PC Gamers Awards Warhammer 40K: Darktide “Best Ongoing Game”
Online game magazine PC Gamer has awarded Warhammer 40K: Darktide its 2023 category winner for ‘Best Ongoing Game. The game has also been nominated to the BAFTA Longlist of sixty games. In awarding the title, PC Gamer explained its reasons for the election.
“PC Gamer’s Best Ongoing Game award celebrates an older game that stood out in 2022 through updates, new content, or support. This year, we’re honoring Fatshark’s co-op FPS Darktide, which overcame last year’s rough launch through continued updates. This year, it became the game it always promised to be.“
The magazine went on to highlight the different values through the eyes of different contributors including Robert Jones, Print Editor. According to James, the game earned its ‘badge of shame’ after endless Steam negative votes and feedback. He wrote:
“The game was not only so janky and broken that, one time, it took me seven crashes with restarts to finish a single run, but it also shipped with key chunks of the game missing. It wasn’t just me who was spitting with rage, either, with thousands of reviews on Steam at launch leading to the game getting a ‘Mostly Negative’ badge of shame.”
Another writer, Sean Martin, Guides Writer at PC Gamer, was less critical about the initial moments, even though he expressed his hope to see the technical prosperity of the game. He gave Fatshark two thumbs up and said:
“Fatshark has slowly but surely made good on its quality of life promises, plus the class overhauls add far more variation to play style. Hopefully, now the game is stable, it can start fulfilling the narrative promise of Atoma Prime and the setting’s potential.”
Notably, it is easy to vote alongside this magazine. The studio has listened to players’ feedback and managed to respond appropriately and convincingly. It merits the award and we do hope other studios can copy the customer support attitude of Fatshark.
