After 316.9 hours since November '23 and leveling every class to 30, I have a final review for the game: it’s mediocre. It’s a lot of fun when it works, but the fact that it doesn’t work so often drives me up the wall. It’s like Fatshark learned nothing from Vermintide 2 and continues to create a comedy of errors.
A short but non-exhaustive list of problems I have include:
Horrible framerate even on a mid-level system and lowest graphics settings
Silent specialists (WHY is this still a thing)
A complete and utter lack of failure to communicate with the community, with a bad reason as to why
Gacha crafting system that exists purely to keep players on the loot treadmill and dissuade people from trying out new weapons
Obnoxious achievement requirements that would literally need thousands of hours of play in order to get 100% completion
Achievements that need to be completed in private games for literally no reason
Inexcusably long loading times and lack of caching
Entirely one-dimensional characters whose backstory is only hinted at, which is honestly standard in 40k so it’s more GW’s fault
The inability to change voice, gender, or height after character creation
Dogs refusing to behave in a consistent manner
Mutants being constantly loud annoyingly frequently
Poxbursters spawning behind corners or doors you’re next to, leaving zero time to react to them and taking damage for literally no reason
Being forced to navigate through a gigantic hub world and not giving players the option to just do things from the main menu
The MTX shop somehow being perfectly fine despite all of these other issues
The fact that some of these issues can be fixed with mods
I’m through. I can’t tolerate it anymore. I’m uninstalling as of today and refuse to play more until FS gets it together and actually starts working on their video game again instead of putting out 7GB cosmetic hotfixes. It wasn’t done on release, it still isn’t done, and it will probably continue not to be done in the future.
This thread has excellent ideas on how to improve the game and I think it would be good to start there.
Nah, they did it because some of those achievements were causing people to ruin public games to get them. The design of those achievements was terribly ill conceived, but it’s for the best that you can’t get them from public games anymore.
Don’t worry, the game performs like ass on high-end systems too.
Many of them were also made a lot easier. If you do get a group together to do them, they’re relatively simple now. Getting all of them back in the day was a pain in the ass. I’m not sour about though, I knew when I was doing them that at least a few would have to be changed because they were just idiotic.
Its never a lack of feedback, the community at large has voiced their opinion… there has been a ton of constructive feedback but it seems to almost all go unheeded.
Four months and 300+ hours isn’t too shabby for £40. Not that I’m disputing anything you’ve said, mind you, but you found something good in there one assumes. 100,000 + people bought this game at launch (ref: Steam charts), then another influx with the Game Pass and XBOX releases… and I bet many of them didn’t even clock 10 hours. Wonder whether there were a load of refund requests.
Only one I’d disagree with. I think the writers did a great job of giving depth and likeability to these characters - as much as is possible in the setting, at least. Their characterization is a million times better than every goddamn Space Marine, that’s for sure.
All the rest seem spot-on to me. You just want the damn game to work because when it does it’s so good.
Maps from which you can still slide, dodge or charge or just walk off, because reasons
Barrel player knockback
Elite and / or special enemy spawns comprised of one enemy type multiplied by 10 or 20, because that makes for great gameplay
Player input queuing issues
General amount of game mechanics which deny player’s movement, interrupt charge abilities from ranged weapon fire to stuff like ranged fire toughness break
Several “forgotten” weapon types and marks, in a bad need of rebalance
Clear signs of mismanagment and someone’s personal pride getting in the way of much needed game design changes in areas like CRAFTING
We could go on, but frankly I cannot be bothered, Fatshark barely ever acts on players feedback. That they involved some decent knowledgeable players in their testing and weapon / class rebalance is positively shocking
Elite and / or special enemy spawns comprised of one enemy type multiplied by 10 or 20, because that makes for great gameplay
General amount of game mechanics which deny player’s movement, interrupt charge abilities from ranged weapon fire to stuff like ranged fire toughness break
in which case all I have to say is just “get good and learn to play around them”, though I know standard shooters shouldn’t be able to push you around when you have toughness up.
There’s really no need to be rude. His criticism is that having 30 poxbursters and mutants attacking the team simultaneously isn’t hard, it’s that the gameplay isn’t compelling and probably obnoxious. You’re the one projecting on his comments.
Throwing waves of heavily armored enemies or gunners at you is intended to test your crowd control ability and AP capabilities. If you don’t have any of those, it gets a lot harder. I don’t find this an issue at all. The monster variety is a bit limited, yes, but that’s fine right now.
WRT being jostled around and interrupted by enemies, in a game where the player controls the flow of combat, such as the modern Dooms, having that control taken away from you feels awful - this is why people think Air Control is a really good rune in DoomE, and why I’m not a fan of the knockback mechanic that Carcasses and such inflict on you (instead of a proper velocity change, they instead take away your movement abilities and put you on a rail for a second or two).
In a game like Darktide, where you have comparatively fewer movement and control options, it makes sense that you should be shut down if you charge into the open without any thought. Being unable to accept that you can’t just charge forward mindlessly without having to deal with threats first makes you a worse player.
There are also multiple players who can take multiple angles, so ideally, if one person can’t deal with it, another person should be able to. A book zealot can pop it to suppress all those shooters for a little bit, or maybe a shield ogryn can taunt all of them. Even an average player with a rapid-fire weapon can just shoot in their general direction a bunch to get them to scatter and give your team an opportunity.
Thanks for stating the obvious and missing my point. The pure tediousness of dealing with patrols of 10+ gunners, gunners/rippers pushback, sprint input issues, dodges being denied by terrain and rubbish on the ground.
I have no problem with dealing with enemies, I have a problem with boring enemy group composition, “fun” factor of 20 gunner patrols and lack of map polish.
Please don’t come back by more obvious statements of just dodge / slide away, “get good” and learn every square meter of the map by heart. Fun factor, good design and polish.
I have a 4070 Ti and a consistent 130 fps. Not sure what you consider high end but my experience has been great (well great since like 6 months post beta launch lol)
You haven’t even mentioned what settings you’re using. There is nothing inherently impressive about 130fps in a vacuum.
I have a 4080 and get anywhere between 160 and 220 in Darktide, but based on the settings I use and the visual quality of the game, that’s really bad. I play better looking games and get frame rates twice as high. I don’t use DLSS because I play at 1080p, and AI scaling will always look terrible at this resolution. When I play the game on my 4K living room TV, DLSS quality or even balanced looks fine.
Darktide is poorly optimized. It heavily relies on scaling to get remotely acceptable performance. The base assets don’t look very good.
