I'm biased since I've collectively sunk quite over 1000 hours in Vermintide 1 and 2 combined. I love Darktide from what I've played of it, however, there are clear issues that need to be resolved:

1. Performance - this is the most critical one. How are you supposed to enjoy a first person shooter/slasher when the framerate dips to 40-30 any time you look at the point of the map where there is the most geometry or the lightning in the room you currently inhabit is aping your GPU.

2. Bugs - early matchmaking woes aside the game has plenty of bugs, some even carrying over from Vermintide 1 and 2 since the games share the same engine like being able to hit enemies with melee through walls, however, falling through the level and Penances not progressing within the parameters laid out by the tooltips have to be resolved as soon as possible.

3. Lack of class variety - the game is new, however, the comparison is inevitable. Vermintide 2 launched with 15 classes and Darktide only has 4 with Fatshark saying they will be added every 3 months, however, they have also stated that they MIGHT and I emphasize might, monetize them - neither of those things is good and while one of them will be fixed eventually over time, the other is a symptom of a bigger issue.

4. The progression/ monetesation - the grind to unlock "the good stuff" for your class is not fun and you don't share either currency or progress for your secondary characters. This will become one of the barriers that new players will face and is a quit moment. It also leads me to the next issue - they are aping Destiny 2's visual customization monetesation. What do I mean by that? The game is a first person shooter, however, when you aren't in a mission the game forces you in third person and autojoins you to a hub with random other players. One could make the argument that its neat, however, it also comes off as malicious - it pushes players to get skins "to look cool" since you will be potentially surrounded by other people that do and its human nature to want to stand out (in a positive way). Playing with human psychology in premium games by employing mobile f2p structure is toxic to the industry in my opinion.

5. General gameplay feel - while for the most part the game handles really well with all classes, there are things that ♥♥♥♥ up and since you are having a lot of fun for the most part those ♥♥♥♥ ups stand out much more. What do I mean by that? Just like with Vermintide 2 there are talents and passive effects that straight up either don't work as stated in the tooltip or don't work at all. Honestly after all these years one would hope they'd hire someone who can streamline the tooltip descriptions, however, that doesn't seem to be the case. There are also balance issues with things here and there but those will probably get ironed out over time as people start to develop a meta and Fatshark starts developing around/alongside it.

6. Then there are the "Penances" which are "Okri's challanges" from Vermintide 2 or simply achievements in-game that sometimes reward you with a cool skin or a portrait frame or other "prestige" cosmetics - I can't help but think that the guy responsible for some of them had malicious intent. Some require you to go out of your way to perform tasks that put your team in jeopardy or would be impossible to do unless you are in a full premade squad and everyone agrees to let you solo a boss for 5 minutes (for instance, as that is one of the Psyker Penances). These also tie (in my opinion) with the psychological manipulation that goes around the cosmetics shop since some of the Penances are the only way for you to get an outfit (skin) for your class without paying. Having them be behind a frustrating progression wall in order to channel the player's frustration in to buying a premium cosmetic feels scummy to me.

With that wall of text being said, I will probably spend hundreds of hours in this game - something that I don't get very often from modern games and something that I cherish when developers manage to achieve. Hopefully the game will get better with time and the devs start addressing the bigger pain points of the community and don't just rest on their laurels as that is how a live service game is supposed to function.

Update 1: They've added cosmetics that are purchasable with earnable in-game currency, however, at the current time they are only recolors of existing penance cosmetics which only serves to undervalue the penance rewards.

Update 2: The crafting is ♥♥♥♥. They had the perfect template for a good crafting system with no RNG in the Weaves from the Winds of Magic DLC in Vermintide 2 but they chose to ignore it and revert back to artificially inflating playtime via RNG with a crafting system that most closely resembles the one in Vermintide 1. The resource gain from missions is beyond awful and the amount required is stupid. All the while it isn't even fully implemented on launch which boggles the mind as to why in tarrnation would they do so much stupid in such a shoddy way.

Update 3: All of the text above? Completely meaningless. Almost a month without an update or even any communication. They aren't touching their forums, you can only get random snippets from CM's on discord. ♥♥♥♥ this and ♥♥♥♥ the launch window that just so happens to coincide with a major holiday period where they can't do anything about the game (bear in mind this happened with Vermintide 2 as well). All of this has already happened, only this time its worse. The management people at FS need to go. All of the great work done by the devs is wasted due to everything surrounding the stellar atmosphere/ music/art /gameplay loop/ combat.

Congratulations! After years and years of me following you (ever since War of The Roses) you have finally managed to break my trust and any form of loyalty I've had for you as a brand because at the end of the day there is nothing learned. With every release the same mistakes happen over and over. You manage to implement a decent or even good system and by next game its time to go back to the stone age, ignoring every lesson that you could've derived from the missteps.

I realize game development is hard, I realize the customers constantly skewing towards the negative since its so easy to fall in to "drama mode" on the internet these days can be draining, however, on our (the customer's) end you have given us a half finished product which was sold as a service game that requires a certain level of upkeep to function that hasn't been there at all