aside from combat and art direction, Destiny did it better.
in Destiny menu and mission select is far superior. you can pick the exact activity or playlist direct from the start screen, called the “Director”. you can access it anywhere anytime with just a press of a button and jump into a different activity. we need a similar start menu for darktide too.
give us the ability to choose a certain mission and change difficulty and modifiers if we want. its our free time, why remove agency from us on how to spend it.
the loot game is so far ahead in destiny. every mission or activity rewards your time, either directly with items or indirectly with tokens and engram progress. there is never a feeling that you wasted time without moving forward and you can purchase the exact item you want relatively quickly.
feeling you wasted time happens often in darktide after lvl 30 with the xp and money you gain being worthless unless you get lucky in the rolling hourly shop or the completely random emperors gifts. you can play an afternoon without feeling you got more powerful as the items you were looking for didn’t show up. why not let us buy the items we want when we want if we have the resources to do so?
weapon customization is nonexistent. perks and blessings are preset without giving you options like in destiny, removing player control and customization. they also are overly niche and vary widely in power making the problem worse. pure rng with no power for the player to influence the result.
lack of scopes is one example, in destiny each gun rolled multiple scopes you can choose from red dots to sniper scopes, in darktide your stuck with iron sights in every weapon except 1. in destiny you can choose if you want more damage against against shields, bouncing bullets or extra stagger, in darktide you are stuck with carapace damage on your lasgun. in destiny you can decide if you want dragonfly, rampage or multi-kill clip, in darktide you get 6% reload right after sliding. its so bad.
in destiny currency is shared and you can send items to a shared storage, in darktide its per character.
destiny cosmetics are far ahead. the shader system blows anything darktide has out of the water. instead of purchasing individual preset colors for each individual weapon we can change the color and texture of everything we own at will. the extremely limited rotating and per item limit shows how backwards and anti player the current customization is.
in destiny just apply the shader you want to the item of your choice and you have something few other players have. cosmetics are widely avaible through both gameplay and store and do not have a rotating daily refresh, you buy it when you want. what’s currently available is also very underwhelming.
in destiny maybe 1 in a million will look like my character due to drastically different shaders and wide variety of models on every piece of equipment. in darktide mine is 1 of millions.
skills/customization for classes was done better as well, helping make your character feel more unique. in darktide there are so few options, and some of those options are bad or don’t work.
story telling is a joke, only matched by destiny 1 “I don’t even have enough time to explain why i don’t have time to explain”. it is so bad it feels like the current cutscenes are hastily made filler. no way this is what writers intended. in mission dialogue is the only saving grace.
I’m playing Darktide currently for the atmosphere and the 40k world brought to life in the moment to moment gameplay. everything else surrounding this not only adds nothing to the experience, it actively detracts from it. every time I feel the urge to level up a new character I remember the shop and cosmetics, the looting system, the cutscenes and the fact that currency and items aren’t shared and i just lose interest. you made the progression/item systems terrible and its killing the fun.
destiny didn’t launch with good systems, they learned and fixed their mistakes. I hope darktide follows the same path and improves.
destiny devs after meeting with diablo devs:
“They basically came in and said, ‘Look, here’s our story of developing Diablo III and then bringing in [the expansion] Reaper of Souls,’” said one person who was at the Blizzard talk. “They were saying, like, ‘Hey, random numbers are not fun—dice rolls are not fun. You can give the illusion of randomness, but you want to weight it towards the player… The only point you have to deliver on is that when people leave your game—because they will—when they leave your game, they need to be happy.’”
“In previous interviews with Kotaku and other sites, director Luke Smith has talked openly about avoiding randomness and designing quests with guaranteed rewards, an approach that has served Destiny well throughout year two so far”
Diablo 3 dev on loot 2.0
