When Darktide first released, we had five character slots. (There were actually eight, but three were hidden that you could access with a mod)
Then, with the Arbites update, those last three were unlocked for everyone. Anyone who’d messed with that mod knew that there’d always been eight, and that trying to change the number to make more resulted in a server error, so eight was the hardcoded limit.
Then, the Hive Scum update came out, and for the first few days eight was still the limit. This caused some grief to some players, as they weren’t able to use the new class without deleting a previous character, if they’d already previously hit the limit of eight. So, with some dev scrambling, a ninth was added a few days later.
This seems like it speaks to a broader overall problem: Why are there so few character slots to begin with?
Now, for some players, this won’t be an issue whatsoever, as some players only make one character per class, and as there’s currently six classes, they don’t have an issue with character slots.
But clearly, the intention has always been that players should be able to double-up on classes if they want, as with the launch of the game there were 4 classes but 5 character slots, and consistently we’ve always had more than the number of total classes, so clearly it’s intended that players make more than one if we want to.
Given that’s the case, it seems like what we have now is still pretty low, and it all comes down to engaging with the game’s content. There’s six different voice types for each class save Ogryn who has four, so in total that’s 34 current personality types that are in the game, and yet there’s only nine slots, so any player, at any given point, is only able to actively engage with about a quarter of the game’s actual character personality customization content.
To that end, I don’t really see the point in limiting how much of the game’s content a player might choose to engage with if they wanted to. Again, for some players, that’s never going to be an issue since they’ll just make one character per class, but I can guarantee that there’s players out there who WOULD make more characters if they could, but are currently being arbitrarily limited by the character slot number. More characters = more playtime = more engagement with the game, which seems like a thing the developers wouldn’t want to put a hard-coded limit on if at all possible.
Another aspect to this is that, the debacle over having to scramble to add a new character slot is just going to keep happening again and again. There’s a new character class confirmed to be currently in the works, and there’s probably at least one more planned for a later release this year, so the same thing is going to have to happen again where the developers add more character slots when those classes release.
So why go through that again, at release day, having to also make sure to update the character slot limit by 1 so nobody has to delete characters, when you could do it much earlier and save everyone the hassle of determining whether or not buying the new class DLC is worth deleting a character over? Why not just increase the character slots by a large amount right now, and future-proof having to update the number for class releases ever again?
So that’s why I think the character slots should be updated to quite a large number, and having thought about it, I think 50 is the way to essentially have this never be an issue again.
Why 50? Well, we right now have five classes who have six personality types, and Ogryn who has four, as previously stated that’s 34 different personality types. If New Class A gets released with six more, and New Class B has six as well, that’s still 46 personality types in total, which means for the next two entire class releases, the devs’ bases on this issue would be entirely covered with still 4 slots in excess no matter how extreme someone wanted to get with their character creation. And then if they make a ninth class with six personality types, sure you wouldn’t be able to have them ALL at that point, but I think it could be argued that 50 is a pretty high upper limit and at that point you could be forgiven for saying that some sacrifices could be made.
As far as I’m aware, characters are simply stored server-side in text, so hopefully it wouldn’t be a huge memory load if a player had 50, and the devs have proven with the last major content update that adding more total slots is possible in the game’s framework (eight wasn’t some unchangeable hard limit), so I think increasing the slots to 50 would mean that the issue could be future-proof resolved once and for all.
Now this, I can’t agree enough with. Always nice to have QOL additions, but some things are important, while others are even more important.
but to each their own