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Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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I said it on Reddit, I’ll say it here too. While it’s always nice to get a community update, I don’t buy into the whole “some of the challenges we’ve had” and I’m curious to see what excuses Fatshark will come up with. Had they built Darktide upon the success of Vermintide’s crafting system, loot system and QoL features, we wouldn’t be down to 4,000 players.

They kept the core gameplay and adapted it to 40k and it’s super fun, so there was no challenge in doing the same with the rest of the game. Granting loot after every game, account-wide currencies, curios and weeklies, crafting materials through item salvaging etc. were no challenge. There was no challenge in replicating and improving what Vermintide 2 does rather well, as the crafting system, but no, they had to re-invent the wheel and someone thought that character-bound weeklies and checking a store every hour would be top endgame mechanics.

The real challenge lies in going back to the drawing board to redesign a system based on super thick layers of RGN, lack of player agency in every aspect of the game, absence of clear direction, with zero QoL features to make the game fun and not a chore outside of shooting at and axing stuff. Not a developer, but I’m pretty sure this can’t happen overnight.

Remember when Aqshy said the following:

Since launch, we’ve seen feedback from many players requesting shared progression across characters to ensure a smoother progression loop. Our designers are taking this feedback seriously and are discussing how to best implement a solution that meets our players’ desires and gameplay goals while also striking a balance with the game’s design intent. This is a sizable endeavor, and its feasibility is still unknown, we hope to be able to share more information on its progress at a later time.

Well, I have no clue what the game’s design intent is but I don’t think Fatshark does either. Pretty sure account-wide materials, currencies and curios wouldn’t hurt the game’s design intent much, whatever that means. And if something as simple as shared progression across characters is a near impossible endeavor (was possible in Vermintide, but can’t be done here it seems), it really doesn’t bear well for the rest of the work to do.

So there’s your challenge. The challenge is for Fatshark to question these very choices and how the game was designed, and then to turn things around. That’s the only challenge I want to hear about.

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Totally agree.

Who is the lead designer? I would love to see a Q&A with him on the design intent of this game because it is baffling.

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This is why I just don’t agree when people bring up the fact that “VT2 was the same when it came out”

No…no it wasn’t. VT2 was broken and a mess yes, but pretty much everything was there and set up for success and people could see that. The foundations were good enough to get people to stick through with it while Fatshark pissed around and finally made their way to where the game is now.

In this, the foundations here are just bad. Sorry, but they are. The core gameplay is good but their “design intent” for everything else is just bad and anti-player. “Live service” as an excuse to come out with 0 content (Story, characters, etc) to drip feed to us later? Siloing character progression? 50 million layers of RNG? No, to get this game where it deserves to be, it needs a LOT of work on its core foundations. I honestly don’t see how we get there without a major overhaul.

Maybe a hot take, but I have a bad feeling we see Darktide 2 before we see Darktide 1 to be where we actually want it to be. There’s too much work here.

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I would hope darktides lead designer is no longer a lead designer .

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We’ll never hear about what the ‘design intent’ is because, at this point, I have become convinced that the design intent is ‘milk these assholes for money then drop this game for something more lucrative’. Explaining the design intent would reveal that they are pulling on every exploitative, player-unfriendly, time-wasting detail they can. They don’t respect us, don’t care about the experience being superb so long as it’s enough to keep people tapping the well.

The people working on the game assets have heart, deserve better than to have their work in a design shell as horrible as this one.

Yeah, I’ve lost all patience for these uninformative, vacuous ‘community managers’ stringing us along with corp garbage. Hedge is insulting and callous, but Catfish is just a useless mouthpiece who has more chance of coming out with something genuinely useful and insightful about Fatshark as the lunch lady.

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Yep. No one designs systems this bad on accident. All you have to do is look at the sheer amount of truly worthless blessings to see that yes, all of the RNG and the time-gating, and giving you no chance at all to get the items you want has been done intentionally.

All progress is siloed to try to inflate player time, and I’m positive it’s there so they could sell boosters in the future. It’s designed from the ground up to be the most annoying PoS possible, in order to trick whales and have fake engagement. Unfortunately no one is going to change management at FatShark, so I doubt this will change. Not to mention it would be a huge rework, since everything has been designed to be terrible from the ground up.

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To be honest VT2’s crafting and loot systems were pretty bad.

Darktide has way more impactful perks and blessings with pretty good tradeoffs on some weapons. The different weapon traits (Damage, cleave, mobility etc.) in and of themselves give more of an identity to the different weapons of the same type and mark. No more attack speed, crit + swift slaying on 99% of the weapons.

The shop wasn’t half a bad idea either. The problem comes from FS for some reason thought setting it to an hourly reset instead of a map completion (with modifiers to difficulty and modifiers) was in any way a sane idea. That and releasing the game without a full crafting system.

I have no idea why they think balancing patches to weapons is a good idea before people can reroll and add blessings with how heavily some weapon types need key blessings to work well (or be way better than other weapons that are good right out of the shop).

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You’re definitely right. How many updates have we had now where they keep saying “we hear you” “We’ll communicate better” “we’ll work on it” because they know that there’s basically nothing they can do without a major overhaul from the ground up, to create a system that’s actually player-friendly.

yet literally 0% of it is actionable. They have not actually said a single thing that they’re doing to improve the game, let alone improve areas that there’s been an overwhelming amount of feedback on. Not one. Not one “we’re going to improve loot aquisition by doing X”. I mean hell, even with the crafting they deviated from what they said they would do originally, radio silence, and now said “yeah we’re going to work on it and let you all know how hard it’s been”

This upcoming community update is pretty much my last hope for ANYTHING. “We heard players don’t like the RNG mission board so we’re going to do this” or “we’re going to make the store less RNG by doing this” or “This is the plan for crafting and we’re aiming for end of Feb for these features”. If it’s more “We hear you” “We’re going to work on it” “We’re going to have meetings on how to resolve this” or any more non-actionable statements with specifics then I’m leaving, and not coming back until 2024 to see what’s up. We’ve been strung along every step of the way by non-statements and I’m tired of it

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Actually the vast majority of blessings do very little to change how a weapon feels. The vast majority of them are minor tweaks or buffs that make no meaningful difference to gameplay or breakpoints. There are a few good ones, but they are intentionally much harder to get. If a weapon has 8 blessings, that doesn’t mean your chance of getting the good one is 1 in 8. It is far, far lower than that.

They have not only designed the most horrible RNG systems you could think of, they’re also deathly afraid of letting us have any fun at all, making most blessings essentially pointless. Some weapons even have no good blessings possible.

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Yeah the design of the game just hurts your desire to play, even with tons of hours its just constant block of craft mats and no working systems to alleviate any of this. They just say it needs work and proceeded to leave it alone for 3 months after the blog where they actually described a system that wouldn’t have been AIDS. You could pull blessings from the many avaliable weapons and apply them to the ones with good rolls. And reroll perks, even if the cost went up.

No idea why we couldn’t get that in the interim, at least the resource siloing could have been applicable and not just feeding tokens into a slot machine.

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I absolutely disagree. Without going in-depth apart from the very few totally useless or downright hurtful blessings (limbsplitter and speedload for example) most weapons have 3-4 desirable blessings with one being usually super rare. Something like headtaker might not seem like much (+4-5 power on hit), but can make you one-shot things on damnation starting from the second or third attack and it’s a huge change to how the weapon feels.

Really? Which ones?

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Crusher has 3/4 blessings that increase impact. These are literally pointless. It has one very bad blessing for a minimal damage increase. And do note it’s damage, not power.

Psyker staves have some blessings which are nice, but none of them have any blessings that could ever compare to something like slaughterer or brutal momentum, for instance. Helbores are 1 or 2 blessings that matter a damn, and even those aren’t impressive in the slightest.

Braced autoguns and really, a lot of ranged weapons, have blessings that do so little they make no impact in the way the game feels to play.

There are alot of weapons like that, and several instances of overlap, where one type of blessing provides a huge amount of +power, and another possible blessing on same weapon provides a tiny amount of +power.

Your example, headtaker, is so rare that it almost might not even exist.

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I give you this. Tried it once, but didn’t like it I don’t even know what blessings it has.

Brutal momentum and slaughterer are melee blessings. I don’t think it’s honest comparing melee and ranged blessings like this. I think we can agree that staves have damned good blessings.

Onslaught and surgical? Those are pretty good (if they work properly) I wouldn’t say they don’t change anything. Sustained fire might be good (I don’t use it enough to know). Infernus is probably bad on it. Maybe I put it in the basket of “weapon with obvious 2 bis blessings”.

Hit and Run and especially terrifying barrage, both that can be on braced absolutely change the feel of the weapon. Stripped down is also a very good QoL if you are running something like a thunder hammer. Las weapons have Crit weak spot nuke damage, opening salvo, infernus, ghost… Even laspistol has pretty good blessings.

Overlap exists and you can stack them. I agree that rarity is a problem, especially with crafting/blessing swapping not being implemented, but that’s not a problem with the blessings themselves.

TL;DR Okay, there might be 2-3 weapons with just 2 bis blessings, but I still think that the majority has a good variety of impactful ones.

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Which ones? Do be specific and mention exactly what these very good blessings are for each staff.

Surgical resets after every shot, which makes it near enough worthless. Onslaught is… nice?

Hit and Run maybe, but generally braced autoguns are for pulling out and quickly killing something specific, then putting away again. Don’t really feel the need to run while shooting, but I guess it’s not pointless. Terrifying barrage only works at ranges where you’re going to be meleeing them most of the time anyway. I guess it’s OK, though.

Infernus has been nerfed and made so rare that it might as well not even exist. Even with it, recon lasgun still can’t perform ammo wise on damnation. Opening salvo is minimal. Weak spot nuke doesn’t work on Vet (at least not during ult). Ghost might be nice for non-vets, I guess.

At the end of the day, even if we were to say that most weapons have some gamechanging blessings… why do all the poo blessings exist? Why do the weaker versions of blessings exist? Why can you roll four different increase cleave blessings on the same weapon? Why can you roll brutal momentum and also cleave blessing? Why is it all so utterly, horribly badly designed?

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No, you can figure specifics out. Focused channel, Warp nexus, warp flurry (if it works) on most things, TB on some, Void has double tap as extra, trauma has rending as extra. I’m unsure about the usefulness of blazing spirit. I haven’t tried it and it’s pretty rare.

I’m not going to go into specifics, but barrage helps a lot when you just don’t want to get into melee for some reason, same with hit and run. They are way more impactful on Vet if you like running braced for the fun factor.

Still way better than VT2 weapon traits, and still more meaningful choices than the previous game.

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That made me chuckle

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Personally, I don’t find many of Vermintides mechanics satisfactory.
For example:
-Perks, blessings and talents often boil down to very boring stat buffs.

-A lack of variety, which chaos wastes ameliorates a bit.

-Getting bombarded with useless rng loot that you have to salvage and turn into weapons or upgrade materials just to engage with the next layer of rng bollocks.

I have more, but to get to the point: VT2 had many faults and simply copy pasting all the same mechanics would’ve been a bad idea. Trying to improve or change the system was a good idea.

Alas, Fatsharks idea of an improved ‘Tide’ Experience was made clear when we realised the meaning behind…

The only red thread that snakes itself through Darktides labyrinthine development is this mysterious design intent. Because all changes in direction, every feature thrown to the wayside and all mechanics that were foregone for what we received in the end, all of that was done with it in mind.

Sadly, you can’t summarise it in a single word and even though it has been used numerous times to defend Darktides current state, the Design intent has never been stated specifically. So allow me to conjecture:

Maximise player retention, minimise production cost. Utilise well established tactics to bind customers to the game like: Fear of missing out, Gacha, weekly quests, grinding for gear, randomised rewards, artificial rarity etc. Basically they wanted a “Game as a Service”.

Or this is what I would say if not for the fact that Darktide has been proclaimed to be a GaaS by the Devs themselves and if that design intent really had been present from the beginning, how come they failed on so many aspects of the genre so spectacularly? Truth be told, I’m merely amusing myself with this post. The truth of Darktides troubled past will probably never come to light, but that just makes it fun to think about.

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Well, that pretty much sums it up for me right there. I’ve now come to the conclusion that the intent was all about turning a profit at the expense of us players. Turns out it was way too obvious and most of the community wouldn’t have it and was vocal about it. Now they’ve shot themselves in the foot and they won’t be able to walk again any time soon.

They had gold in their hands and had they polished their game outside of the combat system, they could have made a f***ton of money from it. Like many, I would have bought their cosmetics just to support them.

I really feel sorry for the many artists and programers who probably truly care about both their game and the community and who must be as frustrated and angry as the community is over the decisions game designers and top management have taken. I’d say a few top decision makers have to get the boot to give the game a fresh start and a new direction where the “game design intent” would mainly be how to generate sales by delivering a fun and rewarding global gaming experience.

I have little faith anything meaningful will change though. I think at this point they might as well start working on Darktide 2 by taking into account their community’s feedback to make the best game possible and get a bit of credit back, even if I’m sure their reputation will remain sullied for a long time.

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TBH, we really havent seen Darktide 1, either. We’ve seen Darktide 1’s alpha, and it’s a solid alpha, but Darktide as it stands doesnt deserve to be called a full title.

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Considering the truly incredible amounts of reputation damage they have done to themselves with Darktide, you also have to consider just how much damage they will take if they now abandon Darktide and begin on Darktide 2. Maybe the wider public will be unaware, but I have a feeling more and more reputable review sites and ‘influencers’ will pick up on things if they mismanage things even more. Some already have.

On the other hand with the crafting devblog, they have shown an incredible willingness to stick to their unfriendly and unhealthy RNG GaaS gacha mechanics, despite overwhelming negative feedback. It is not unlikely that management at FatShark is so fond of sniffing their own poo that they’re simply incapable of understanding what they’re doing not just to Darktide, but to FatSharks reputation.

I mean these are people who not only willingly and knowingly released the game at least a year early with hardly any content and just absolutely full of game-stopping bugs, but who decided to make every single system in said unfinished game as unfun as possible. The systems are obviously unfun, at a glance. It couldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone. That they thought that a bug-ridden unfinished mess could get away with such malicious and hostile mechanics is beyond comprehension.

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