When can we hope for another comms link?

Hey, we aren’t quite ready to show you all what we’ve been working on - but we’ll give you the news as soon as we are!

If only I was so swole

I’d rather wait until things are more concrete before giving any information - just so I don’t accidently toy with your emotions and raise the expectations

For sure, luckily for you our last patch was just two months ago so we still have a while until we get to that point

Different studios will have different processes and therefore different times when they feel they can share information on upcoming patches so I can’t really comment on what other studios do.

Just before launch we were in a very different position, and were able to answer more questions on what/when - such as Helldivers is doing now- and we had two full time CMs working mainly on Darktide.
They probably have a different amount of full time CMs/ comms/streaming staff - sometimes having less staff and no IP (or your own IP) means you are likely to have shorter lead times on updates etc as well.
I do intend for us have a focus on dev blogs, streams and other ways of interacting with the community this year with the strategy I am building, but as the only full time CM currently I am a little limited!
And this isn’t even including the Versus CAT test around the corner…

We are recruiting!
Over the holiday period though the office was closed at some points, and lots of staff take an extended vacation so it’s a difficult time to hire.
Plus experienced CMs are sometimes hard to come by, usually after 3 years or so they go on to be PMM’s or use it as a stepping stone into a producer role etc.
Also preferring candidates that will relocate / already live in Stockholm makes the pool a little smaller!

Vermintide is a lot older and thus they have their processes set and have done for a long time so know better when they can give information vs when they are not ready too. Because of this they have more confidence too I think!
Whereas Darktide is still fairly young, and last year we mainly spent playing catch up so we have less predictability right now.

We have tried this route in the past, and after receiving some less than stellar results have decided to change our process for the time being! It may be something we consider again in the future though for sure

It almost as if they are two separate games with two separate sets of developers and processes!

I totally understand that and hear you!
With the confidence element - game development isn’t always as simple as ‘we want to do X → do the work for X → it works → we release it.’
Something that i’m sure all game studios suffer from is the ‘we want to do X → oh there are so many bugs this creates can we fix them all? → is this even doable?’
Of course we are much further than this in the process for the things we want to release however until it is a done deal it is hard to give a date.

To reassure ( as much as I can) you I see all of you requesting some statement on vision, and I am feeding this back to the team.

Why would we have the same processes for two different games especially ones so far apart in life cycle? They have separate EPs who have different visions.
One has a considerably larger team than the other - so a process that would work for the Vermintide team might not work for Darktide.
Also the differences in the systems, servers, tooling, etc means we cannot have the same process for a lot of elements.
We try and centralise where we can but tailoring our processes to the product and the devs/managements requests is important.

Not at all! There are some in the pipeline.

Just to clarify - my comment was in reply to having devs themselves posting thoughts and updates, rather than dev blogs