I won’t speak for Darktide as I’ve already purged it from memory data banks and reverted back to good ol’ Vermintide 2 programming. However, Vermintide allowed the player to customize bots to their preference. You can change class, loadout, talents, and trinkets - on top of this, there’s also AI mods approved by the developer to which you can use to increase their performance; nothing crazy it’s just little AI tweaks. This resulted in a situation where the player can gear their bots for any difficulty they wish to tackle alone. Since bots do a fine job of sticking together, they aren’t bad substitutes for real players. Though they have kinks; such as, holding a choke point with them is a death trap, since bots don’t know how to do so - better off fighting out in open with lots of space. Tight corridors are also tricky for bots too.
For the skeptical, here’s me doing a Cataclysm run with bots:
Now to tie this to the main topic of Coherency. There were many instances where I had to split from my bots. This is the nature of dodge dancing around an enemy in an attempt to minimize damage, or to pull away and search for specific points of a horde that has low density which will be easier to strike at. There were also situations where I was the last man standing. So Coherency would have been more of a hindrance than a benefit in those moments. The idea of it sounds nice on paper, I understand the arguments for it, but in practice it doesn’t work; neither in what I described earlier or with the flow of combat.
Additionally, 'tide games aren’t the type where you firmly stand still; since that seems to be the only point where you benefit from Coherency, standing still and sticking to each other. You have to be proactive, constantly analyzing battlefield, switching between weapons to clear out threats from afar. You have to be moving around to minimize damage done. You need to also be able to react quickly and plug in any choke points that might overwhelm the group - nothing is worse then fending an attack from multiple fronts while being surrounded. Another thing is that sometimes, you’re going to have to make risky calls depending on circumstance, for instance your team is holding an unfavorable position and you need to fall back away from that chaos; sometimes it’s better to escape and leave team behind and attempt to salvage a hopeless predicament, then to stay together in a bad spot. All of this means, you guessed it, splitting up.
Coherency would have worked for a tactical shooter that was built from the ground up to support such a thing. That means having an actual cover system that facilitates players to stand their ground with a lean function; not this pop-a-mole crap where you crouch from cover then pop back up to shoot at enemies. Or not having disablers/special units get obfuscated within horde density and are still able to pull or attack players from within.
The reality of the situation is that Coherency, like all the other ranged systems in Darktide, were developed in a vacuum independent of the fleshed out pre-existing melee framework. You can tell because of how direct the systems conflict with each other. Ranged enemies can stagger you with bullets if you try to engage in melee. Cover system doesn’t really mesh with the whole 'tide game design. Sprinting is awkward to operate and does little to minimize damage compared to dodging. Toughness, which was an answer to ranged enemies, has a lot of problems associated with its implementation. The list goes on. There’s nothing that marries the two systems together into a cohesive package. They’re haphazardly stacked on top of each other with no thought or care put into how they’ll function for this type of game.
Essentially, what I’m saying, is that Coherency isn’t a good fit for 'tide games. These games are primarily a melee type game with supplemental ranged. Even from a conceptual point of view the mechanic conflicts with the pre-existing melee design. The very concept goes against dodge dancing, for instance. Which is one of the main pillars of which the melee is based of off. Even if we were to completely rework melee or add more elements to Darktide which make it more inline with other tactical FPS, you still don’t need it. As the game already does a terrific job of spawning disablers to keep people together.
The current implementation of Coherency isn’t satisfying - just like all the other things in Darktide. That’s my conclusion.
As I’m writing all of this out I’m left wanting. I desired that evolution for Vermintide. The next step of ascension of which the melee system will try to strive for. After all the years of feedback from Vermintide 2, that was what I was hoping for. Instead, I got a slew of clunky systems, unsatisfying mechanics that don’t interact well with each other, and a cash shop - which has more effort put into it than everything else - with innovative machinations which seek to liberate me of my funds. Fantastic stuff Fatshark, truly. Just a hint, maybe next time figure your game out before monetization.