Preface:
I want to make it abundantly clear that this isn’t some kind of rage bait post, but a serious breakdown of the factors surrounding Darktide’s Balance, the the Major Balancing Mindsets that the community has, what influences those preferences, and why Fatshark can’t please both groups without major changes to how they present Darktide to the community. Several content creators have made videos on this topic, and considering I’ve just down Class Breakdowns for every class in the gamer, I thought I’d add my own two cents. Especially considering that while these content creators have correctly identified the stakes that each party holds in the balance of the game, I do not think anyone has adequately described why both sides are so entrenched in their own perspectives. This post is not blaming one side or the other, but exploring the perspective each comes to the game with. And I’d like to add that there is a way for Darktide’s State of Balance to get better, but it requires Fatshark to do something that neither group is currently invested in. As per usual, for those short on time or patience, I’ll sum up my thoughts in a TL;DR.
Defining the Parties:
So i’ve seen a lot of ways that different creators trying to address this problem have divided up the community based on general interest, but in understanding the different parties that have stakes and influence on the balancing of the game, I find that simpler/broader is better. Party number one, whether anyone likes it or not, is Fatshark. While I have no doubt that Fatshark wants to make a great game, they need to make a profitable one. Their stakes in the balance is whatever will pay the highest dividends. But then the two player focused parties with stakes are Casual Players & Competitive Players. Both Player Parties want the game to be balanced for “fun” but what each party defines as fun is where the problem lies.
Now, I can’t talk about this difference in definitions of fun without this getting somewhat personal. I am the highest skilled player out of any of my peers who I actively play with. Among my friends, I have twice the hours (1,528) in this game as the next highest person. And I bring this up not as a brag, but to indicate that I play this game for very different reasons and in a very different capacity to the rest of my friends. This means that while yes, I have the personal perspective of a competitive player who wants the game to be balanced based on challenge, everyone who I enjoy playing this game with is far closer to a more Casual Mindset. For my part in this, I can’t afford to be entrenched, because I want to play this game with my friends.
If you are a more Casual Player, you probably inherently disagree with anything that might come off as/be perceived as a Nerf. You are playing this game for fun, and winning is fun. In fact, you might wonder how anyone could play a PvE Horde Shooter competitively aside from maybe speed running, and you didn’t buy this game to get roped into someone’s random speed run or masochistic fight pit. And that is a fair perspective to have. This isn’t some kind of strawman argument. Darktide, as a game, does not present itself as some kind of hardcore experience. You get a handful of cool, strong classes, some missions to play through, and a couple of silly, wacky game modes.
If you are a more Competitive Player, you probably inherently disagree with ideas about raising the power levels higher than they already are. Arbites in particular is likely a real sticking point. You are playing this game to overcome a challenge. In order for there to be a challenge to overcome, there has to be weaknesses in the classes and their kits, that way there is way to express you skills, short and longterm planning, and buildcraft. Darktide is a PvE Team Based Horde Shooter, so what each member of the team brings to any given encounter is important to you. And that is also a fair perspective to have.
Investigating the Stakes:
The thing is, if you’re a competitive player, the casual players have you outnumbered. I want to put forward some very rough guesstimation math. If you look at the achievement “Like a four- leaf Clover”, it indicates that 9% of the steam community of players has unlocked it. Based upon the steam charts the all time peak of Darktide was 108,395 players. Assuming that close to the same amount of players at the peak of the game still own it, that means if you have the achievement of “Four Leaf Clover”, you are one of somewhere in the ballpark of only 9,755 players people with that achievement. While this is close to half of the current average daily players (about 17,761), the majority of casual players aren’t necessarily daily players. Hell; I’m not a daily player. And even considering that half my hours are probably in one class, where as the other half is split between three, it does not take 250 Hours to reach level 30 in one class. Which means the vast majority of players either have significantly less hours in total or all of their hours are in three or less classes, if not both.
Darktide’s biggest problem is that the Casual Player Base is right. But the Competitive Players aren’t wrong. Darktide, outside of the initial tutorialization, has no real in-game systems, gamemodes, or challenges focused on educating or nurturing the skills needed to perform at higher levels of play in a way that is fun or engaging. And without the insight that resources like that could provide, balancing suggestions based on Upper Tier play only reads as needlessly oppressive for the vast majority of players. In posting on the forums, I’ve been exposed to a lot of other people’s own personal insights, and one in particular that I keep coming back to is that “Nothing Prepares you for a Havoc 40 game other than playing a Havoc 40 game”. And I think this sentiment can be applied to every challenge in this game.
I have recently been playing the game w/ my partner and their peer group, and when I first started playing with this group, before the Arbites dropped, they generally expressed disinterest and even condemnation of the elements of Darktide that I found most enjoyable. And then, partially due to boredom, and generally due to my own chaotic inclinations, I qued us into a Damnation. And the party struggled. Even I did, as I was playing a test build on my weakest class. But we won, specifically due to me shot calling and giving very clear directives about when and where we should move. After this game I fully expected to be banned from choosing missions, but something unexpected happened. My partner and peers enjoyed that game. In fact, they enjoyed it more than they had the previous game. Yes, they struggled, but they also saw me struggle, instead of just watching me blow through every challenge on my own. And the way I went about solving the challenges we were faced with wasn’t just “getting good”, but instead illustrated to the other players the depth of game knowledge I had accumulated in my time playing. Now, my partner and my peers come to me constantly for information regarding classes, enemies, buildcraft, missions, weapons, and more. They see me as a wellspring of information on how to get better at the game.
Again, the point of bringing up this personal excerpt isn’t as a brag, but to illustrate that my peers saw in-me, not anything in in-game, a repertoire of valuable information to get better at the game. And this is why Casual Players are right, but Competitive Players aren’t wrong. Comparing Casual Players and Competitive Players based upon this idea that casual players want fun and competitive players want challenge is inherently misleading, and implies that casual players are opposed to things being hard. The truth of the matter is that everyone has fun overcoming challenges. My want to overcome a challenge inherently means that I want to win too. I just want to win in a way that makes me feel like I earned it. A breakdown that I find far more honest and accurate is that Casual Players want easy to understand and access tools and Competitive Players want challenging test and difficulties to overcome. Without actual in-game learning resources that don’t turn playing the game into doing a chore players don’t currently have the tools to learn and improve at the game, meaning a Class’s base power has to make up for the gap in knowledge. For Casual Players, the idea of making options weaker (especially when there’s nothing in game to help the player improve) probably seems like an inherently bad game design choice. But it’s not. As a Competitive Player, it’s easy for me to read a more Casual Player’s frustration with the importance of Buildcraft and Game Knowledge as disdain for challenge. But it’s not.
I personally understand Havoc to be the equivalent of end game content, that requires good teamwork, skilled play, considered buildcraft, and defined map knowledge. But Havoc does not really present itself like end game content. The rewards associated with the gamemode don’t put any focus on those skill sets; they put a reward on winning. And those rewards are things like cosmetics and titles. Things that player want to earn. Arbites probably feels like a godsend for Casual Havoc players. Without any in game tools to access information or education on higher tier skills in-game, the tool that lets them engage with the gamemode is the class. But now, the challenge a Competitive Minded players searchs for in what should be the highest mode of play is non-existent.
As stated earlier, I recognize that I don’t play this game in a way that is relevant to most of my peers. Of my 1,500 odd hours, a not insubstantial number of those hours have been spent in the psykhanium, testing things with the help of mods. Being able to spawn in specific enemies or groups of enemies to fight is one of the best ways to train yourself to better handle diffrent encounters or otherwise learn more about your build. But if you’re a console player, modding isn’t really an option. And even if you are a PC player, you might just not want to have to download mods. Which means one of the best resources for improving your play in Darktide requires out of game material (modding), is entirely self guided, and gives no rewards. It is not a practical expectation for a player base to learn the skills required for higher play in this kind of environment. Likewise, community tutorialization is equally faulty. No video or essay in the world is going to teach you how to better operate your weapons, and buildcraft videos often spend more time highlighting the strengths of a build over the complexities and consideration of it. Breaking down little intricacies does not make for the most engaging content (I would know), and what most watchers want to know is if a build is strong, not why. So how do you fix this disparity in the knowledge base of the players?
Proposing Solutions:
Darktide is a very diffrent game than what it was on release. Systems like crafting used to be RNG; you had so much less freedom to hone your build. But now, if the game can’t find a way to balance the options classes have, why have options at all? Class Trees and Crafting are both great ways to give the player base a lot of control, but only if the options are equally valid. For those options to be equally valid, especially in a game as complex as Darktide, you have to be able to educated the player base on how that options is intended to be use; how the player can get value out of it. Raising the access to and general level of knowledge of the Player Base is far more likely to reduce the gap in perspectives on balancing, leading to a much higher likelihood that Fatshark can balance the game in a way that everyone can appreciate. Or in the very least, the majority of people excluding the most stubborn outliers.
So if you want to fix the difference in knowledge levels of the player base, the obvious solution is more rigorous tutorialization, right? There, we fixed it. Except…No one likes tutorials. The initial tutorial in the Psykhanium is long and boring , and it only teaches you the very basics; far from Comprehensive. So I don’t think I’m going to excite anyone, Casual or Competitive Player, if I suggest “More Tutorials”. That’s just not a good solution. Besides, tutorialization is costly to make, as it only can get value out of people accessing it, it doesn’t directly serve in game progress or rewards, which means players won’t want to do it, which means that a percentage of players never interact with it, so that percentage of players don’t have a good understanding of the subject, thus requiring more/better tutorialization to resolve. It’s a vicious and terrible cycle. But it doesn’t have to be.
We can look a game like Armored Core 6 for ideas on how to implement advance Tutorials. In AC6, there is a selection of short tutorials (each being less than 5 mins to complete) on a handful of the higher concepts. Completing these tutorials unlock mech parts and weapons for you, or otherwise give you resources of some kind. The short time requirement and the interconnected reward for demonstrating mastery of the concept means that this tutorialization is very effective. But if you want a 40K game example, look no further than Space Marine 2. SM2 has a very similar system, where the key abilities of each class gets highlighted in its own micro-tutorial. SM2 goes a step beyond even AC6 because it grades you on your execution of the challenge, and you are awarded better resources based upon how well you do. Short time investments with valuable rewards is an easy way to make impactful tutorials on advanced subjects of your game.
These kinds of mini challenges could be a part of psykhanium. Let players choose a difficulty level for a bespoke little challenge. Something like asking players to get a certain number of perfect blocks against a number of Ragers within a time limit encourages players to learn about those mechanics. And additional objectives, like staggering enemies, or modifiers can net you more rewards, like an Auric Operative Stipend. Let players earn bonus Ordo Dockets, Plasteel, Diamantine, Ordo Ingots, and maybe even some small amount of Aquilas depending on what difficulty they complete the challenge at. Even as one time (per difficulty) reward challenges, the fact that you can play them again means that they’re a resource for training the player on how to deal with certain enemies and/or use certain weapons at increasing difficulty levels.
The same goes for meta-progression rewards. The Weekly Contracts currently ask player to do such vague things. Kill Scabs. Kill Dregs. They could ask for specific task instead of generalist ones. Things like Shove a Number of Hounds and Poxbursters. Dodge Crusher and Mauler Overheads. Rescue or Resuscitate Ally. Resupply or Buff Allies a certain number of times with Ammo Boxes or Stims. Heal a certain amount of ally Health with Med-Kits or Stims. Play (Not Win) a number of games on a certain difficulty. Instead of contracts just asking you to play the game, they could ask you to play the game well. Instead of choosing between punishing lower skilled players or higher skilled player, the game could be balanced behind giving every player the resources and opportunity to achieve high tier play.
I recognize that tutorialization can be expensive to create and hard to get a player base to engage with, but these options were suggested specifically because of how easy they are to implement. Adding things that Weekly Contracts can track isn’t resource intensive, and depending on what the contract is tracking, it can help guide players to better gameplay habits. Adding Challenges is harder, but all it ultimately consist of is spawning the player in the psykhanium with an enemy, potentially tweaking the AI to help demonstrate a subject, and then asking the player to do something a handful of times. Attaching decent pay-out rewards to these challenges helps engage the player base, and their replayability means they can keep being used to hone the players skills.
The TL;DR of How to Improve Community Sentiment of Balance:
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Add Psykhanium Mini-Challenges that can be played at different difficulties with scaling one time resource cash out rewards to help incentivize players to take up the challenge.
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These challenges serve the dual purpose of teaching players advance mechanics like perfect blocking or weapon mechanics and the difference in enemy breakpoints, damage, and behavior at higher difficulty.
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Change or Add Weekly Contracts to better emphasize positive team behavior like staying in coherency, sharing resources, dealing with certain threats a certain way, and/or Rescuing or Resuscitating Allies.
[If the changes listed in this short summarization don’t convince you that these are compelling and worthwhile changes to make to the class, please read the full post and let me try to.]
Closing Thoughts:
I really do think it’s fair to point out that Darktide has changes a lot in its two year lifespan. When the game first came out, I treated it very casually, but after the Talent Trees came out, I felt like there was really something to bite into. I trained myself to use knives, not just to complete the penance, but because I wanted to know how to get value out of them. I first modded the game because I wanted to know how to solo every boss while taking the least amount of damage possible. The challenge of overcoming those objectives is what has kept me coming back to the game when every other game seems to have lost its luster. But I can’t blame other people for wanting an easier experience when the game doesn’t provide the tools to mastery it in-game. Instead of one group or the other having to suck it up, I feel like there’s a far more impactful solution in reaching a compromise, where the tools and incentives to get better at the game are actually provided by the game, and the challenge is preserved.
I recognize that in part for some of these options to work, you would have to restructure certain aspects of the game, but those aspects need to be restructured if only because the other systems that they’re connected to already have. It’s not changing how the game works for the sake of change but in recognition of the changes that have already been made. That’s why I’m such a proponent about addressing specifically Class Identity first and foremost. Balancing is largely math, but it’s math that’s based on mechanics, which in of themselves are abstractions of ideas. If the Abstraction isn’t defined, the math can’t be either. Knowing that, say, a Psyker’s Role in the team is horde clear, and that their position is Long Range means you can have an easier time not only balancing the class (as you have a clear idea what the class is supposed to do and where its strengths and weaknesses lie) but in turn you also have an easier time balancing the weapon sandbox, and the enemy sandbox, and even making tutorialization material. It becomes possible to teach people the importance of build craft and how each branch of the tree provides value to the class because those micro-tutorial challenges can use pre-defined builds that only use the nodes associated with a certain playstyle within a class. That’s why I’ve been so fixated on outlining comprehensive changes to better define, organize, and balance they Playstyle Options of the Veteran, Zealot, Ogryn, Psyker, and Arbites.
Darktide is a far more complex game than it was on release. There are more abilities due to the class tree. More weapons and blessings from updates. Actual weapon crafting instead of RNG. And now, a whole new class, which should theoretically add even more. But Darktide isn’t currently balanced or tutorialized in a way that lets the player naturally grow in competency, or allow every class get its own distinct value, or get what value they do bring to a team’s composition at the same rate. And those options are equally pointless if players don’t know how to make use of them. The answer isn’t buffing everything until it all plays the same, but we also can’t demand a more challenging experience when they game doesn’t even properly team the skills needed to engage with the challenge that’s already there.
