Well, I propose that they change the gameplay and pacing to a more deliberate difficulty rather than throwing everything at the wall and hoping that it’s difficult enough, because I think that would be more fun.
I think might be it tbh. It feels chaotic rather than deliberate. In VT2 you planned your engagements, in DT you rush because you can’t really plan anything.
And that’s dope for you, but for someone who loved the difficulty of VT2, this is just so much worse.
VT2 punished you for taking bad engagements, DT pushes bad engagements down your throat and tells you to choke on it, imo.
Why not just lower the difficulty or play havoc?
Because I don’t want lower difficulty. I want less chaos.
the problem is not how the AI director works in Darktide, the main problem is the balance
you could see this in some fragments how the game actually would be fun, by simply not equipping any talents and nerfing yourself in auric damanation with no talents.
i did true duo auric with no talents, and it shows a darktide more competitive and team oriented. if power was scaled down and making the game actually challenging, would much way better.
complaining about the sheer amount of enemies is crazy when currently things just get outright melted in nano seconds even by off meta weapons.
and the 2nd chapter, is the balance of specials
in vt2 assassins are deadlier than poxhounds, in dt you could even close your eyes and push poxhounds just by listening the sound cue since the lag compensation is so big and forgiving that they will never grab you. meanwhile assassins required extreme precision just to push them forward in front of you without the need of dodging. packmasters were also problematic than trappers and trying to separate you from your team etc.
threats in dt are a joke and never are an issue. if poxhounds were actually deadlier, like they meant to be during beta, speedrunners and rushers wouldn’t be a problem cause poxhounds would deal with them. to the point that rushing becomes actually scary.
Oh yeah, I totally agree. Characters are WAY overbalanced at the moment and I think they should be brought way down.
I’m not arguing that the game is or isn’t too difficult, I’m arguing that the game design is chaotic and bad.
thats the definition of a lower difficulty, besides chaos for one is a normal monday morning for others.
dumbing it down to the lowest denominator so
everyone clears “every difficulty” completely negates the purpose of them in the first place.
“i cant lift that dumbell so its impossible”-the thread?
guess theres plenty surprises for you in the form of solo maelstrom and solo havoc-videos where people clear the content and dont skip in stealth mode.
theres plenty amount left to explore, it just takes some effort few are willing to invest.
No, Chaos != difficulty.
Most people would agree that DS is difficult but it sure as hell aint chaotic and the same goes for VT2, which again is way less chaotic.
True, well-designed difficulty is deliberate, whereas your definition seems very narrow and likely argued in bad faith.
I’d much rather have a game where I’m presented with a situation and have to think “What am I gonna do about that?” than a game where the whole map is covered in pox gas and there’s 4 that I have no idea where they spawned rushing at me.
That’s chaos, not difficulty and it’s honestly a kind of immature way of arguing.
im “arguing” out of boredom with someone claiming “no amount of skill” as a hyperbole…
the limit of ones capabilities dont end with yours and plenty people are having a relaxed time and rather crave better challenge.
thats the inability to assess a situation on a seconds notice and sign someone aint fit for that content.
again, plenty people breeze through and personally i havent had problems with visibility, gas or any environmental modifier.
whether you want to improve past that is up to you, i spent 2000+ hours and every step of the way up until havoc 40 i made sure i wasnt dead weight for the others by any means necessary.
if that means watching each map in a video 20x until you can draw it backwards, do it
if that means you spend 100 hours in the psykanium with mods to learn parries, dodges, weakspots etc, do it.
if that means not playing when tired or having a shitty day, do it.
but don’t throw nonsense like “no amount of skill” around for a mere mid level setting that people clear solo as if they’d play doom eternal.
i think if tuning down the power level of characters while keeping the “chaos” it would be still fine.
i personally never felt chaotic darktide. in fact one of the reasons why it may feel chaotic is cause people tend to rush, accumulating bosses and triggering things that they shouldn’t and then they are forced to rush because for them their only way to save themselves, which by the way triggers even more enemies and specials and then it feels a struggle for some people.
but also i was one of the people doing a mini skip in true duo h40 just to trigger the entire world at end event of chasm station, just to make things even more difficult, with so many bosses and so much stuff, things like 3-4 captains at the same time with 2 bosses or something and we still won as duo, while clearing first all the optional captains first
i can tell you that weaves despite not being the main mode, it was even worse than havoc and dt combined together, in term of pacing and chaos.
if you want a same 1:1 exact pacing copy of normal vt2 in dt though, i can tell you that, even by nerfing characters, it would be simply so boring and a sleep walk still.
some people just simply like the fact of being overhwhelmed and it was happening in vt2 too to be honest, but in a different way by how it was balanced, and in dt is just the same but to its own ways and it doesn’t even feel that far.
Not as a hyperbole though. I don’t think these situations takes skill, they take very specific setups. Skill is expressive in VT2 where you can take any setup and face any situation without issues, which isn’t true for DT and has never really been.
Whether we’re talking about the gunner onslaught from Y1 or the Carapace hordes from more recently, these situations aren’t resolved by skill, they’re resolved by character power.
people should try ultra nightmare at 150% speed in doom dark ages before measuring “chaos” in darktide 
somehow it seems hard for them to wrap their heads around the fact others enjoy flick-shot frenzy and 180° turns every 1/4 second dispatching a previously mapped sequence of enemies and it falls into place like art in motion.
that aint chaos, thats bliss
I disagree. VT2 never felt chaotic unless you got yourself into that sitation on your own.
until you get 2 or more packmasters being off sync where if you dodge one, then you just get hooked, or assassins pouncing in weird dimensions and grabbing you or other very bad combos. and specials in vt2 weren’t a joke like in dt.
there was chaos too there trust me, simply contained in its own way in vt2.
you say auric isnt done without cheese, i do solos with a full health ogryn, no bubble, invis, yellow toughness… just killing whats there like its quake of old.
wheres the cheese in that?
what issues are there?
havoc40 ogryn solo, sure that would be the legit god of darktide, but auric?
other players do oggy I II V E G solo… all cheese?
took a look at vt2, even bought all dlc to support fatshark in my early days of darktide.
fact is it feels like a snoozefest to me whereas darktide triggers my doom-dopamine…
and killing rats aint giving me any gore-pleasure as does killing human enemies…
Nah that’s just buggy, and that’s a whole other topic.
So what you’re arguing is that you’re the top 0.1% of players in this specific meta, and thus the game should be centered around you?
Even if that was true, it’s a really bad arguement.
People have beaten Elden Ring at level 1 on a dance pad. That’s certainly difficult, but would Elden Ring be a good game if that was how the game was designed?
You really don’t need to take this personally. I don’t think the game is very well designed and I’d like for player power and chaos to be brought WAY down in order to bring skill expression up.
if you take it all slow, won’t happen much
but if you start losing mates, the harder and overwhelming it gets, because the pacing changes as Last Standing Man, and specials gets more frequent and it can become easily a mess.
and it’s a situation you can be put in, because of others dying.
which is another example why, last standing man it’s also a joke in dt, even if alone you would never really ever have any issues, compared to vt2, where specials already are a threat.
the chaos and feeling of overwhelm was in vt2 too. but in general it didn’t seem because the normal pacing was fine because there were also “dead times” where you could walk just a bit before having a horde and more specials. simply just like in l4d2
and it’s something that most of veterans of vt2 never liked and all players i know prefers dt at least because of the intensity so they dont sleep in front of their monitor (reason why people went in modded realm with custom modded difficulties)