Darktides mechanics are (still) BORING

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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When this game released (and trash gunners were actually insane) one major complaint i voiced was that playing peekaboo with trash mobs and waiting for coherency toughness is an encouraged strategy that is so boring that nobody wants to do it (yes i know making space is good, lets not overthink this, the game wants you to grouphug and wait).
Being able to outrun basically all enemies in the game also falls into this category making “mostly melee” the absolute worst modifier as far as im concerned because its just a matter of finding a circle route and pressing shift.

The fundamental problem this game keeps having aside from all the absurdly broken sh. is that the game keeps being designed in a way where the best available strategy is so boring and awful that nobody wants to do it and everyone puts as much effort into avoiding using those strategies as possible.

With the reduced stats passivity is back in full force as the optimal strategy for dealing with gunners, wether its sitting in a psyker bubble, playing peekaboo or whatever. Yes, you CAN still engage and its probably going to be fine if you have the silly “15% ay lmao toughness on each dodge” zealot trait but its heavily discouraged by the game to do that.

So you can sit in your psyker bubble or behind wall in the peekaboo game without a lean mechanic and play a point and click adventure and have fun i guess?

Would you like to wait for tox gas that reoccurs on a cycle?
We have some awesome waiting gameplay!

Would you like to interact with our amazing corruption mechanic or use the ult (beacon) that is literally “press active ability to not play the game for the next 8 seconds” and completely ignore corruption?

Smite. Literally. Smite.
And lets be real, Trauma secondary is just smite but you get the illusion of your “aim” making a difference. And the word “aim” deserves pretty large quotation marks because thats how large the circle is. And without any doubt - for your teammates it certainly is the same experience.

What is the best way to rank up havoc? Sit in the group finder and spam R.
(I got to 28 by doing this for 30 minutes - PRO GAMER! - was the highest ive seen, shouldve spent more time pressing R to be better at the game really)

What is the best way to see specials? Install Spidey Sense, track multiple specials omnidirectional footsteps on a radar with pinpoint accuracy and play whack a mole with your gun.

And i get that its a bit reductive, like you can still get all these traits that let you effectively ignore gunners (like psykers on crit evade) but at the end of the day the main issue the game still has (aside from the absolutely hillarious design decision when it comes to the most basic functionality of stuff) is that the most consistent strategies are all desgined to be as boring as possible.

related:

PS: And this also a repeating pattern with weave modes in particular.
Weaves had the same awful stuff. “Pick up the barrel and carry the barrel that makes it so you no longer get to play the game to the end of the map”. Finite spawns that encourage camping and slow cooking. All the stuff like that.

Its just bad design. And its so baffling.

You already made good high difficulty modes - namely twitch and monster modifiers/whatsitcalled roguelike VT2 that people liked.

But instead of taking inspiration form those you made the same awful decisions as for weaves where you make the gameplay as boring as humanly imaginable and waiting/not playing a core feature.

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Sadly, the solution is plain as day

Git Gud.

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There are many legitimate criticisms to offer of Darktide. That its mechanics are boring isn’t among them.

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game dropped to 3K players at one point, less than VT2 more often than not

idk about that, suffice to say i disagree a lot

i added a PS with good game design chocies for VT2, no idea why those werent used here

akjsdlhsalkjdhska its past midnight

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Eh, the best parts of Darktide are the parts lifted from VT2 in the first place, the weaving of melee and ranged combat.

Stuff like dodge n slide spam, pure ranged fights, everything about snipers, coherency, smite, etc are all pretty boring or unfun in comparison.

Personally I have no idea how those people who just spam their infinite ammo lasgun all match and barely use melee or perma smykers have fun for more than a round.

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Right, i didnt expect this to be particularly contentious at all.

Ive seen more than a few people complaining about smite psykers at the very least and the design INTENT for a lot of stuff in Darktide is just to play as lame as humanly possible.

That is not to say there are no good mechanics at all:
Nurgle blessed and the new “gunfire resistant mobs”

(who are also green (for some reason alongside the other green goo exploding mobs - i guess the devs really really want everything to be green because how else would we remember we are fighting nurgle cultists) but the green is a bit lighter than for nurgle blessed ones)

both of these are good mechanics because they actually force you to interact with enemies in a way where you cant just use your default lamest strategy possible.
Just like the monster modifiers in VT2 (oh wait they made a gun that perma stunlocks them anyway, nevermind then).

But to reemphasize - overall for the whole of darktide - there is an overwhelming amount of game design choices that encourage playing in the lamest way possible.

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How they implement their designs is a problem as well. Most of the ratcheting up of difficulty in this game comes from things that already exist within it. There’s been very little experimentation with new enemies that do new things; mostly just reskins that are harder to cleave or tankier or explode. The green skull bomber wasn’t entirely original but at least it did something new inside the space of Darktide beyond those three things I mentioned. One could give benefit of the doubt in the past because they spent several years porting the game to different platforms but that era ended a few days ago.

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I agree with a lot of what you’re saying, OP.

When Darktide first released, my initial reaction was disappointment, because it was obvious they hadn’t brought what they’d learned as lessons from VT2. Instead it feels like they’re making the exact same mistakes, and also stubbornly refusing to get ambitious with the games design.

Theres a fantastic interview by the lead GGG dev, from last month, where he says "It honestly feels like when we innovate, it always pays off. But when we refuse to try new things, we suffer"or words to that effect. He was really talking about the industry as a whole. Studios sticking to what worked before because it worked before, terrified that maybe they’ll upset their players if they change anything.

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A very good point that was also made by Mark Rosewater as well (in that same speech i initially linked)

A lot of other people have brought up a lot of other valid issues with havoc. I dont feel like going into details with all of them but…

… it keeps being evident that it is a lot of the same mistakes over and over

Anti solo design, i dont need group finder - discord already exists for people who want to use discord anyway - i just wanna hit play and call it a day.

No player agency, imagine if they just make all the maps and the new modifiers introduced in havoc readily available for mixing and matching so people actually get to play the part of the game that they like.

Issues that were already apparent with weaves that were made again with basically no change in direction.

Its just such an L.

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it’s a co-op game right down to the core design. go play space marine or necromunda, your buttocks-sodium is of no use to anyone here.

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Kids, this is what happens when youre a redditor and you get so emotionally upset about the first 3 words that you cant manage to read 2 more lines of a paragraph.

Dont use reddit. Be a better person.

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posting someone else’s video about another game and then awkwardly trying to leverage it at this one to feel like you’re the smart one in the room is the reddit behaviour, and i addressed the only actual thing you accused the game of. your post is a bunch of being upset and no awareness WHY. actually, go play deathwing, that’s about your skill level.

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