Ty for the vindication lol
Idk where all the preview cosmetics from both promotional material and on game previews are but I’ll be super disappointed if they’re premium cosmetics (although there’ll be people defending it on the forums like people asking for more premium cosmetics already).
Don’t even get me started on the demonhost. The worst thing is the missed opportunity of needing to kill DHs to get the grims on grim maps or the ability to get grims from them on non-grim maps, I would like that so much. It’s not like VT2 didn’t have loot die for the bosses for a while so, I guess it still a possibility, not keeping my hopes up tho.
I both think you are accurate and kinda downplaying it at the same time. Gunplay, toughness system, weapon attributes that are capped and 2 blessings instead of 1 with actual variety are all good improvements (even if the balance can be questionable), but they probably just used downgraded VT2 stuff for a lot of other things they couldn’t finish, and I’m isn’t even talking about reused animations.
I have no idea if the game will ever recover, but i think that increased player agency in gear progression would make the game more enjoyable for a larger audience and result in a larger and more healthy playerbase.
I do not know what exactly the majority wants, but i would personally like a system with full player agency and the possibility to upgrade already existing weapons to absolute perfection (all stats at 100, free choice of perks and blessings) and i have seen many others mention something like this. This would mean that the gear progression would end at the point where all of your characters have every available weapon fully upgraded to perfection (until new weapons are released).
I do not know how much most people care about a progression system having a clear end or not, but i think that if the itemization is great and the rest of the game is also great, then it probably does not matter all that much.
This could be achieved by making a few additions to the existing system (diamantine sink, yay):
- add the ability to upgrade item modifiers
- add the ability to remove perk and blessing lock from an item
- add the option to select perks from a list, once the cost to reroll has reached 0
- add the option to selectively unlock blessings to circumvent bad RNG
If you want something more elaborate, feel free:
I would appreciate if blessings were cool/unique/functional/useful before I would consider this an upgrade lol. I didn’t get too far into all VT 2 had to offer so I can’t comment on the blessings etc there, but I don’t see why I still can’t ask for the blessings in DT to be a step up.
About attachments there even was kantrael lasgun without scope in one trailer or on some early screenshot
But no blessings on trinkets like in V2, so its 4 in DT vs 5 in V2.
They already started buffing underperforming/useless blessings, there are some weapons where you can use a lot of stuff. The balance is pretty questionable, as I said but I like the direction with blessings being as impactful as they are. Even if there aren’t a lot of weapons you can tailor them pretty well on items that don’t need 2 specific ones to be used.
I’d choose 2 impactful weapon blessings instead of the defensive trinket blessings in VT2. Although I would choose both if I could.
Come on now… Players tend to optimize the fun out of their games if they can. This is kind of beside your point btw, it’s just a buzzword for me. You can see some talks by game developers about how they have to work around this issue.
I kinda like the non-cappable stats. In a deterministic system, I would lower the point distribution to 360 and make things like mobility and ammo way more impactful. Maybe even add 2 levels of point buy. One at character, one at the individual item level, and capped total attributes. That would be pretty interesting to experiment in. Probably it would be a nightmare to balance, but still…
Just tried to craft a gun and this is exactly what it felt like. Materials wasted no gun 
In some types of games, optimization would mean that the game basically plays itself and there is nothing left to actively do. In those types of games, it can make sense to try to prevent it.
In Darktide, optimization means that you can use any item that you want at its full potential and tailored to your exact build.
Optimization does not remove the fun in games like this. It is part of the fun and enhances the overall experience for most players.
Look at Vermintide 2 for example. Getting red items (optimal items) does not optimize the fun out of the game, but enables you to set yourself up exactly how you want, and to try out everything that the game has to offer at its full potential.
I went on and specified what i mean by “player agency” right after using the word, as well as adding the links to two other posts of mine, one of which is multiple pages of explanation.
Unless you ignored all of that, it is certainly not just a buzzword in this case.
And you are very likely in a minority when it comes to this.
I believe the bots still use a kantrael without a sight or a flashlight. They might have changed that but I at least know at launch they did.
that’s not gambling, it’s a skinner box. Skinner Box: What Is an Operant Conditioning Chamber? gambling relies on skinner box modeling to be profitable, but here it’s just to compensate for lackluster gameplay.
still bad, not the same kind.
I think it’s also important for these defenders to really objectively provide some numbers. Like what is the average amount of hours for a specific good weapon (specific perks and blessings) and the hours needed for (a max specific weapon with 380 modifiers T4 perks and blessings). I barely get commitments to that answer. One person said 1000 hours. For one weapon. So that’s the kinda mentality I expect people who defend this system to have.
4 characters and let’s say 20 weapons each you want to grind out? Hope you got 20,000 hours.
I’ve already commented on this one so I’ll just…
Yeah… that is kinda nuts.
You can not even expect anyone to play any single game for such a long time.
Unless it is an MMORPG or something like that, that is maintained for years and years with insane amounts of content.
I am aware that people (including myself) have played Vermintide 2 for more than 1000 hours, but that is mostly time played after already owning a red version of every weapon in the game, and not a constant chase for a single perfect item.
It’s a buzzword, a jargon, it is used to give impact your argument since it sounds good, it’s also pretty overused (or abused I could say). I don’t see you defining it anywhere, you talk about how you want “full player agency and…”. After the “and” part it’s not a definition it’s something else.
I find that word pretty meaningless in most cases and used mainly for emotional impact. “Full player agency” or I would say the absolute player agency isn’t a good thing either. Games have to have a certain amount of player agency in certain areas depending on what they want to achieve. More doesn’t mean better.
In DT for example it was the active choice of the developers to make kiting enemies harder, disablers stronger, and overall surviving alone more difficult. This is taking away player agency, and it was a good change (IMO).
Again we can let it rest here, I’m not motivated to go into this further, and it was a pretty pointless side thing. You can say I was triggered by it.
What people want and and would like (more) tend to differ. I think if you stay with the “player agency” priority it would give you a lot of it (a lot more than your idea) if it’s balanced correctly.
PS: I’ll probably give this topic a rest for a while if something interesting doesn’t come up.
I was really hoping we’d have gotten something more like a less hardcore GTFO, where the players are encouraged to sneak through some parts of the map killing small groups of enemies in between holding off big hordes at certain points. There’s just not really enough difference between the gameplay in DT and VT, which is somewhat expected, they’re games in the same series, but idk I wish FS experimented with the formula a little more than just adding better ranged combat.
This is a good idea and seems like it would be pretty easy to implement. We really need some kind of reward for both successfully killing and not alerting the DH, right now they literally just exist to waste either you time or your ammo.