Exact information about Darktide history of development with all it’s issues are drowned in negative emotions from all the frustrating designs this game have, and gets repressed in the dark corners of the mind to be never re-called again.
At this point i have aversion to crafting system so strong that i completely gave up on it. I’m just waiting to semi-decent item in Melk’s shop (happens quite often … to think of it) that can be made decent by swapping 1 blessing and re-rolling 1 perk and just go that way.
This is basically what I’m doing. I’ll pick up an item from Melk if it has a good blessing I want to extract, and/or an item with a good blessing and base stats where I can slot in another preferred blessing for the second slot. Occasionally I’ll buy blue/green items and roll the dice on upgrading. But it’s less headache and disappointment to just wait for something at Melks.
4th day in a row here, melk has the same selection for both my zealot & my psyker, nothing but autoguns & axes, as usual.
The difficulty is just making the whole experience boring, I really hope this month brings some changes to the game…You can only spend so many hours grinding without even getting a single step further before you just give up.
Imagine trying to train ravens or monkeys to solve puzzles with this kind of system, what do you think would happen? xD
They wouldn’t do it, maybe FS should imagine their playerbase as monkeys and design the game in a way that would get them interested in engaging with it, that’s about as basic as the whole system is.
I bet it would work.
To be as fair as possible to fatshark this is a gross overstatement. The map is only like 40% rehashed content run backwards with some mild remixing. The entire Archivum section is whole cloth new map. It’s also one of the best maps in the game for high spawn density and challenging terrain and one of the single most entertaining midpoints with the absolutely viscious shooter, gunner, shotgunner and sniper spawns.
I think people like to hit on this point because its low hanging fruit. But IMO the map design is pretty good and I don’t mind that Hab Drayco shares a bridge section with Chasm Logistratum before both go into entirely different maps for the rest of the mission duration. What bothers me is simply there isn’t enough maps. I think what really bothers most people is more subtle and probably embarressing to admit so I’ll just speak for myself here.
The maps aren’t colour varied enough. The biggest color departure is the desert maps. Everything else is just grey, brown, blue or greenish metal. Yes its a hive city but we are thirsty for some terrain that appears more thematically distant. The first map people mention when talking about Vermintide compared to Darktide is almost (in my review) uniformly Athel Yenlui. Its green and has a forest.
Maybe fatshark doesn’t want to take us to the upper hive just yet but why not a midhive hydroponics factory with lush greenery carefully engineered by the Mechanicus Biologus to be as lush as possible in its production and serve double duty as walkable gardens for contemplation and worship in a shrine sector (say throneside)
That’s basically my problem with the maps. Backward maps and some similarities are nothing that bothers me, but the system is set up in a modular way so they can make new maps faster… So where are they? 3 months for a new map?
I know FS was mostly working on fixing the game (as the community requested I might add), but now apart from some weapon bugs and the still totally broken (but now somewhat dodgeable) dogs, they more or less fixed all the major issues the game had on release. I waited patiently, now I need more stuff, and much faster than we are getting now.
I guess we’ll see how large next month’s big release will be…
They care about money. That’s why they announced that DT will be some sort of live service.
With Boltgun release so close, there is a competitor for DT when it comes to play time investment.
Invested play time means that it is more likely for them getting money out of the live service model via shop skins and stuff.
And then there is WH40K space marine 2 on the horizon at the end of the year too.
As it stands right now, there is not much left of the euphoria that DT caused in me during the beta and the release time. Even worse, they failed to reach their own declared goals again and again. Heck they even managed to take out a huge amount of fun by changing stuff to the worse, what had the consequence that many people who had never played VT1 or 2 before, left DT without any intend to ever come back.
So if they keep on with a system where the difficulty of the game has 2 stages. Namely the item acquisition and tuning first and mostly. And then the second stage the actual enemy mechanics.
Where the first stage is made to be the bigger thing, by layers of RNG and lock blocking, then who do they want to attract and keep as players?
I did see this coming. Way back in january i proposed that the game needed more content before endless balance tweaks and crafting patches. That isn’t to insult any of the improvements to the game, it is much more stable than it was even in January and it runs at a much better frame rate for me. But I can tolerate some jank as long as the content is there and it has been slow going. Far slower than I would have anticipated in my worse analysis. Commsplex was dropped in update #6 - December 22nd. That means it will be actually 5 months for a new map. That’s ludicrous. I remember when map tools were added to Left 4 Dead, the rate at which new maps was generated by just one dedicated guy could be insane. There, presumably, is a whole teaming working just on maps. So where’s the volume?
I try to avoid too much doomposting as a rule, though I am not averse to a little savagery around map selection at this point. I am just not expeting much to be honest.
I agree with you. If they actually want said money they need to maybe act like it cause this playerbase is bleeding like a stuck pig and its bleeding because there’s nothing to do. The RNG would be tolerable if the volume of content was there. I know people don’t like to hear that because they hate the RNG (and so do I, and so do you) but I am right about this and warframe is all the proof you need.
I’ll be keeping tabs on darktide because I think there’s gold here and someday I hope to be able to invite people to play this almost great game. It doesn’t even need that much more to achieve greatness. It needs like 4 classes and 4 more maps and 6 more weapon patterns that are actually interesting. And it needs to do away with the RNG on mission difficulty selection they created for themselves via Hi-int being gated by other modifiers.
There isn’t. It’s painfully obvious that the current output and speed of patches is not the work of roughly 100 people. After fixing the worst of the worst gamestopping crashes and bugs right after release, the vast majority of the team have been working on the console release. Now, hopefully those guys are also working on a fairly significant content drop to bring forth along with the console release, which us poor PC peasants won’t get to see until the console version drops.
There’s no guarantee, though. The team pushed out a PC version that was completely unfinished and broken in every way possible, so it’s not impossible that basically the whole team is working on just getting console working at all, and that content is seriously on the backburner.
Edit: I’ll also add that when you create a toolset that uses tiles and reused assets to create maps, you probably do it because you’re hoping you can have a very, very small team dedicated to creating maps.
Ok but the developers who work on console ports do not work on maps and vise versa. Wholely different specialties. Those people can’t be assumed to just be twiddling their thumbs.
I do completely understand the logic behind this view point but it just doesn’t mesh with me with how slow FS has been with everything, including VT2 even after its console release. Like was the majority of their team already working on DT back then? I struggle to find coherency in this theory when looking further back at FS’s general output. I think they’re just really slow to do stuff. I don’t have a good explanation for this I just don’t find “working on console port” very convincing considering their general history of development pace over the last 5-10 years. Like it’s consistently slow throughout.
Oh yeah they’re always slow, even at the best of times. If you compare VT2 before console release and after, VT2 did get significantly more content after console release. Suddenly the patches were way quicker and bigger. For a time, at least.
At least quicker and bigger updates compared to before the console release. FatShark is slow even when they’re at their own quickest.
Perhaps. This assumes very defined roles though, which FS may or may not have. They have a fairly flat structure, a bit like Valve (which is infamous for people moving their desks to different teams and just working on whatever the heck they want to work on). I obviously don’t think FS is quite like Valve, but it might be a mistake to think that a graphics/mapmaking person has only that job or only those skills.
Edit: One of the glassdoor reviews actually specifically mentions how nice it is that you can contribute in any way you want, even outside your ‘designated field’.
So… might be a very flat Valve-like structure at FatShark offices.
Funny (and sad) thing, these are the top 4 most liked posts in this thread right now:
Post #10: me asking about changes to crafting → 28 likes.
Post #1: The OP by @FatsharkCatfish, announcing new content → 19 likes.
Post #68:@alsozara complaining about the progression system → 15 likes.
Post #16:@neltera saying, that he/she only checks the forum to see if crafting has been fixed, so that the game can be reinstalled → 14 likes.
The OP announces an update next week, that includes new free cosmetics and a more accessible version of Power Cycler.
Also a new map in a follow up patch.
New content. People should be happy.
However, posts in the middle of the thread get a comparable amount of likes for complaints about crafting.
This is a massive OOF.
If FS still do not get that they have to solve the crafting/progression issues SOON, idk if they ever will.
Since release, this has been one of the most discussed issues.
Although it is very likely that a large majority of the people complaining about this, have left the game a long time ago, it still is one of the most discussed topics.
This problem should have been addressed within days, and solved within weeks (after release, or after shrine of ominissiah update).
This would explain a lot tbh. Employees tend to like flat structures for obvious reasons, but in my experience, flat orgs are horrible for getting things done. Everyone elects to work on glamorous fun tasks, no one does the boring but necessary tasks, ergo nothing gets done.
They also talked about no locks on perks and people being able to change them BUT the iterative cost would go higher and higher and people spoke out against that.
" Combine Blessings
At the Shrine you may choose to combine three Votive Offerings into a single upgraded Votive Offering. Currently, most Votive Offerings have a maximum Tier of IV, but there are some exceptions to this. We’re testing a few different options with the requirements and the results of combining these Votive Offerings."
“We also hope this blog gives you a glimpse of the broader crafting system(s) and the depth of customising your weaponry and loadout for the perfect playstyle you wish to engage with. At the heart of this is the Blessing extraction and Re-Blessing functionality, where you can collect and swap out Blessings in order to customise the different combination of weapons you wish to experiment with.”
And their mission statement goal is the most contradictory and hilarious thing ever with all the RNG present.
Same. It’s like “hey we got this crafting update where you can combine lower blessings to a tier you want, and we want you to be able to EXPERIMENT and CUSTOMIZE to try out the PERFECT weapon”. Bolded their words. They explicitly stated PERFECT.
Then I guess someone said “You know what would be funny? If we just do the exact opposite. Trolololo”.
I agree about this part… however I don’t think they will remove the locks cause it would made the crafting system they made totally pointless. The question if it is a good system or no is not relevant at this point.
However, a communication about their intentions on this topic would be a good things. BUT as pointed Mayson in this post, we can imagine why they don’t do an official announcement.
The complaints around the crafting system that turned to a bashing of FS have a counterpart… they will be cautious about anything they could announce on this topic.
