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People's complaints were a completely, utterly unhinged tirade of the most entitled, freakishly self righteous treat hogs I have ever encountered anywhere.
It was the most "Americans have no real problems" "I demand to speak to the manager" throwing shit at the person behind the register mass delerium I have encountered in years. I have not witnessed a comparable excretion of completely unjustifiable, self pitying, "woe is me", whining screaming crying pissing and shitting and puking and sweating display of pathetic "consumption is my entire identity" since Gamer Gate.
It was breathtaking.
It was extraordinary.
It was extremely annoying, because Darktide is a great game, it's fun, everyone I played with liked it, it's got great gameplay, and it was forty dollars. Not some ultra-premium CoD black box 100$ BS. It's not a AAA game, it's 40$ horde shooter by a small studio. People were bitching about the game not having a vast, sweeping story and that the cutscenes weren't cinematic masterpieces and, apparently, that Fat Shark didn't send a developer directly to their house to suck them off.
No core features are missing.
No classes are missing.
No weapons are missing. This is all ridiculously entitled bullshit.
The "core feature" is the game. The game is fun. The game is pretty. The game has great mechanics. The game is, I repeat, fun. Basically no one disputes that THE VIDEO GAME THAT YOU PLAY IS FUN.
The item crafting that isn't in the game, that people lost their fucking minds about, is a bunch of dice-rolling to that amounts to like 1-5% changes in the damage output of your weapons. It's nothing. The numbers are completely insignificant to actual play. Unless the numbers line up just right it's very unlikely that whatever bonuses you get will actually change the number of hits to kill on a weapon.
There are fewer classes than a completely different game. Fatshark never promised 25 classes on release, people just assumed their would be.
There are like 70 weapons. Every single one, including all the las guns and autoguns that are superficially similar, operate in very distinctive ways and do different things allowing for different playstyles. All of them are well made and incredibly satisfying to use. Few if any of them aren't viable.
There are two upgrade currencies. That's it. And again, the upgrades are marginal. You can play on the highest difficulty with un-upgraded weapons.
Oh no a game in 2022 has an MTX shop it's the end of the fucking world!
The only legitimate complaint that wasn't the wailing and gnashing of teeth of treat poisoned children was that some people had legitimate problems with crashes and performance. Which is entirely normal and happens with every single new game released.
Jesus christ. it was like... I can't even come up with a metaphor. It's like every single white boomer on Nextdoor found out their food order had the wrong number of pickles on it and decided to go completely fucking ballistic all at once.
Like just review after review that was "Well the game was fun and it has amazing mechanics and I played for 200 hours but this thing that doesn't actually have anything to do with the actual gameplay wasn't in the game the way I thought it should be so I'm leaving a negative review". Like SHUT THE FUCK UP. It's a FORTY DOLLAR GAME. You got your fucking money's worth! Shut up! Just fucking shut up!
Oh, and all the stuff that was in Vermintide that people are big mad about not being in Darktide? VT got like 4+ years of development and was a total shit-show on launch. God forbid a brand new game not have as much content as one with years of development behind it!
I can't get over it. My brain cannot handle the horrors it has witness. I cannot believe that people played a game for ONE ENTIRE FUCKING WEEK. Not like a few hours a day for a week. Not 8 hours a day 7 days a week. ONE HUNDRED SIXTY EIGHT FUCKING HOURS! and then left a negative review, usually with something like "Great mechanics, gameplay is really fun, graphics are great, great dialogue, great enemies, weapons feel great, but i couldn't gamble to change my weapon stats by 1-3% so this is the biggest betrayal of trust since Starscream turned on Megatron".
And now people aren't going to play a genuinely good, fun, enjoyable coop game because these fucking nerds got a 40$ game by a small studio instead of the second coming of Christ they apparently psyched themselves up for.
/rant
Well shit, when you put it like that it does sound very silly. The only thing that really bothered me personally was the performance issues. I agree that the core gameplay is very solid and very enjoyable.
Performance issues are 100% legitimate and I genuinely feel bad for people who had problems and I hope Fatshark has put in the effort to fix as many of those problems as they can.
Damn, you’ve summarized basically everything I’ve felt as an old Vermintide fan that started playing Darktide with the beta. The tide games have always been about combat feel to me and the moment to moment gameplay in Darktide is so crunchy and satisfying that the negative reaction has been a bit mindboggling. Performance issues and missing systems suck for sure, but people have been reacting with a level of fury I haven’t seen since Payday 2 announced their paid skins would have stat buffs.
This all sounds about right, I had the fortune to play it on gamepass and didn't buy it outright, and while the game is pretty fun it's so fuckin empty and has some baffling design choices that make it pretty clear they should have let it cook a while longer before launch
Darktide's fine but unfinished, the review-bombing is just a tantrum from fancy little treat lads who are frothing mad that the devs got the holidays off instead of being chained to their desks until the treats are tasty enough, and who somehow manage to work in an unhinged rant about how it must be those devious celestials who are pulling all the strings and doing everything they can to stop fancy little treat lads from having a good time. Like it was unfortunate timing that the community started to meltdown while literally the entire company was shut down for several weeks, but I think it's mostly been a self-sustaining thing where people have just been psyching themselves up into a frenzy at a time when there literally could not be an answer.
The funniest ones are the ones who start crying and pointing at back4blood as an example of "tencent making everything they touch into a microtransaction hyper-monetized hell". Back4Blood doesn't have microtransactions or a cash shop, it just sold an annual pass with three expansions attached to it which one can play without owning it as long as you're playing with someone else who has it.
The performance issues are weird though. I have a pretty old rig and it runs perfectly fine with no issues, but then you've got people with high end shit from the past year or two just crashing and burning. Sometimes the servers just start melting down and the game breaks weirdly. The matchmaking is completely broken and the only way to match into a lobby is to keep canceling and requeuing until you get an instant match because it's like it just dumps you into an empty queue otherwise.
