Fatshark Apologises to Darktide Players for Disappointing Game Launch
The developers of Warhammer 40,000: Darktide have today sent out a message to players apologising for the game's state upon launch.
It's fair to say that Darktide hasn't enjoyed the best of launches. Since the game was released at the end of November, players have become increasingly frustrated with some aspects of the game - most notably its progression system which is very RNG-intensive, its incomplete crafting system and the fact that a cash shop was immediately implemented while some aspects of the game were not finished.
This has caused the game's Steam review score to gradually deteriorate, with recent reviews being mostly negative, and the all-time reviews for the game being only 56% positive.
It's also become apparent that not as many players are sticking around in Darktide as Fatshark would've hoped for - according to Steam Charts Darktide is now struggling to hit 10,000 concurrent players at peak time, a stat which leaves it at risk of being overtaken by Vermintide 2, Fatshark's previous major release from 2018.
Fatshark have now decided to reach out to their customers to apologise and attempt to reassure them of their intentions to improve the state of the game. Today they emailed the following statement to players, and also posted it on their official forums:
To Our Players,
We take enormous pride in our ability at Fatshark to deliver a game that millions can enjoy. This was what we set out to do with Warhammer 40,000: Darktide – to create a highly engaging and stable game with a level of depth that keeps you playing for weeks, not hours.
We fell short of meeting those expectations.
Over the next few months, our sole focus is to address the feedback that many of you have. In particular, we will focus on delivering a complete crafting system, a more rewarding progression loop, and continue to work on game stability and performance optimization.
This also means that we will delay our seasonal content rollout and the Xbox Series X|S launch. We will also suspend the upcoming releases of premium cosmetics. We just couldn’t continue down this path, knowing that we have not addressed many feedback areas in the game today.
Thank you for playing and providing feedback. We really appreciate it. It has and will continue to help shape the game we love.
Martin Wahlund
CEO and Co-Founder of Fatshark
While this statement alone probably won't do much to quell the discontent among some Darktide players, Fatshark will hope that it at least reassures some players that fixes and changes are planned and in the works.
We hope you enjoyed this article about Warhammer 40K: Darktide.
Comments
The crafting system is not crafting at all, it's more akin to playing a slot machine as the RNG dictates how your character functions given that Blessings & Perks are all gained via RNG, it could take months to get a decent Defence Curio, (this alone could kill the players base) Although you can "Re-bless or Refine" a blessing or perk you can only do this ONCE and then the game locks the other perk or blessing slot, so you have to make a choice (not locking these would be a solution to change it from gambling to crafting)
Say you have a Curio with only one perk that you do not want, if you refine and get a perk that you are happy with, the next time you Consecrate an item the game applies a new perk and that perk is locked, so if it's something you do not want, you have to start all over again and the crafting material Plasteel take so long to gather.
If you are the only one in a match that that needs to gather plasteel it means running around away from your team to gather and potentialy becoming a victim to any enemy that may take you by surprise while doing so, not to mention if you lose your toughness then you are left very vulnerable to being killed away from your team, making it their choice to come save you or just leave you because you are the one "not with the team" Given that on Damnation difficulty where you can gather the most materials in a match, you also have the hardest enemies to contend with, while away from your team.
This (endless need to gather materials) changes the way you play the game too, it becomes a game within the game, meanwhile your team is constantly on the move forward pushing into enemy territory while you are focused on something else, it's not fair to the team or the players, this sort of game play divides the players, something needs to change because this becomes stale after a short while, hence the lack of players as shown in the steam stats.