However, this has all been very incremental in terms improvements, and principle issues with the crafting and progression system remains.
@FatsharkCatfish I’ll try to summarize the frustration as best as I can:
The crafting system, as it currently is designed, leads to a negative player experience, discouragement, and disengagement. This occurs primarily because of the perk and blessings locks. The locks cause players to feel they are “wasting” resources (and hence their time) because upgrading an item has a high probability of ending up with two undesired or under-powered blessings (i.e. “bricking” an item you were excited about upgrading. It feels like throwing precious crafting materials and good base stat items into the wind for no actual progress. It’s very demoralizing.
As it stands, even if you’ve managed to get the Tier 3 & 4 blessings you want extracted into your blessing pool (no easy feat on its own), you still have to find a “good” weapon with at least one of those blessings already on it. This alone can be exceedingly rare and frustrating and is entirely contingent on layers of RNG swinging in your favor.
The core audience for this game doesn’t want an endless item grind. An endless item grind is not why we played VT2 for 1,000+ hours. We want to be able to tinker and experiment with different character builds and weapon/blessing combinations. We’re fine with having to work and put in playtime to assemble the parts and materials, but please give us the ability to freely combine weapons + blessings that we’ve already acquired.
Predictable progression and the pursuit of tangible goals should drive playtime, not blind, agonizing subservience to the RNG-gods.
Since the negative feedback we give is ignored, maybe we should change strategy.
If we accept that nothing can be done for Darktide, we can instead focus our efforts to save the next game.
So, let’s start praising the locks as a really good idea, and keep asking for more locks to be added, preferably at random. Or even already-locked items in the shop! Why not?
That will surely kill the game very quickly. And the game designers responsible will be sacked.
Sadly I do think you’re right. I’ve tried to rationalize my own continued play by just trying to focus on and enjoy the core combat gameplay in missions (which I do enjoy).
The problem I have though is they could change the system so it would still require a lot of playtime and grind in terms of getting materials to fully upgrade and unlock an item (and to separately acquire the blessings). Multiply that by all the different items and potential variants you might want to try and it could still easily be 1,000+ hours of playtime to get it all. But at least you would be making measured, predictable progress that whole time.
I’d like to believe having a carrot dangling in front of you that you can actually reach, with more carrots lined up after that to go for, would be a better system for engagement and enjoyment than perpetually chasing a carrot you might never get.
One crazy idea I had if Fatshark is hellbent on keeping blessing locks: Flip the locks around so the blessing you first replace or apply to an item is locked. Then the other blessing slot remains unlocked and can be changed around.
The above would give players the ability to pick two blessings initially, but afterwards if they wanted to change both of them around you’d need to craft + upgrade a new base item. That would be significantly better, although still not my preference.
Yep. People put in thousands of hours in VT2 and there’s literally no item grind here. So much of this game feels like it’s trying to do something that it’s just not.
I’m one of those. I worked towards weird achievements and mastering Cata in VT2. The loot boxes were obnoxious but they were just mats in the end that you could use to get the exact weapons you wanted. To get a red weapon still required luck or a bit of a grind (five reds to one red you wanted). This system at least let me work towards gear that I knew I could get if I put in the time and skill.
Winds of Magic was by far the best and would be a good baseline here. No grind for dozens of weapons to compare, just grind for blessings and perks to slot in. This system could be expanded to be something amazing.
Of course these choices were done intentionally. There is a reason why there are specific weapons which are totally OP. Why there are blessings and blessings combos which are totally OP. Making every weapons and blessing well balanced would require work no one wanted to put it. This way you have another reason to spin the roulette wheel.
Dear FatShark, in case one of you guys is reading this, can we please get these functions?
upgrade weapon modifiers (allow everything to go up to 80 or 100)
price it something like
→ 100 Diamantine per 1% increase per modifier until 80%
→ 150 Diamantine per 1% increase per modifier 81-90%
→ 200 Diamantine per 1% increase per modifier 91-100%
permanently remove locks from Perk slots
(2k Diamantine)
permanently remove locks from Blessing slots
(2k Diamantine; or cheap, since it is an important function)
unlock a Blessing of choice for the library
(5k Diamantine for T4)
There goes our diamantine.
Ressource imbalance and itemization both solved at the same time.
Got excess plasteel? Play the slot machine.
Maybe you pop out an item that is better than what you currently have.
Maybe you pop out a new T4 blessing that you do not yet have.
Got excess diamantine? Spend it on the systems i mentioned above.
Improve the good items that you already have, or save up to buy that specific T4 blessing that you want to use, but could not get your hands on.
Itemization would no longer be exclusively a slot machine.
People would have the additional option to spend large amounts of diamantine to circumvent the RNG, while the option to hope for good RNG persists.
Problems with gear acquisition and progression would be mostly solved.
Players could finally invest in the improvement of items that they already have and actually want to use, with the guarantee that no ressources are wasted to bad RNG.
Great ideas. Watch FS not implement them because I swear to the Emperor there must be some law out there that we haven’t named that game devs will actively NOT implement good, reasonable changes to games because A. They are embarrassed that someone did it better or B. They have their own crappier system coming out and won’t say anything.
There is hope.
Multiple positive changes that recent updates made to the Psyker, are in line with suggestions that were made on the forum.
The changes are nothing so incredibly special that FS could not possibly have come up with these ideas themselves, so I am not saying that FS made these changes because they read the ideas on the forum.
But it is possible.
I’ve been thinking about the same thing, however I honestly believe its probably nothing more than a weirdly worded comment. Especially since it was just a comment on an announcement about the stores being down I wouldn’t put much stock into what that 1 comment meant for the game’s future.