I’ve been seeing a lot of discussion and comments on penances in game, on discords, streams, and of course these forums, and while I’m sure I can say “penances bad” and call it a day, I want to emphasize exactly why they are bad and even where to possibly go with them if they were to change. Of course since people mostly care about the class specific penances with cosmetics locked behind them, that’s what I’m going to be focusing on. Just a fair warning, this is going to be VERY long winded. If you’re not interested in a short description on achievements, just jump to paragraph 7.
Before I get to my point I want to start with the foundation of what I am going to be talking about, what is a penance? You know that already, it’s an achievement. For this topic I’m going to focus on three different kinds of achievements I’ve seen in other games and also in Darktide.
Progress/‘accumulated number’ achievements: Generally these are checks on how long you’ve played, how many time you’ve done X basic thing, and how far you’ve gotten into the main game itself. These are typically seen as easier achievements as you can normally boil down most of these achievements to the question, how long have you been playing, as playing the game is likely to increase the number of times you are going to be doing basic things and progressing the story of the game. You can of course make these more difficult by increasing the number required to get the achievement of basic things and rarer occurrences. You can also make deceptively hard tasks by making the achievement “Reach X location” but to even get close to the location you would need high level gear or “Get X achievements” which can only be obtained by a skillful player.
Experimental task achievements: These kinds of achievements are more like suggestions for the player to do something new. These can range from just using something new or challenging the player to use what they already have to a higher level of use/skill. These can be any level of difficulty as the point is usually to just get the player to do something they haven’t done yet to get the player to see more of the game and maybe even to subtly teach the player useful interactions that will be required for higher level gameplay.
Skill gated achievements: These achievements are meant to be almost like a badge of honor. You had to do something that might look hard or even close to impossible, but through your careful movements, decision making, and tactful item management you were able to accomplish it. While these don’t always have to be extremely difficult, they are demanding you to reach a skill level that some people might not be able to reach.
There are a few different kinds of achievements I can mention like ‘exploiting’ something to reach a dev room that might be out of reach, or just making the player do something funny for a funny result, but I just want to focus on achievements players are likely meant to do in a game like Darktide.
With all that being said, lets now get to the penances and why so much negativity is surrounding some of these penances. While a lot of the penances are there as goals to aim for or just eventually reach over time, many other penances have frames, insignias, trinkets, and cosmetics locked behind doing particular tasks of varying degrees of difficulty. Most importantly, the main clothing you’ll progressively get will give you a sense of, well, progress. Progress that you and your character are getting better and better. So the equation seems to be that if you are getting better, you should now have the skill level to get the harder to obtain cosmetics. This is where a big disconnect hits the communities’ expectation and the reality of many of the penances.
Some of the penances just seem to be focused more so on dumb luck rather than a consistent chance at doing something achievable in most games. Some of the penances require a large number of special units to be in game, and maybe even requiring them to be clumped together. It doesn’t feel skillful to stumble in on 6 ogryns all lined up while you are playing ogryn and then to bull rush into them IF you are in the right position to do so before your teammates kill any of them, it just feels like you get really lucky. Pick n Mix and Malleus Monstronum for the Psyker feels like a weird mix of luck and teamwork absolutely being required to even have a chance of getting either of these (more on the teamwork side of this later). If you aren’t in a team that is actually working to carry you to getting your penances, then Pick n Mix requires your team to conveniently hurt specials enough where you can finish them with one brain burst (remember that Pick n Mix has to be done on Heresy which increases the health of enemies so most specials won’t die in one BB) OR be lucky enough that enough one tap specials spawn in a row AND you’re the one to kill them before your teammates. Malleus Monstronum is even worse basically requiring you to be in a team very specifically so you can go for this achievement (again more on this in a bit) OR to have all of your teammates die and for you to not only kill that monstrosity almost exclusively through BBs, but to also crowd control any mobs/specials you stumble into on Heresy or Damnation by yourself.
This isn’t to even mention the completely backwards penance that is Going Out With a Bang, requiring you to purposely do something that is going to down you, but to do it next to 3 elite specials (which as a Psyker is really bad positioning to be right next to them) that are low enough hp where nothing else kills them except your slow to activate warp overload ability. This is why so much fuss is around this one penance, it doesn’t feel skillful to have three elites right next to you with low health that aren’t knocked off by something else, you aren’t accumulating anything if you mess it up, and you can only say that you are trying something new if only at the cost of griefing your team in the hope that you get the penance, and with the penance sitting at 0.6% players who got it on Steam’s global achievements it is the 3rd rarest achievement for Darktide only beaten out by two other achievements, one of which is to just get all 4 different classes to level 30.
Then there are other oddities that make for weird penances because while they make you do something new, it’s not something you are likely to do again as it doesn’t make you better at playing the game in general nor does it teach you a new mechanic. Long Bomb requires a Veteran to throw a grenade in just the right way so it will explode midair, killing 5+ enemies, just so the grenade doesn’t bounce. There is no reason to repeat the actions needed to do this and you learned nothing new, i fact you might get the wrong impression and think that bouncing grenades are bad and you should never let your grenade bounce. Buying Time requires a Preacher to throw a stun grenade at a sniper that is over 40 meters away. Why would you ever do this as a Preacher? Why wouldn’t you shoot it? Why wouldn’t you mark it and let the ear piercing blast of a sniper round go off so your teammates know where it is just by looking for the outline and then to take it out (again, more on teamwork later). I get that the Psyker’s ability pushes enemies back but does pushing 7 enemies off a cliff feel like a thing that a Psyker should be doing? Why does 4 separate Ogryn penances revolve around Bull Rush? Why not put a penance in there involving taking hits/shots that only a shield can block, or taking aggro from an elite that a teammate has to kill which your teammates are going to be doing anyway so it’s not asking anything new or difficult out of your teammates, just asking you to play a new way and try new things, guiding the player to explore new territory and rewarding them for doing so.
Then there is the confused question of should penances be difficult to get or not. It feels like there is that progressive I mentioned earlier as the easier/lower difficulty penances unlock the first headgear for your class, followed by harder/difficulty gated penances unlocking the next headgear, and then the last headgear unlocked by completing the penances that require you to play on Heresy. On the other side of the coin, there are penances like One in the Chamber, which requires you as a Veteran to use the last bullet/shot in your clip to kill a enemy, ANY enemy, 5 separate times in one mission on Malice difficulty or higher. This is grouped with the second headgear for Veteran, despite how easy it is to get this with any low capacity/high damage weapon or to just mag dump with any high damage Vet weapon until your last shot. Also, it’s just going to be more difficult to do something that requires the deaths or coordination of an entire team (Malleus Monstronum) to complete especially when you have to have the uphill conversation saying “you should help me with a penance that I will be the only person to benefit from your help”
To put all of this back into context, this is so you can get the next best cosmetic for your class. The only way to get your progressive headgear is to do these penances, and with Going Out With a Bang being a requirement for the Psyker’s second headgear, you’re likely going to be wearing that first hood until you grief enough lobbies to earn your second hood.
I do want to mention that I don’t hate this system, doing tasks (penances/achievements) to get specific rewards, it just think it’s been executed really poorly here, so that’s why I wanted to suggest changes and see what the general community thinks of them, and if they could be improved.
First off, any penance that effectively requires the coordination between all of your teammates should go under the team section of the penances. Malleus Monstronum would be changed to require all teammates to complete a Beast of Nurgle fight without making contact with the slime for the beast of Malice+ difficulty, or maybe to complete a Plague Orgyn fight without being hit by his charge/stomp attack on Malice+ , or maybe to complete a Demon Host fight without taking a point of PHYSICAL damage. Making this a team effort that everyone could complete would make it so now instead of 4 people needing to group up to complete 1 penance for 1 Psyker, everyone would be rewarded for completing the penance.
Another suggestion is to make a couple penances involving marking. I’m surprised that there isn’t a penance involving marking and it’s something that should have a bit more incentive to do. Even though I do see players marking in my games, it wouldn’t hurt to have it incentivized. It would also be done in a way to make it so it’s not JUST about marking, but marking something and then having a teammate kill that thing either doing the majority of the damage or just getting the killing blow, which again isn’t a big ask of your team as that’s something your teammates are already trying to do.
Moving back to the class specific penances, there should be WAY more penances that try to introduce new ideas or to show off the strengths of certain weapons especially class specific weapons, so here’s a short list I came up with in just a few minutes of thinking.
-Change Long Bomb to require the Veteran to throw a grenade close to a teammate’s feet, killing 8+ enemies. This would be to show the player that you can help give your teammates some breathing room that might stop them from going down otherwise.
-Change Buying Time to require the Preacher to stun a Rager and then kill it before it is unstunned. This is a much more realistic use of a stun grenade than just throwing it across the map instead of doing literally anything else.
-Change Abhor the Mutant to require the Preacher to use his charge ability to while over 5m away from a Bomber to close the gap and kill him with a melee swing before he can successfully throw a grenade he pulled the pin on. This is to show just how quick you can close a gap with a Preacher’s charge.
-Change Cliffhanger to require the Psyker to push a leaping Pox Burster away with his ability and take no damage from the same Pox Burster. I don’t know if you can push a Pox Burster with just a melee weapon out to delay the explosion but I’ve delayed an explosion and gotten out of the blast radius from using the push ability.
-Change Something in your Eye to require the Ogryn to activate his Bombs Away! feat to not only kill the special hit but also 5+ trash mobs. This is just a more clearer use of the Ogryn’s box of grenades instead of ‘throw thing at eye’
-Add penance to require the Ogryn to block X damage in Y amount of time that only an Ogryn’s shield could handle. Just a penance to guide the player into doing something new, doesn’t have to be super difficult to achieve.
-Change Going Out With a Bang to require the Psyker to kill two special enemies with one charged attack from the trauma staff. Literally anything is an improvement.
-Add penance to require the Psyker to kill a Bulwark facing the psyker using the surge staff. Show off one of the strengths of the surge staff and to witness the stunning potential of the surge staff.
-Add penance to require the Psyker to kill 20+ trash mobs on Malice+ within three charged attacks of the void staff. Maybe 20+ is too high but it should be a bit of a tight number for the upper limit of the void staff to show it’s power when you have many mod enemies in a line.
-Change Friends will be Friends to require the Ogryn to Bull Rush through 10+ mob enemies to reach a downed teammate and then revive that teammate on Malice+. Can be used to show the strength of Bull Rush and the passive and maybe even the feats of the Ogryn.
Those are just my examples I could give off the top of my head, I’m not going to claim they are perfect, I think I can make an argument that I improved some of the penances to be more like a learning experience instead of ‘do insane thing you should never do’. If I sound like an insane person just rambling then I would like some comments on what I’m wrong on or maybe I’m missing something, I don’t have 4 level 30 characters so there has to be some mistakes in here.