A community event unlocking new free content?
I hope FS is watching Helldivers change gaming for the better and taking notes!
I don’t expect to see these beauties in Darktide, but I do wonder about community events, something we asked for last year, among everything else down here in the gutters.
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Speaking of this, people were upset when FS locked a map behind a community event. And honestly I’m with them, imagine if the mech WASN’T unlocked because we failed the community mission (even though they made it very easy)?
Ideally for me community event rewards should always remain cosmetic, so players aren’t upset if they lose them and devs aren’t afriad to not make the challenge an automatic win.
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I’d like to remind you that FS did this with Ascension Riser and it wss recieved pretty poorly. I was part of that negative reception and probably overly negative myself. But in any case there is a key difference:
Fatshark’s community event unlock was for 1 of 2 new maps after a huge content dry spell. Thus people were upset because content delivery had been very slow. + just two maps was not at all what people were hoping for after that hiatus. People wanted new weapons and new enemies more than new maps. Ascension riser was, as a map, awesome though. Needs a better engame spawn pattern to be fair.
HD2 has been out for like a month and we’re getting a smashing new release of a much anticipated piece of leaked content and it was tied to retaking a planet which is already designed within the game and not some artificial and external impingement on normal gameflow.
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I was too, but I was also hoping for us to fail
Just to see how FS would act 
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I can see that side, but considering how much Malevelon Creek turned into a meme/viral. It became free advertisement.
@Reginald Seems to me HD2 learned from FS failures and not FS.
The pricing plan, with a revolving door of cosmetics, they are both extremely similar.
The core issue with FS releases is the state of the game. They released an unfinished game, still marred with performance issues. FS is trying to catch up while HD2 is pushing the envelope.
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Full agreement here.
They already tried this OP and it was received with “You holding content hostage now?!”.
Besides, I find these events to be gimmicky anyway. The content was already developed, as if they’d hold it back. You have no meaningful way to even measure if the event is being fulfilled and the goals reached. I’ve long theorized that the numbers behind the scenes are fudged and generated, no real measurements taken place.
If you really want such events or think they’re authentic, I’d put you in the “too innocent for this world” camp, no offense intended.
No, it’d be simply best if they just delivered some great content in great quality. No weird quirks. No gimmicks. No “unlock this here and there” or “solve this funny little puzzle hehe”.
Pour all that creative energy into the content itself and then release it with pride. That’s the best a dev team can do really.
I don’t think failure is an option. Those numbers, I question their integrity. Whether here or elsewhere.
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I don’t think it is an inherently a bad thing. Bundle it with like a double xp weekend (or maybe in our case double crafting materials) or something and you have a great recipe for a player event spike. I think the distinction is the reward should br somewhat small amd not gameplay related, which again would hopefully mean that it is tracked.
I doubt that that event was real in the slightest. However I do believe Fatshark has the theoretical ability to track objectives. If every kill, and every type of enemy kill is logged after every mission for penances, than it might be possible for them to track that.
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call me paranoid but i doubt such events are made to “fail”
with how performance is distributed across the playerbase i doubt the top 5% would make a difference in numbers generating kills on auric maelstrom and the rest not having enough fodder on the map even if they performed “up to snuff”.
also i personally don’t care for the grander scheme of things, i actually enjoy getting tossed in a confined mission and am “expected to fail” by lore yet make it out alive.
let’s me focus on my own performance in face of unfavorable odds and cherish to worlds atmosphere where living to see another day is the exception not the norm.
what does ogryn care for inquisitor plans, ogryn not even understand many words, ogryn does like to smash 'em heretics though 
and so do i.
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I do agree, and y’all are correct. Holding maps hostage is bad. HD2 is giving us free maps with a goal in mind.
The Idea I should of expressed more in OP was the common goal of the community. Players in HD2 are always working towards something together. No one expected a weekly with the reward of Mechs. I personally thought mechs would come with a patch at a later date, but to have them in the game already sprinkled around.
Also, I absolutely love that a HD2 devs said he was drinking players tears. I just wish FS had some sort of communication and plan, instead of rolling out delays and apologies. The open communication/transparency with HD2 is a breath of fresh air.
Right, I already feel like we are making a difference in HD2 universe, even if its scripted. On tertium what sense of accomplishment have we gotten? That we’re not a traitor and 1 Wolfer has been killed. This is a hive city with untold b-b-b-illions living there. The planet doesnt feel like its living, evolving or changing as we fight this war.
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I think a better way to do it for Darktide is to have content drops narratively focused but not tied to some sort of arbitrary out of game objective.
Drop a new map, raiding a Moebian 6th armory or something along those lines. Than next week, have a lore announcement saying like, “We got a lot of good stuff from that and are distributing the weapons you stole after clearing them for corruption” and have a weapon drop.
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Yup I love this! Drop a new map, maybe with the weapons only in that map to play and use, and after the “event” unlock them for bring on other missions.
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well, so far i’ve gotten out of my cell, not gotten executed and am alive DESPITE not because those 3 random lunatics they send me out with to kill untold numbers of heretics sometimes bare handed.
i’d call that a good week if i was actually in the warhammer 40k world.
i’m neither in the military nor do i care for the bigwigs plans, my only concern is to get out of yet another meatgrinder in one piece.
i get why things mentioned above work in helldivers, yet its worlds atmosphere is of no appeal to me, while i enjoy the sci fi purgatory that is 40k to the fullest.
everything is f’d up anyways and you struggle enough than to worry about something out of your control. guess i’d be pretty happy as an ogryn 
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It’s definitely in the content delivery and how it is organized. The way Tide games currently work, they simply don’t seem to be made for this type of content.
I know what you mean. You want something like in Dragon’s Dogma with the Ur-Dragon that has to be taken down by a community, or the feeling you get from MMOs employing faction lines colliding and such. A feeling of community by prioritizing this thing throughout the entire game internally, not as an added event post-release.
I don’t think we’re ever going to get that type of feeling from Darktide, but it’s also not a problem. It will always stand as a game with it’s own contained story.
As for scope I have to disagree, theoretically speaking!
The characters in Darktide we encounter are obviously meant to be hero characters like they are in the table top equivalent. I mean it takes a certain level of skill to lead a Nurgle-backed Cultist Incursion in a giant hive city.
But what I will say is - It definitely isn’t communicated enough. Or rather, the villains here get too little exposure to make their impact.
Since Borderlinds 2 we have seen how amazing a well-built villain is. By the end of the game I was rooting for Handome Jack and Hyperion more than our wannabe heroes and their boring “let’s be herrooeesss” schtick.
The magic word is presence!
And your story villains need lots of it to feel impactful and memorable.
Now that the event started 3 months ago, we have Wolfer and some Heretics talking trash in their comms. And the occasional name drop from Zola.
But it feels a bit unearned. Why?
Because that should have been way more widespread since the start of the game. The way the twins and Wolfer were handled they all sort of popped out of nowhere.
“Whoop de do, here we are and we are big meanie-weenies. Now die!”.
What was there for the Twins introduction was kickass, but too late and too little. Why do we not hear of any of these funny monkeys throughout the other missions? Why are they hardly ever referenced before? Why is Zola all chill for a full year and then suddenly freaks out about this Wolfer guy?
All questions arising from what wasn’t included previously. Foreshadowing is an art form in of itself. And I know it’s hard to do in an online game. Yet there could have been lots of tidbits sprinkled throughout the mid mission dialogues. Or the visual story-telling of the game. It’s simply not there.
And that’s why the impact is missing. This is why you, @kqgee, feel almost nothing when killing the Twins or hearing the name “Wolfer”. The build-up isn’t there so your anticipation had no chance of growing.
How amazing would it be to die in Auric Damnation+ and instead of getting a silent Game Over, you suddenly get a Voice Com from Wolfer telling you “it’s still not to late to change your mind”. Or perhaps during the mission making his presence known by reacting to you being downed by a Mutie.
Something like “I know you guys are real freaks, so I sent some of my friends to hang out with you.”
Some trashtalk like that.
That’s definitely good. And those events ideally build up to the new threats, but slowly and one at a time.
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The reason this is well received and Darktides map drops werent is because while they’re both withheld/unfinished content that has been in the files since launch, Darktide waited nearly a year to drop them and Helldivers 2 dropped them within a month.
It’s hard to do little cute funny events like this when community goodwill is gone because you’ve done absolutely nothing for the entire quarter.
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Darktide’s “”“”“”““story””“”“”“” is a lost cause imo. They would have to do something very dramatic and thematically risky to invest players that I don’t think will happen. So at this point I really don’t care what awful writing or whatever they have cooked up next, I just want good content faster. And ideally the content drops tied more thematically to the updates even if not tied to the “plot.”
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Thank you, and yes. I was one of the very few asking for a book with the pre-order ever since I heard the name Dan enter the tides playground.
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I think something that was a miss step on FS’s end but Arrowhead has ran with is making it feel like a living, breathing universe.
Here is the thing. We all know why we had to liberate the planet, we all had stakes and why it was important, we even had theories as to why the mech production was so close to bot space. The event felt special as a result.
The biggest failure of the ascension riser event is that there is basically no reason why it was locked behind the event.
On top of that it was basically like taunting a man dying of dehydration with water. Darktide didn’t have a ton of maps and locking a map behind an even for no real reason garnered a lot of bad will.
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Funny enough, the writing isn’t even all that awful. It just gets too little presence to matter.
Same deal I just wrote also applies to the traitor. She wasn’t even a vendor when the game released, so you had no idea who she was or what she embodied. And it made it super comical.
No name NPC walks on stage with you and then gets shot.
“The traitor… WAS HER THE ENTIRE TIME!”…
Okay, Rannick, thanks for the heads-up, my man. I will return to my plasteel farm now scratches head.
It lacked significance because it had no context and no relevance to you personally. So why should you care?
And at that point, why evem just write a book? Why not incorporate it all into the game, the reason we bought it!? This drives me maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad!
I played WoW for years of my life and that is because the game did not just have one, but many many stories inside that world. Big to small. World impacting to daily life. Every quest NPC, random tidbits of books lying around, enemy factions with tragic backstories (The Defias was essentially a giant construction company left unpaid and betrayed by Big Monarchy Government so they turned the tables on them - How cool is that?!).
It was full of life!
Telling a good story will never be not popular. Just tell the story!
We have many good candidates for stories. Morrow has a story. Zola has one (and it’s finally being explored somewhat). Hadron has a story. And each of these is also tied to a Warhammer faction. TELL THEM STORIES FATSHARK! JUST! FRIGGING! DO IT!
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I mean tbf you just explained why the writing is bad. Not saying enough, not knowing character motivations, having a bad sub plot at the fore front…even if not the writers choice it is still “bad.”
Anyways I don’t feel like anyone even likes any of the main narrators besides Hadron. I like Morrow and am interested in his story but I am the only one out of everyone I’ve played with. If we got more background, would anyone even care at this point? People didn’t seem to like the Zola logs.
Anyways for me I think it should be a focus on the enemies instead of the allies. I should hate Wolfer as much as Zola and be frothing at the mouth to kill him. Make him a giant bastard, excuse the French. Everytime you lose a mission, have a vox line where he calls the strike team pathetic. Have him kill one of the narrators (ideally Hadrons since shes the only liked one) and parade their head around a stick. Say we’re too weak to protect out own.
Have more ambush events like the twins deployed by him with his voicelines.
Just something other than Saturday Morning cartoon, “Grr, my henchmen are all incompetent goofs! They said there’s 50 guys in there when its only 4! How comedic!”
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wolfer’s a red herring, we already know from the last mission released that the cult was operating and prepping for this before they recruited the 6th, wolfer is simply the actual villian’s catspaw in getting the 6th into line for whatever their goal is.
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