The current system just doesn’t work, it clashes with the penance system(sometimes you can’t even attempt a mission type you haven’t done yet regardless of difficulty and sometimes there isn’t a mission of the difficulty you need to complete a penance), it clashes with the weekly assignments because you can get a mission board without scriptures or without the zones you need for secondary mission(or have the zones you need but without secondary missions) and it just clashes with basic player skill progression because sometimes you just can’t play above a certain difficulty level because it can happen that there’s not a single map of a certain difficulty level and others have no players.
One example, there was no heresy missions on the board for the last 40 minutes to when I started writing this post, out of 6 damnation games I tried to join 5 were completely empty so it was unplayable.
This makes the game feel like it lacks much more content than it currently lacks, all maps should be present and have the option to pick a difficulty. A lobby browser would also help greatly with this problem
Here’s how the mission board looked like
Agree with this thread, although I suspect this was done precisely because the game is a little light on content. If they gave us a way to freely choose maps and mission types, I reckon people would much sooner start to realize how little there really is to do and blow through the game much faster. At least this way you have to play a bunch of maps that you don’t need for your progression.
it’s having the opposite effect, players are spending much more time replaying the maps they’ve already played so it looks and feels like it has much less content. They added maps after preorder beta, barely feels like it seeing as a lot of the time they’re out of rotation or on the first 2 difficulties
One of the biggest complaints of Vermintide 2 was lack of maps, when I saw that for this game they had made huge maps, that they could then adjust to run from different directions with different objectives, I thought this was a clever way to produce more maps without increasing the costs as much as it would if every map was bespoke from scratch. But seeing the limited selection, I now wonder if instead they used it as an opportunity to make the same number of maps cheaper, which is a depressing idea. V2 at launch had 13 maps, which is more than we currently have for Darktide. Is this another lesson Fatshark failed to learn from V2?
the missions themselves supposed to have two difficulties attached to each one(as was mentioned in prerelease interviews), a difficulty that regulates enemy health and strength and a difficulty that regulates their number with also the addition of modifiers, this is not in the current version of the game, as multiple game systems are unfinished after launch and the game seems incredibly rushed I presume the mission system is unfinished as well and wasn’t properly tested. As it stands now it’s actively making the game worse
Agree, would have also worked better for having a story (and bringing in Dan Abnett to write said story), this kind of map works better for storyless games like Deep Rock (which even let you pick your difficulty)
Last night my friends and I couldn’t find a level 4 mission AT ALL. Just wasn’t populating. Then the strike leader just said, “F it, let’s see what happens,” and hit Quickplay for level 4. A game was immediately CREATED and we started. We were all VERY certain it was a level 4 mission also, as we’ve been playing them for a bit and know the feel. So CHOOSING the mission isn’t even needed at this point. Just Quickplay on what difficulty you want and you’ll get it I guess. But it’s a random map so…
Yeah, but as you say random map, and random as to whether you get secondary objectives, which is counter to the whole contracts mechanic it pushes you into.
Oh I agree 100%. It’s stupid. But the ability to have different maps / missions other than what’s displayed exists in the game already, so why would they just not give that to us straight away?
The inability to choose what map, mission and difficulty I want to play at any given time is seriously affecting my ability to enjoy the game. Especially when penance hunting.
I really do not want to play Strike missions constantly because that’s the only option given to me at Heresy+ difficulty for the majority of the day when I log in.
It’s stupid, it’s illogical and quite frankly a massive stepback from Vermintide 2. I am not sure why this game has approached the co-op shootersmashhackkill genre in such a self-sabotaging manner.
