Curios are Boring

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
21

I wasn’t there at that time, only read about it in old forum posts. And though it seems kinda radical, going for another extreme - imo - was also a mistake. Some middle ground should have been found. But I can confidently say that hunting for all those curios made game post-maxing base things much more interesting and enjoyable for me, resulting in me playing it for more hours (not because I had to, I just felt naturally intrigued, I had a goal I could work towards and could actually reach; unlike the alternative sometimes being offered by other types of players, like “gitting gud”, “honing your skills” etc, what, realistically, unachievable in my case).

Different kinds of players need different kinds of stimuluses, it’s not just a theory, it’s a fact as of now, confirmed by decades of data and experience accumulated by hundreds of online games.

22

Yes, different people have different stimuli but nobody likes the feeling of futility. The curios are the last vestige of a system where you can pours hundreds and hundreds of hours worth of resources into not only not getting what you want, but not even an upgrade. It’s disjointed from the core game loop due to the shop timers and currency layer, and the chance of getting a curio naturally from a mission drop is so low it’s negligible. A chase is a chase, but that kind of RNG needs mitigation, safeties, alternatives and agency which Darktide does not provide.

The “can actually reach” part is an illusion of probabilities. If you get the curio you want, it’s because you lucked out, never because of anything you actually did.