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Fatshark Marks '7 Years of 'Tide' With Free Vermintide 2, Content, and Preorder Beta for WH40K Darkt
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Fatshark Marks '7 Years of 'Tide' With Free Vermintide 2, Content, and Preorder Beta for WH40K Darktide | MMORPG.com
Developer Fatshark has plans for November, starting with a free copy of Warhammer 40K: Vermintide 2 on Steam, new content, a cosmetics pack, and a preorder early beta for Darktide before its November 30th release.
Comments
Their releases are always like this. That being said, they did good work over the years. Only shame being that Darktide is the only one of their games that will have auto reconnect. Still would love dedicated servers, but that's never going to happen.
This promo seems to be a tremendous success for them, the game went from 2k players to 104k within days. Matches pop up in seconds.
Which just shows how much better Fatshark could have fared with Vermintide if they took lessons from Digital Extreme. Horde action games are generally better played with 3rd person view, let alone when you intend to monetise it based on cosmetics. I mean what's the point of buying any if you don't see them?
Vermintide already is in a similar position. It is a game that is financed by selling DLCs and cosmetics, just like WF (well, except the DLCs). Which is where my confusion comes from, because unlike WF, in Vermintide you can't really see the cosmetics when you play. So what motivation is there for the players to buy them?
The inevitable question then is how Vermintide would have fared if it adopted WF's approach. You can say what you like about DE's decisions in many cases, but the way that game is monetised is among the fairest that I know of in the whole gaming industry. Players are generally satisfied, WF and DE are doing very well and thank to this system the game has grown over the 10 years from a small tech demo to a huge beast with tons of content always freely available to the players, constantly updated engine and graphics, etc.
Now look at Vermintide and the way it manages the game. Most of the content updates and cosmetics have been poorly received, they are much sparser than WF's and often of questionable quality or value.
The whole point is that Fatshark has developed a strategy for their own game that is very counterproductive and clashes with other key parts of Vermintide. It's still a good game and provides lots of enjoyment, but somehow it seems hobbled by their own decisions. Again, with WF we see that the system can work much better for both the players and the developers.
You are quite right that cosmetics sell better when players can easily see them, though many games allow you to swing the camera round, that is not as good as the immediacy of 3rd person. I am also a proponent of cosmetics as a way to fund games instead of all the dreadful monetarization we see all around.
But having variegated forms of gameplay comes first and "first person" can give a game a feel like no other. Gaming can't sacrifice the realism first person gives for the toy store approach of 3rd person. That said, I prefer MMOs (depends on what we are calling a MMO here) in 3rd person, like I said one size does not fit all, different gaming systems for different games makes for better play.