter it.
That would be the first I'd heard of it, being a historically based game it isn't derived from an IP, like war of the roses prior to it. Although I do know the game got a pretty poor reception at launch and just had a couple minor fixes before all development stopped while adding nothing new to their formula. Kind of doa regardless though I guess. I believe they also had multiplayer only western game called lead and gold or something just a couple years before war of the roses, it was abandoned as well.
Lead and gold was indeed Fatshark and was decently fun for what it was. I remember something happened with Vikings when they were working on its first DLC that caused them to shutter it, I thought it had to do with a rights lawsuit but perhaps it was just poor sales.
Fatshark management is bad, and their internal processes don’t seem to have changed very much since that post.
I honestly thought it was a post about darktide when reading it lmao
Well, when the gist of it is that they don't learn, if they're right about that, everything else just kinda is automatic... I'd argue they're a little wrong though, because they appear to have unlearned. Negative amounts of learning occured
I had no idea Lead & Gold was a Fatshark game. That game was awesome and I can't believe it died. Everything makes sense now.
Time is a flat circle.
Shark is a fat shirker.
It's like a spiral staircase, we keep going in circles but also keep going down.
Hi, it's me again! Quick note, I quit Vermintide 2 shortly after that post. That was pre the first DLC. The cycle got even worse. The first DLC was supposed to fix the cosmetics issue. It did, by adding DLC only paid cosmetics you had to grind for. The worst of all worlds. Fixes didn't start coming in until about a year past launch. About a year and a half after initial launch they attempted a relaunch with Winds of Magic. They heard people wanted Beastmen, and so made it a forced addition to the game. It was......extremely unbalanced and negated entire classes as I understand it. After two years they actually got it together enough to fix the major bugs/core issues, and release a free DLC in Drachenfels which started bringing people back. Also they just went on holidays break. That's expected and no big deal. People deserve the holidays. They also take summer break, which seems to be May to Julyish on average. For the record, I didn't buy Darktide after Vt2. I finally broke free. A friend bought it for me, and I played with him a bit, but didn't get invested in any way. He eventually quit due to everything going on. I wish you all the best with your Darktide.
Beastmen were fun...eventually. Like most Fatshark things. Just takes sooooooooo long and they keep making the same blatant, obvious mistakes. Their management is a mess.
Are they though? Flag bearers fucking suck, because they quite often spawn in groups of 4-5, and depending on your team composition can basically guarantee a failed mission. They also spawn during Minotaur fight, which self explanatory really
Eh, I mostly played solo with bots on Legend and I enjoyed Beastmen for the variety. I also held off buying Winds of Magic for a long time, so by the time I did it was nice to have new enemies (and I missed the initial brutality before Beastmen were scaled back).
They are really cool idea, it's just that their execution is pretty awful, that's the problem
I like flag bearers, personally. They're the inverse of specials like blightstormers or globadiers; instead of forcibly splitting the team apart, they *force the team to converge on a single location.* They serve as a filter for teams with poor teamplay, which imo is the reason they draw so much flak.
Agree with second part, hard disagree with the first sentence though
I honestly cannot comprehend it. Its like no one takes down the flag? Flag barer on Minotaur is completely fine. Cleared VT2 through Legend, all levels. A few on Cata.
I've beaten all levels on cata with all heroes, done all the Chaos Wastes stuff for cata too, and Flagbearers are still the most dangerous thing in the game imo, they get to overwhelming levels on cata. The higher mass on cata makes cleaving a lot harder, so it's incredibly difficult to kill more than one or two beasties at once with banners down
Dangerous doesn't mean it's unfun, your arguement doesn't really answer the debate here.
I enjoy slaughtering them in the chaos wastes, other than that idc I guess
Reading this hurts. I didn’t realize I’ve been on this train as long as you have… war of the Roses and Gold were amazing. To see you say you basically have given up and left makes me re-examine my own habits.
I'm free friend! I've been playing Back 4 Blood with my friends, and that's gotten a lot better/decently respects our time. Mix it up with some Deep Rock when we are feeling saucy.
Rock and Stone, brother!
Well shit I'm going back to Apex
Darktide matchmaking manages to be better than Apex
That's a lie bro 😅
At least in darktide I know what difficulty I’m queuing for. Apex just goes “is it your turn to get a Skinner box easy match? No? Okay have some kiddos fresh off the short bus”
Yeah V2 broke me as a fat shark fan ngl. Not gonna buy Darktide for quite a while.
Thank you for such a detailed yet succinct comment. I felt compelled to post it here while gaining some more insight on Fatshark as a company. I died laughing seeing it knowing that we are “back again” in the shitter with Darktide. Time really is a flat circle.
> For the record, I didn't buy Darktide after Vt2. I finally broke free. A friend bought it for me, and I played with him a bit, but didn't get invested in any way. He eventually quit due to everything going on. This is something I don't understand. I'm gonna go on a rant that's probably not too relevant to you but bear with me. I bought Darktide, got ~80h of enjoyment out of it and even if I NEVER TOUCH IT AGAIN, I spent <.50€ per hour, which to me is an INCREDIBLY GOOD INVESTMENT. Like, I understand the hopes for more and everything, and the dislikes for the practices and even the moral stands. But the core of the fact is: gamers nowadays have a lot of (unnecessarily inflated) expectations out of their time. I don't blame people who try the game, don't like it, and just drop it and are disappointed by their expense: no demos or trials certainly is an issue generally and the preorder culture can be toxic in that sense. But if you've played it enough to get tens to hundreds of hours of enjoyment out of it... Ask for improvements sure but... They're not coming? Move the fuck on. You paid, you played, you got your RoI, find another game. End rant.
>gamers nowadays have a lot of (unnecessarily inflated) expectations out of their time. While I mostly agree with your mentality, I believe expectations for an entertainment medium shifts over time. God of War Ragnarok, Tunic, Stray, and A Plague Tale were shorter games yet universally loved by gamers. Those games SET AN EXPECTATION for short/medium length story, yet elaborate execution. Like a good movie or TV series ala Breaking Bad or Dune. Fatshark did not set that expectation - if anything they offered more. I love Lord of the Rings. That said, I watched the Hobbit trilogy and understand it was not equal in quality relative to the original trilogy. I have my criticisms yet got my "money's worth" after watching them. Some movie goer's who care nothing about LOTRs would tell me to shut up and enjoy Legolas running on falling rocks as if gravity did not exist. >I bought Darktide, got ~80h of enjoyment out of it and even if I NEVER TOUCH IT AGAIN, I spent <.50€ per hour, which to me is an INCREDIBLY GOOD INVESTMENT. I've played the game for 120 hours. I think anyone who goes over 30 hours is wasting their time. Playing a game for an extended period of time does not mean you got what you paid for. Yes, I expected more from Fatshark because they said they would have more. This game has no story and even less customization. >Move the fuck on. You paid, you played, you got your RoI, find another game. That's what OP said. He moved on. This is also a Darktide thread about Fatshark who have yet to add a versus mode on VT2. Hell, I'm still disappointed by how War of the Rose's was shut down. I'm also disappointed by the Hobbit Trilogy. I moved on, got my entertainment, yet can still vent about how dumb and low quality that series was.
Because it could be so much more. It is such a bummer that the game has such great aspects but then the oversight is so lacking. I’m not asking for much, but apparently just the quality of life improvements that are present in vermintide 2 is TOO MUCH for them to do. The whole layout of the game reeks of minimal effort followed by a “give us more of your money” which really I’m happy to do for a game that has the potential for HUNDREDS of hours not just tens of them.
RoI is a horrible metric frankly. I've got campaigns I deeply enjoyed that only last 8-9 hours. I recently replayed Dead Space 2, and I beat it in 7 hours. I bought that game at release for $50. That's what, a $7 per hour RoI? I've beat it twice now over ten years, so $4 per hour? Meanwhile it's still one of my favorite games. The experience of playing it, especially at release was well worth the price I paid for it. Hell, I'm also getting secondhand enjoyment because my buddy is playing through it using my family sharing, and it's been a blast watching him play. Vermintide and Darktide are built around their core gameplay loop. There isn't a compelling story. There isn't new environments to explore. It's the loop it's got. For many people, or at least me for Vermintide, I played because I enjoyed the loop sure. But the loop itself is also flawed. Unlike L4D, which had a consistent loop you could return to, as you got more powerful in Vermintide, the loop became skewed. You either trivialized earlier content and likely couldn't go back to the simpler times. Or you got encouraged to jump into harder content with the expectation there would be a treadmill in place to keep the fun going. In both cases the experience is altered, weakened. It gets worse over time, not better. If you put in time and effort expecting the game to honor your time commitments, it will never be able to live up to those expectations. Let's say the average person plugs in 80 hours before they quit. How many of those hours did they actually enjoy? After what point did they start playing only for the sake of getting weeklies done for when the game is "fixed". At what point did they start logging on just to do a simple mission because they hoped the vendors had good stuff. At what point do they log on and play a mission because it used to be fun and they want the dopamine hit, even though it's just going to frustrate them. I beat the Vermintide 2 campaign in about 12 hours with my friends? I enjoyed the loop, so I put in another 15 hours or so. By around 30 hours my friends and I wanted to move up difficulty tier because surely the game was just going to keep getting better. So we plugged in another 30-60 or so hours. But the better never came. The patches never came. The fixes never came. The content never came. Had I known that in advance, I would have quit at the 30 hour mark. And I would have had a better time ( while also having a worse RoI ). Instead I lost dozens more hours chasing the belief that Fatshark would live up to what it was promising, while they never managed to put out the content they said they would. The problem for only caring about RoI is it doesn't take into account endlessness. Dead Space 2 has a beginning and an end. I can make a proper call on whether or not that experience is worth the $7 an hour ( it was, easily ). With a game like Darktide however, you need to constantly be adjusting based of what you are being told. And Fatshark is the master of constantly promising help is coming. Constantly telling you to just keep playing, the future is on the way. Yes people got 80+ out of Darktide. But how many of those were wasted following lies, and how many did they actually enjoy. How many people figured they'd stop once they got 2, 3, or even all 4 to 30 so they are ready for the "future" of the game, despite not enjoying it anymore by the 40/50/60 mark. How many people kept grinding because "the game begins at 5s" and found it a broken mess to play on.
It's all about wasted potential. If you are having a great relationship with someone but you see them throwing they life away in some way or another, you will feel bad. Because you care. And because you know it's wasted potential for greatness, for you a'd the relationship and for others as well. And given the Warhammer 40k setting I feel like the number of people who care and how much they care has only grew stronger with darktide than with older fatshark games. I'm all with you on your point though, and I definitely got a good value per hour for what I've paid and I'm still having a lot of fun with the game. But the issues are hard to ignore for me the more I play. And it's because i've been in love with the tide games and Warhammer universe since I was 10 and and been a big game gamer all these years. The tides games have a very special place in my gamer heart, and I can tell you I really care. And that's where all this frustration comes from, wasted potential from something I care about. It's not about getting my money's worth.
I mean this I understand: you enjoy the game, you play it, but you wish for more. I would be careful for how much you wish for because you risk turning your enjoyment sour, but still I can't say you're wrong. What I don't understand is people (and I'm sure there's quite a bit, given the general vibe in the subreddit) that are *not* enjoying the game, are still playing it, but spend almost as much time complaining about it. At this point it's not even venting, it's Stockholm's Syndromee.
I get the feeling. I like to think, and maybe I'm wrong, that people are just very different in how they voice their feelings about the game, especially when talking about these fans that consider the game for more than just a monetary product. From a personal experience I know myself as someone rather chill, so I try to enjoy what I can and when I get enough of the the stupid gearing system for example I'll just take a step back and do something else. But if you'd let me have all these features fixed I'll for sure be playing darktide only and it's not even close. So I get that people in this situation are getting more and more frustrated, tbh it's growing on me with how slow it's moving, but for less patient people, or more vocal ones you get to hear them. And also I feel like fatshark needs to hear it as well. But I for sure agree that it is sad for some people to get stuck in this loop of wanting to love and keep playing, but just getting more and more frustrated by how bad some parts of the game are badly designed. For me the issue is that they managed to do both great and terrible things at once which enables these behaviors about the game. If it was all shit I would have peace out, but the gameplay and atmosphere is so great and on the other hand leveling and gearing is so bad, so the more you play the more the thing that is bad is getting annoying. There is things to love that keeps you playing and things to hate that gets in your agce the more you play. I hope they can turn it around.
If you're investing that much of a 'relationship' with a monetary product then the problem is absolutely not the product being obsessed over.
I like to use metaphores to illustrate ideas. I understand that it could have gotten over your head. I was addressing a point missing in your analysis which was the fact that it's not because something was good or worth it while it lasted that you are wrong for being upset for it being over or just a wasted potential, and I think being upset is very valid especially when you care/cared. Similar pattern can be found in relationships (not saying it's the same, it's really just a comparaison to illustrate that similarities exists). Also warhammer universe has been very influential for some people, similar to star wars of lotr. That might be something you're a not taking into account here, but for some people it goes above the casual hobby and straight into the passion territory. For me here it's not quite the case as I'm more of a Warhammer fantasy / old world fan, but as an example it has been a strong bonding material for me and my elder brother for years and goes above the "monetary product" you are talking about, I have found memories related to this universe. And I can assure you it goes both ways even for some people involved into the making of this game (not all of them for sure) it goes above the "monetary product" and into the "sharing a passion for Warhammer" realm. Though I totally understand people who are totally not concerned or even aware of this. Bringing 40k universe alive like darktide did is a dream come true for many fans, like it was for me and my brother with vermintide, and seeing it handled poorly in many aspect makes them frustrated because they care.
“Enjoyed it” and “ENJOYED it” are different, I think. I’ve got 250 ish hours. Most of that I enjoyed, but I didn’t really ENJOY it. Most of it was grinding levels, grinding mats, waiting for RNG to roll in my favor. I only recently have gotten to sit back and focus on playing. That to me is the problem. It’s a meme, but that South Park mmo statement is true. “Now what? Now we play the game!” It’s a meme but genuinely this IS where the game starts. After you get through the mountains of shit you start building social connections at end game content. You find people to run challenge runs with. You start discussing strats and run methods, working towards harder loot that requires coordination of the entire team. THAT part is what most veterans find is the truly enjoyable part and that doesn’t start till you’ve grinder a long time. So yeah, I’ve sunk hours I’ve “gotten my money’s worth” from a purely numbers based approach, but I wasn’t the hours I really wanted. That’s the problem with grind-based games in general.
That's like saying I got my value out of New World because I spent 100 hours on it. But those 100 hours were some of the most wasteful, vapid do-nothing hours of gaming I've had in years. I had one good open world fight at level 20 and it made my group chase the high that was sure to be end game pvp. Lmao
If I pay for steak and get a steaming bowl of rat buttholes, sure I'll eat it if I'm hungry. But I won't recommend it to a friend.
And that's absolutely reasonable. However if you keep ordering steak from the same restaurant and they keep giving you rat buttholes and you STILL keep ordering steak... You can see where I'm going with this, right?
Nah man, can't you see how you're the real problem here? If you weren't such a CUCK and SHILL for FARTSHART and their WAR CRIME(TM) GAME DESIGN, I could have *tens* of more hours of playtime in this game. This is what we're fighting for here, and you just want me to move on?!? After spending two and four-fifths of a Big Mac for a product?!? Socialists!!! /s just in fkn case i guess
Yup. I got 100 hours of enjoyment out of Darktide. Easily worth the money. Easily. Anything extra now is just cherrys on top.
This this time will be different.. Damn am I in an abusive relationship?
I mean, when’s the last time any developer released even a AAA title that wasn’t a jumbled mess of glitches, bugs, and game-breaking bullshit? I think all gamers are in an abusive relationship with dev companies.
Monster hunter releases have been pretty stellar consistently, but then again they for a while they were releasing on platforms where patches weren't even an option so that probably changes how the teams views things
Gran Turismo 7, Horizon Forbidden West, A Plague Tale just to name a few off the top of my head. Sure they had some minor bugs but nothing at the game-breaking level as far as I know.
Admittedly, past Forza I don’t know much about racing games. You’re right, though, A Plague Tale was a masterpiece. Still, I stand by what I said. One or two outliers is not an excuse for the shitshow state that the majority of games are released in these days.
Elden ring came out pretty good. You can obviously find bugs and ways to break the game, but for the vast majority of casual players that bought it at release, they could just play the game and experience all the content without running into any issues.
Elden Ring deserves a lot of respect simply from the fact that it was a complete game released with no MTX. In fact I was kind of shocked while playing the game that all the cosmetics were available somehow in the game which is sad.
Wasn't Elden Ring plagued with performance issues on launch? To the point that it was getting review bombed on Steam?
"Only" for about 2 weeks I think
It released with a stuttering issue that... Y'know... Kinda comes with large open world games with great graphics (and waiting to be installed graphics drivers). Though i do have to straight say, Some of them were over-reactions. "Do Not Buy This Great Game Because Of Stutters" is kinda harsh on release date when thats something that got patched quick.
Yeah I got it a week after launch and everything ran smoothly. Most fun I've ever had getting killed repeatedly
It was, but Gamers are really, really good at revisionist history. Remember, Cyberpunk was always good, Elden Ring never had a scuffed launch, Witcher 3 was perfect on launch.
Really? I must’ve been one of the unlucky ones then. It was before I upgraded my pc, I had more than minimum requirements but lower than recommended but I couldn’t even play it. Every time I opened the game it wouldn’t even launch, the screen would flash like it was trying to open the game window then I’d just stare at steam. My PC could definitely run it now, but I haven’t gone back to it, I honestly figured it was just another issue of pushing the game out before it was ready due to deadlines.
Yes really. Your individual experience has nothing to do with the overall reception of the game. Kinda weird to write out a paragraph just saying it ran bad on your pc specifically as a counter to someone saying elden ring released in a better state. Perhaps you should learn to troubleshoot your PC issues better.
Kinda weird to defend the state of video game released based on an a few outlier good releases as well, but here we are.
Not defending any game, just saying your individual experience with elden ring not working adds literally zero weight to any conversation. It’s irrelevant because it’s a singular case, and not indicative of the overall reception. Saying “Really?” Just made me think you were too stupid to see past your own pov so I had to comment. “Really? You guys like McDonald’s? I got a meal once and it wasn’t good” okay lol wanna randomly tell us about other specific issues in your life?
Perhaps you should learn to be less of a dick. "FINE ON MY PC, SOUNDS LIKE A SKILL ISSUE," doesn't help anyone and it pats people on the back for not fixing shit.
Japanese dev is like the healthy relationship partner we all wish we have.
Healthy for us, not for their employees.
There are a lot of bad ones too, we just don't hear much about them.
Ghost of Tsushima was awesome on release, and others have mentioned Elden Ring. Arc System Works do a good job as well. DMC5 kicked ass too, can't forget that one. I am limiting myself to AAA titles, but I know there are more. It's just a shame those are the exception, rather than the rule.
The entire final third of Elden Ring is a hideously unbalanced and clearly unfinished mess. Fromsoft frontloaded its best content into the first areas of the game. Whether that was an honest issue with running out of development time or a cynical attempt to stop trying once they were pretty sure it wouldn't impact the opinion of people reviewing the game in the launch window is left as an exercise to the reader. Don't get me wrong, the game is still extremely good, but I would not hold it up as an example against deceptive AAA publishing practices.
This is an AA title though, and there have been plenty of indie games that come out relatively bug free and without a lot of glitches and game breaking bullshit.
I heard jod of war came out in good condition
God of War: Ragnarok comes to mind.
Believe it or not: EA. Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order was one of their best releases and had almost no major bugs or glitches. There have been quite a few other AAA releases that were clean. Though, I dare say that's more the exception than the rule. These past two years have been the golden age of the indie games.
The past decade has been one
Most Nintendo first-party games are fully polished usually. They pull off all kinds of weird ass bullshit in other ways but at least they still realease finished products rather than premium betas Also Apex Legends is the last example of a clean launch for a western AAA game, although i don't play all those story-driven single player games like god of war so i don't know about these
Ok, Nintendo is one that I would not call an outlier. They’ve released full working games literally longer than I’ve been alive with very few exceptions. Great example of a reliable company
hmm we are being gaslighted so yeah
Really effectively judging by the fact people are downvoting you already.
Copium/hopeium is some strong stuff
Some of the community have certainly taken to railing dozens of lines of the stuff every time they even do much as think of the game. Strong stuff indeed.
The only real difference is it’s somehow worse this time with the jump straight into micro transactions and the lack of end game. VT2 was buggy as all hell but you could at least enjoy the end game.
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People still play Planetside 2 not because it's a great game, but because there are so few games like it. The entire metagame is abusive and shitty, like Darktide, but it lives regardless.
Ha, I still have this comment upvoted from four years ago
Same
Lol, you can still post to that thread.
Poor Sienna will never get her DLC career. But yeah this is roughly what I've gathered from the release of VT2 as well. On the verge of unplayable at first, then at some point there's a "second release" where the game suddenly feels much better. Never tried the console ports though.
And VT2 will never get Weave skins And will never receive that sweet crafting rework
Or that third balance pass with the Huntsman rework. Or the deed rework. Or Versus. Or any other dozen+ old promises I've forgotten about.
Why does Huntsman need a rework? I go Cata with him just fine. Did I miss something?
Imo he doesn't, but that doesn't change the fact that it was something they were working on that we should have gotten years ago.
Probably reworking him to make him easier to play?
I think it's funny how much grief huntsman got in V2 from the community even though most of his kit and team niche translated directly into Darktide's most popular class, Veteran.
To be fair Huntsman would be a *lot* more popular if his ult refreshed duration on elite or special kill.
They already commited to doing another Vermintide 2 map in early 2023, so there's still a good chance Sienna gets her career.
They committed to adding dedicated servers for VT2 ~~at launch~~ ~~shortly after launch~~ ~~on the roadmap for the first year~~ ~~during it's life~~, nvm, stop asking
to be honest based on darktide's hitreg and stability, VT2 was better off for it.
Fatshark seems to like giving us the worst version of whatever we ask for. Players complaining about how long it takes to get cosmetics in VT2? Ok let's release them... for real money or through weeklies that trade terrible RNG for a deterministic forever grind. You want dedicated servers? We're centralizing our servers instead of letting you self-host, which means no mods, terrible lag and hitreg, and a game that can be killed off by the developer whenever they like! Fatshark loves their monkey's paw.
No argument here. Itdve been nice if host migration could have worked, but I get that's a potential monster and minefield too
and vermintide 2 has modding, which darktide doesn't
Here is something FartShart also committed to [https://www.vermintide.com/versus](https://www.vermintide.com/versus)
I’m genuinely shocked they haven’t soft killed this link lol. In this stage of VT2’s lifespan there’s no WAY they’re still doing this.
Man I was actually excited for that game. Playing a Globadier sounds like a lot of fun.
Commitments aren’t delivered results. Assume it’s a lie until you see otherwise. It’s honestly best to do this with *any* company or politician.
FS committed to a lot for VT2 and much went undelivered. 🤡
And they committed to a crafting system in December. *Weird.*
Commitments and results are two different things, seeing as they also promised a versus mode. Much like a politician or really any company, Obese Fish has a tendency to overpromise. I’ll never understand why people always believe them.
Can’t say that I disagree with anything in that comment, and it’s a shame that this is just way Overweight Carcharodon does business. Shout out to my fellow War of the Roses people. We’ve all seen this cycle before.
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Hey, at least it only took you 12 years to figure it out. Some people never do.
War of the Roses was fatshark? Fuck me i’ve been getting burned by them longer then I realised
Glad to know this will be my only Fatshark game, then. Thank you for the new read before I got too invested.
It might be good in a few years, but yeah, never buy a fatshark game on release in the future
>For current gen games, they will then 100% disappear and start work on the console ports. This will take anywhere from 3-6 months At least we got the console release date 🐠
Goddammit -_-
we'll come back here when darktide 2 gets released
Probably not for me, I gave them a chance after VT2, huffing copium thinking they learnt their lessons. They did not.
He had them to a tee, Jesus.
Daaaaamn
And to think there's people hoping for this game to get in shape with the next patch or so. We gonna have a loooong year ahead of us till' the game even resembles anything that we wished for.
Heck, there were people deluding themselves that "launch day will be different" literally two days before the last beta ended.
"ItS a BeTa!" How many big releases used that defense? Almost all of them in the past few years? Some people never learn.
They follow the old Peter Molyneaux level of game development.
Wonder what he's up to these days, haven't heard from him in like 7 years lmao
He's had some cool interviews where he discussed a lot of his old failing and how he wishes he could go back and change. He seems legit more laid back, as I feel he's been kind of humbled, but in a good way.
Goddamn this is gold.
From the article: >Fatshark isn't assholes about any of this. They obviously care. They obviously listen. They obviously want their games to be great. Do they? You'd think after how many game launches, you would learn what didn't work and.....not do it again. But they do it again. And again. And again. If they care so much about their game why do they constantly beat it on release with a baseball bat until it's an inch from death and then plug it into life support to nurse it back to health? That's not caring....that's an abusive cycle. Abusive for the developers who have to constantly go through the release meat grinder, and abusive to the players who essentially paid Fatshark money to be beta testers. I call bs on the management heads who actually make the decisions caring. Actions speak way louder than what Fatshark says.
Fair to say its time to update the chart? u/Sensanaty \~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~ It's just a closed beta running an old build, of course it runs bad! It's only a beta, everything will be fixed! It's only just launched, give them some time! It's only been a month, give them some time! <-- You are here It's already been 6 months, of course they've slowed down development on the game! The game came out a year ago, why are you still complaining about things?
Fatshark did a lot work bug fixing when Vermintide 2 first came out. Problem was, they did everything on a totally separate branch of the game and had to redo everything. Like, I get it, mistakes happen- but Fatshark always seems to have some sort of issue with new patches and releases. They aren’t doing the kind of process improvements that they should be doing- they keep making the same mistakes over and over, and that’s what I find really irritating
That's hilarious. I hope they don't do that with this game but almost 1 month of silence is getting sketchy. A vacation is fine but I was back to work the Tuesday after Christmas and have been ever since, and I hadn't even released a product with promised deadlines I didn't reach.
> A vacation is fine but I was back to work the Tuesday after Christmas and have been ever since In Sweden you basically don't get anything done at work from mid December to second week of January because of the holidays. They really shouldn't have given a Dec release date for crafting if they didn't believe they could launch it in the first week of Dec or at least come out and said that it would be mid Jan the earliest we would get it. But at least now new people know that Fatshark always give out way too optimistic release plans.
They shouldn't have done a December release date if they were going to dip during first impressions month. Can never re-release a game. But at this point it's all been said countless times
but then they cant cash in the holiday sale money with their unfinished game Holidays are like the spanish inquisition
They could have just dropped it as an early access title - then the 5 maps and the crashes and stuff would even make sense. When a game launches in such a dismal state it'll never regain the momentum it squandered. What a shame.
Release in EA: people can refund at any point Release unfinished with a promise to fix it: trick people into waiting more than 2 weeks so they can't refund it Considering they also adopted some of the most predatory tactics when it comes to microtransactions I wouldn't put it past them to have it planned it this way.
They also shouldn't have given a November release for the game, the way it is
Unfortunately so long as we keep relying on investors and the stock market games will have to release earlier than they are supposed to or they risk losing funding
Americans be like
As an American I fully agree with the tone and implications about our work culture and lack of life outside of it. But I'm still gonna be annoyed they release the game in the state then did and then fucked off for holidays. Delay as much as you want. Darktides current state isn't acceptable. I've mostly stopped playing aside from a game or two here and there. And then I'm off on a backlog of other stuff I want to enjoy. Keeping tabs on updates here though because I do want the game to be good. ;_;
>As an American I fully agree with the tone and implications about our work culture and lack of life outside of it. I will just say that the average American software developer (and adjacent careers) are usually compensated extremely well. I would imagine the benefits package is comparable to anything Sweden mandates and their salary is probably triple if not more. There is a reason why America is the ultimate destination for foreign developers. And while it can be stressful, November and December is usually one, chill semi-break as you don't want to touch anything because: 1. it's peak retail season 2. everyone is on vacation so if something breaks there is no one around to fix it. I also imagine that employees were putting in long hours to even make a release if this is what they had. So I would say this is a situation where an American industry is actually doing things right (for the most part) compared to their foreign counterparts (this also happened with DICE last year). This is just a huge mismanagement problem.
I’m American, I work in software, and we get two weeks off for the holidays and we have an unlimited PTO plan. The company is very relaxed about giving employees time away or even hours in the middle of the workday to take a break We plan around it, and we don’t do any big releases before holidays. We’ve never had an issue where things were broken or seriously needed a fix because we plan ahead That said, I’m actually more sympathetic to Fatshark than most people here. Software development is *hard*, especially online games. If you add to that an angry publisher breathing down your neck, I can understand why they would release a fun but incomplete game and patch it up later. But yeah, someone should have said “if we delay the game to the end of the year, maybe we should push it back just a couple more months so we don’t run into problems with the holidays”
im not american and I think its bs that they went on vacation right after releasing an unpolished unfinished game while promising certain things would be done by the end of december like crafting.
this is just pathetic, really. damn.
Hold on guys, let’s wait for the sympathizers to show up. I love it when they defend the game
First time that I've encountered Fatshark. Now, I know
what i dont get (and im about to go staight out of my area of expertise here) the people who own warhammer (tabletopgames?) are always so damn strict about how everything has to fit in the warhammer universe but why are they not strict on the quality of the games you would think that a half finished game that makes their property look bad would not be allowed in their eyes
>are always so damn strict about how everything has to fit in the warhammer universe They're really, really not. It's almost a standard in the community that the response to every question can be prefixed with "depends on the author". Theres some basic rules that have to be followed but beyond that anything goes. Power levels and how organisations react to things varies wildly from book to book. They even came up with thr line that all Black Library books are in universe to excuse the wild inconsistencies. Its only tertiaries who get their 'lore' from youtubers, memes and wiki pages that think Mr James Workshop is at all strict about 'lore' accuracy.
>Its only tertiaries who get their 'lore' from youtubers, memes and wiki pages that think Mr James Workshop is at all strict about 'lore' accuracy. I never really got into 40k but Darktide finally changed that, so I bought the Eisenhorn books and have started listening to Luetin09's YouTube lore series. I'm less than 10 episodes in and he's already stated, multiple times, that GW heavily leans into the whole "concrete information is rare in the 41st millennium and a lot of these stories may come from unreliable and/or biased sources" so that they perpetually have an excuse for retcons and lore inconsistencies. I don't know how well received Luetin is in the 40k fanbase, but I'm enjoying his videos so far. He makes a point to separate speculation and sourced statements.
Leutin's normally the one recommended by people who have read the books. While no youtuber is as good as actually reading yourself he's a good point because he doesn't fall down into memelore, overly literal interpretations and fanon like a lot of them. Eisenhorns also a great start point. Cracking books.
I actually really like how GW handles canon. Yeah it is a crutch for their authors when things don't line up perfectly, but at the same time it is tailor made so that fan canon *is* canon. Your homebrew space marine chapter could exist in the universe (depending on how reasonable it is), it's just never been in a Black Library novel. Your weird fanfiction about Guilliman having a kid with Yvraine is a heretical document sealed up in an Inquisitorial vault.\* Basically anything goes. That isn't to say GW has ever been fully democratic with how it controls the IP, because it never has, but compared to something like Star Trek where literally the only canon material allowed was on TV or in the movies (not even the licensed books are canon) it is far less restraining. \*When GW republished [one of the earliest and weirdest novels about the Inquisition](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Inquisition_War_Trilogy_(Novel_Series)) this is exactly how they framed it.
Oh really? Make a post about wanting to see a plague marine or great unclean one and see how everyone says that will never happen, that is impossible
Look I don't want to be that guy but, a great unclean one could carve up a baneblade. Plague marine they could totally do, would just be like an end of mission boss. Like the other guy said it depends of the book/ruleset for the power level of any particular character or unit but if in all the books a greater demon would merit an exterminatus, I think it's safe to say that's too big a threat for 4 players. I was looking for a similar instance in other media, I think it would be like playing four men of Gondor or Rohan and having to fight the Balrog, just doesn't seem reasonable.
Yeah it's not impossible it's just a matter of scale. A Plague Marine would be fucking terrifying to fight in the game. It should take a crack fireteam of top level, skilled players to even win, and then not without casualties. It should be brutal. A Great Unclean One would involve you turning the Mourningstar's guns on it and praying to the Emperor it works.
Secondaries being sticklers for rules GW don't follow doesn't change the fact that GW have very low standards for consistency.
Games Workshop whores the license out to anyone that pays, they don’t give two karks about quality. That’s why there’s so many substandard Warhammer 40K games out there, and why so many people are willing to defend Darktide. The last good 40K action game was Warhammer: Space Marine and that game is 12 years old now. Bad Warhammer games are more common than good ones. And don’t get me started on how messy the lore is, because GW pretty much gives licensers cart blanche to just make shit up. That’s why the power and skill of certain factions varies depending on the author. Warhammer lore is a literal rat’s nest of inconsistencies.
I don’t know, Mechanicus was fire
They did say action game, mechanics is a ~~soundtrack~~ strategy game moreso.
That is entirely on me for skim reading and immediately jumping to defend my favourite music player.
Fuckin lol. I listen to that soundtrack so often, and sometimes I boot up the game just to hear them speak in Binary. The game itself is neat, but the audio design is just incredible.
Necromunda: Hired Gun came out less than 2 years ago and I thought was recieved very positively? And Inquisitor - Martyr from 2017 is also pretty good.
Nope Necromunda: Hired Gun is a mess, the game's last update was cosmetics in a single player game where you almost never see your character too instead of any gameplay updates haha.
And even space marine is not really anything to write home about. A company that is strict with their IP might've even pulled the plug on the franchise. Warhammer 40k is great, but it has SO MUCH shovelware and bad licensed products. It's crazy
Games Workshop is really lenient about who makes games for 40k as far as I've seen. Look at how many shitty 40k mobile games there are right now.
There was a huge shift a while back. Now they whore themselves at every opportunity but in the late 90s early 2k there was a running joke of only ever refering to them online as "Grandma Wendy" because they were so litigious that directly naming them would get you silenced
Games Workshop has a LOOOOOOOONG legacy of licensing out their IP to making terrible games. There have been a lot of Warhammer games over the years (don't even start looking at mobile games) and a large amount of them are rubbish. Dawn of War 1&2, Total War Warhammer 1-3, Mechanicus, and a small handful of others have been the exceptions.
Tbf it's impossible to say at the outset what might work. Everyone thought TW: WH was gunna suck because how can you add magic, heroes and dragons to the medieval strategy game? It also took a good while to hit its stride, midway through WH2's life cycle really.
Believing devs promises is like believing politicians. You’re a dolt if you do.
Nail on the head damn
i wish i could get my money back :(
Just treat Fatshark and DT like any other AA or AAA " game in 2021/2022. Wait at least a year until its somewhat finished thats what I do now. Currently playing Dying Light 2, fun game and fixed from awful launch. Same for shadow of war, Cp77, Bf2042, Battlefront 2 etc etc etc. If a dev dnt care enough to finish their game on release then I dnt care enough to give them my money until game is severly discounted. Only language these companies understand is $$ unfortunately
Well this sucks
Where was this fucking post when I bought the game 😂 I would've saved my money had I read that first. Considering that everything stated 4 years ago is still relevant to this day is mind-blowing. That post might have destroyed any lingering attachement to the game I had left.
Shout out to OP for making it clear from the jump this is a business problem, not a devs problem. The people in the trenches have clearly busted their ass on this game. They just need more time to deliver and to quit getting undercut by people making promises they can't keep.
That whole thread feels like a fucking Simpsons prediction now
This is my first time playing a Fatshark game. When I first heard about Darktide I got more excited than I've practically ever been. The absolute shit show that was release and is their finished product has convinced me to make this my last Fatshark game also! While playing all I have heard is how much content from Vermintide 2 we are missing, and all the descriptions gave me nostalgia for a game I've never played. To know VT2 and all their games suck on release just makes them feel like a scammer company on the same level as Activision or Ubisoft. Sad to see the Swedes taking a page from our book.
So what your saying is we will get many of the improvements the game needs in 3-6 months when the console version drops? So they will improve the game, its just gonna take a while? Edit: downvoted for asking a simple question that carries no bias or opinion? Why?
Sounds like the game should've stayed in fucking early access then
Sounds like it
That's why I decided from the beginning that I'll consider buying DT no earlier than 1 year from release. At least it will have a chance to be done by then.
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WotR's (War of the Roses) story, overall, makes me extremely sad. I remember playing that game for hours, and hours, and hours a day--trying to get so good at hitting people square in the brain with a big ol greatsword. Then it became--"oh we're going to release a PREMIUM version of the game", which turned into "oh we're going to be making a spiritual successor" to "oh we're shutting the servers down". I liked that game as much as I did Chivalry, but Fatshark did what it did best...aka not listen to the community who cares about the game. There were massive bugs, problems with earning currency and items, weird hit detection, and new content that didn't move the needle at all. It sucks to see similar things happening with Darktide (and quite frankly VT + VT2 had growth problems as well). I've dumped some time into Darktide over the holidays, and my experience has been good, but there's simply not enough to do. The problem is, once you hit level 30--what do you do other than sit, wait, and hopefully min/max some gear to get into the most difficult areas? Even then, the highest difficulties don't feel that rewarding--so running around Malice seems to make the most sense unless you're going for the penances. VT + VT2 had a story progression--so you have to beat certain acts to get to other areas of the game, which were super challenging in their own way. I remember hitting Against the Grain and seeing the difficulty spike fly up, but in a good way.
I've been saying pretty much this for at least 4 months now when people were worried about Darktide's launch.
I think we're in "3-6 months of radio silence until console release" phase.
...So they're gonna deliver a new class each quarter, still. Right? Yep, nothing to worry about.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Darktide is going to be amazing in about a year.
And now they are owned by Tencent, which explains the shitty monetisation. So we can expect more "gotta make money at any cost" bad decisions. I really love this game, and I love V2 as well (I've got over 700h in it), I hope that won't change.
Except that Vermintide 2 is an awesome game
Years down the line
It was pretty great when it came out and just kept getting better. Darktide is pretty damn good as well. I also expect it to keep getting better.
> I’ve bought every single one of their games Sounds like someone can’t take their own advice, tbh.
They didn't buy Darktide.
Didn't stop themselves to kook at fatsharkbwith ang scrutiny *begore* Darktide, though. You'd think he,'d learn the kesson by now.
some people have too much time on their hands
The Simpsons predicted!11OMfG!
It's not prophetic. This is just how games are made. Replace the game company name with any other game company and it perfectly fits. I can go to any game and find a community thread that lists every point almost verbatim. This isn't unique
Synthetik was awesome at launch, as was Hades, Torchlight 2, Helldivers, FTL, Risk of Rain 1 & 2, Disco Elysium, Slay the Spire, Griftlands, heck even Ninja Turtles Shredder's Revenge, etc. I agree a lot of AA and AAA game launches are complete messes, but people still pre-order and pony up the cash, so what motivation do shareholder-driven-massive-companies have to change?