Fatshark details upcoming changes to Darktide’s gear acquisition and crafting

At launch, Fatshark’s game of trying not to accidentally shoot a big friendly ogryn in the back while he protects you from a swarm of people with scabies was missing a few things. Of particular note was that three-quarters of its crafting system appeared to have been left out.

We asked Fatshark why Darktide had placeholder messages in place of the rest of its crafting mechanics at the time, and were told that a different system had been removed at the last minute because it wasn’t good enough. “If we release a system and it’s in there and people are using it, it’s really, really hard to rip that system out and replace it with another system,” Fatshark’s head of design Victor Magnuson said. “People have already invested in the previous system. And from a backend perspective it’s going to be a nightmare. From the player experience, it’s going to be really bad. So if we released the game with a borked crafting system and decided we needed to redo it, that’s major surgery, and we don’t want to do that. It was a really tough call, but I think in the end players will agree it was the right call. Of course, they’re never going to know how bad the original crafting system was.”