Dev Blog: Deep Dive into the Shrine

Rejects,

For today’s blog, we will outline some of the features and changes we are actively working on in our next major patch and discuss how we arrived at making some of these changes in detail.

An Update on the Shrine

Before Darktide’s launch date, we brought an update on the different features we were working on for the game’s crafting systems.

The functionality of these crafting features was completed in December, and internally we began playtesting how they functioned, felt, and fit within the game. This led us to identify key issues with our features surrounding Blessings (Earn Blessing, Fuse/Combine Blessing, and Re-Bless). We were not happy with releasing these features to our players in their current implementation. We are going to explain further why we arrived at this decision.

Throughout the launch period for Darktide, we began to receive feedback from players playing the game in its entirety. One of the loudest feedback points we saw was exposing issues in our acquisition methods for items. We identified that these issues for item acquisition would be further compounded by the Blessing crafting features we had implemented. It would result in a frustrating experience for players. We decided to hold back the additional crafting functionality while we revisit our item acquisition systems to alleviate the would-be strain on the crafting system. With that choice in place, we set ourselves upon the task of reworking some of our sources for item acquisition, and we will cover these topics first and then dive into the changes we are making for crafting moving forward.

So, how will crafting change from Vermintide to Darktide? In Vermintide crafting was focused around creating, salvaging, and modifying items obtained through reward chests and through the crafting of blueprints. There are some similarities between the two games with the modification options, yet Darktide will carve its own path when it comes to crafting. Instead it is centred around modifying weapons rather than weapon creation, and will have a heavier focus on acquiring exciting items of different potential through many sources in the game.

Equipment in Darktide

For Darktide, we wanted to set a different direction for the items characters will choose to equip. We want each weapon, and curio players find in Darktide to have a distinctive difference of potential within. The foundation we set with Modifiers, Perks, and Blessings changes how each weapon can potentially perform. The combination of these offers an exciting array of variety, and we want players to continue acquiring many variations in pursuit of interesting build diversity. This build potential exists today, and as a teaser for our next major patch, players can look forward to easily saving and loading preset builds that they can customise!

This direction for items having exciting hidden potential is where our sources for acquiring items in Darktide come into effect. We consider the armoury Exchange to be an expansion of the mission completion phase, where the dockets players receive allow them to choose their own reward from this store or save them for a more interesting option should they find one later. In reality, we acknowledge the feedback that players desire further agency within the Armoury Exchange. We will release a new feature to the Armoury Exchange where players can acquire any weapon type by its mark (Mk) that has been unlocked by achieving the minimum level required. This will be made available in the next patch to Darktide.

Acquiring weapons through this new requisition system in the Armoury, will give players a common (Profane rarity) weapon of a varying item rating according to their character’s current level. It is worth noting that Profane weapons in Darktide have the most potential of becoming powerful weapons in combination with their base modifiers and via upgrades through crafting. To accompany this new feature, we will improve the selection of items in the hourly catalogue in both the base item rating range and their potential.

Further changes to Item Acquisition

To accompany these changes to the Armoury Exchange, we will make further changes to the other sources of acquiring items within Darktide.

The Emperor’s Gift, which was occasionally received upon successful mission completion, will now be granted upon every mission completion without any limit by time, as was previously the case. In addition, the Emperor’s Gift will be influenced by several factors: The difficulty of the chosen mission and the conditions and side missions completed. Both factors will improve the chances of receiving an item with higher potential.

Sire Melk’s Requisitorium is another source of item acquisition, and we will also be implementing some changes in the next patch. We are reducing the amount of work each contract asks of players and increasing the reward (Ingots) players will receive for completing the task. The collection of Grimoires and Scriptures will be collapsed into a single contract for completing these collectible side-missions. We will also add a couple of new contracts for collecting both Plasteel, and Diamantine.

Importantly, in addition to these changes to the contracts offered, we will be improving the quality of the weapons offered by the daily catalogue and through the mystery acquisitions.

Unlocking Crafting

Shortly after the Winter break, we re-evaluated the direction we were going in with crafting in
the future. This set us up to ensure that any changes we made now in the short term would set us on the best possible path to and synergize with future features and content. A significant part of this work was confirming the direction for weapon blessings and where they will fit in the future. While we are excited about the direction we chose to take blessings, we will save that discussion for another time.
Having the future direction affirmed, we could make the necessary decisions and changes required to release the final parts of the crafting system.

The first major change from the previous crafting implementation we discussed is that we will
not be implementing the Fuse / Combine blessing functionality. Instead, earning a blessing will
permanently unlock the ability to re-bless with that blessing at any time. We made this decision as it compliments where we will take blessings in the future, and it greatly alleviates the number
of items that one would need to acquire, not only the ability to re-bless but also what you can re-bless with. As stated in the previous section about equipment, we expect players to
switch and try out new weapons as they discover different and exciting potential
combinations and builds. Earning the ability to permanently re-bless allows for a far more enjoyable and less time-consuming experience and an easier time experimenting with interesting builds for your characters.

In combination with this, we are also improving the other aspects of crafting. We have implemented a cost scaling system that will change the total material costs required depending on the weapons item rating, for all actions at the Shrine of the Omnissiah. Let’s recap all the available crafting features, including what will be present in the next patch:

Consecrate

Upgrades the rarity of Weapons and Curios. Upgrading Profane & Redeemed will cost Plasteel, and after that Plasteel and Diamantine are required.

Refine Perk

Refine a single perk on an item to roll for a new perk selected at random by Hadron. The perk that was not chosen to be refined will become locked for this weapon.

Earn Blessing

Surrender the entire weapon to Hadron, thereby losing it in the process. Players can then select a Blessing to earn the right to permanently re-bless other weapons with the earned blessing. Blessings are shared across different weapon marks of the same weapon type.

Re-Bless

Players can choose to replace a single blessing on the weapon with a blessing of choice they have earned the right to use. The other blessing that was not chosen will become locked.

Patch #4: Blessings of the Omnissiah

As mentioned previously, the next patch to Darktide will include these changes to the crafting system and item acquisition. We will continue to monitor feedback once it is in your hands, and we will continue to make adjustments and changes if necessary.

There are a number of additional new features, changes, and improvements to come in this next patch which we’ll be discussing in our next Community Comm-Link.

We greatly appreciate both the passion and feedback we have received so far on Darktide. As we continue to work on addressing many of these areas brought up by our community, we will continue to welcome the ongoing discussion to further shape and evolve the game for many years to come.

Thank you all for reading, and we will see you again in the next Comm-Link.

Darktide Team

69 Likes

Strange that this didn’t get changed to be honest, was something that people didn’t like.

Is there any knowledge on how soon that patch will appear ? No dead line but maybe a patch order like next patch or the one after ?

36 Likes

EDIT: I missed it on my first read through, but it appears that some item perks and blessings will STILL be locked on items after changing around others. THIS IS KRAKING TERRIBLE DESIGN! This is the #1 things that people are pissed about and that makes the gearing system infuriating. This “lock” system means that upgrading an item can result in becoming JUNK. It is immensely frustrating and there is ZERO reason to keep this. It just discourages people from even playing in the first place, achieving the opposite of what it was intended to do.

#BREAKTHELOCKS!!!

#2 issue is the continued silo’ing of resources. PLEASE FATSHARK - realize that by not having shared resources you’re only encouraging players to grind one character, raising the chances for them to be burned out and become bored. This again is doing the opposite of what you intended.

#NOMORESILOS!!!

I’m going to hit the “positive” highlights below:

This sounds awesome.

Also awesome

Yessssssss

Keep 'em rolling

This is GREAT to hear. Bravo!!

Which is 100% what your fans have been asking for.

When? PLEASE say “Next Week” :slight_smile:

29 Likes

There are good changes here. Especially for shop and Melk but:

Refine a single perk on an item to roll for a new perk selected at random by Hadron. The perk that was not chosen to be refined will become locked for this weapon.

And

Players can choose to replace a single blessing on the weapon with a blessing of choice they have earned the right to use. The other blessing that was not chosen will become locked.

Please. Don’t lock things. its horrible with perks and will be only bit better with blessings because we will have control over them. At least let us reroll all perks as we want.

47 Likes

I missed that.

Yes, please just remove the locks from perks and blessings. It’s totally unnecessary.

33 Likes

You could’ve atleast made it so we can pay a price to unlock the perks and blessings that were locked when modifying.
Disappointed that the perk “rolling rng system” wasn’t changed as nobody wants to be sitting around for half a hour re-rolling perks until they get the one they are looking for; just make it a choose-able perk, that you can then spend mats to upgrade to the tier you want/can afford to get it to.

29 Likes

With the current mission board system this will make player feel punished by not having access to missions with extras.

15 Likes

Remove both Refine Perk and Re-Bless mechanics of locking the other perk or blessing. This sucks. Deep Rock Galactic respects my time infinitely better than this. God forbid I had to buy the same equipment several times to just get the build variation I wanted…

Also ensure there is a way for players to consistently get maximum base-rating items. The new shop sounds like a step in the right direction, but I do not want to buy fifty MKII devil’s swords hoping I get the right base rating to make an optimal build. There are other games in the co-op horde slasher market, and I am sure many of us aren’t going to compromise with half-measures from artificial grind-design for this title. Please show us you respect our time with your design.

26 Likes

So the expected crafting loop is:

  • Roll for a weapon with the best possible stat distribution for a given build.
  • Roll twice and hope for at least one of the two perks to be exactly the one you need and at max level.
  • Roll twice and hope for at least one of your blessing to be exactly the one you need and at max level.

So that’s a solid five layers of RNG stacked on top of one another (if everything goes right at every single step!) without accounting for all the internal systems of perks/blessing tiers rarity.

No mention of balancing material costs either, rewarding higher difficulties with crap that will take up inventory space does not fix the dire need players have for crafting materials (in both type and quantity)

No mention of the hundreds of clicks needed to get a single perk on a single item either.

How is that in any way acceptable? This does not fix anything, you’ve shifted the bollocks around.

54 Likes

Steps in the right direction, at least. Sad that we had to raise such a stink about it to get this.

1 Like

Oh my god. FatShark have not understood a single thing about the pain points of their game. “Exciting items with hidden potential.” That’s a hell of a way to spell out “Everything is RNG and there will be no mechanic to mitigate it, at all, ever.”

This post has just doomed this game.

Not only do you openly say that you are keeping the horrific gacha mechanics RNG where you will never ever get the full rated weapon you want, but you are also comitting to LOCKING blessings and perks, in complete opposition to the goal of allowing people to try out different builds and combinations.

I really can’t believe how it’s possible to so completely miss the mark. This is just sad. So much missed potential. Even with the second go-around of scrapping the crafting system to create something better, you still cling onto the absurd RNG for dear life.

The loop now will be to buy greys from the store and upgrade a ton of them in the hope of getting 1 good perk and 1 good blessing. In other words they have just slightly shifted where the RNG happens, but the RNG will still be insane, and you will still need truly incredible amounts of crafing materials as you keep upgrading stuff in the HOPE of getting something good. Christ, these guys are something else.

55 Likes

I am happy about these changes but the one thing I have no idea why we still have is the perk reroll being random.

Make us buy it at a bulk sum if you want but at least remove having to sit and go through the RNG.

There’s no reason to make us do this other than to pad time and frustration.

I can see a case for every other idea (even if I disagree with them) but there’s absolutely no good reason to keep this in the game. Remove the RNG reroll and let us pick our perk.

9 Likes

this is still a HUGE problem. We need to be able to just pick a perk and reroll it without others being locked forever, curio rerolling and rerolling in general is still incredibly bad. It can take up to half an hour of rerolling to get what you want and if a curio doesn’t have 2 perks you like it’s useless.

26 Likes

Oh cool, so now some of my guns will only have a singular useless blessing instead of two, its awesome that the upgrade system you have keep ruining guns with RNG.

23 Likes

This is all awesome except the perk locking. Why? In v2 you could re-roll until you got the combination you wanted. Why change what was working for players?

19 Likes

Thanks for the post.

My opinion is that it is really close from what was described at first.
I am happy with such system

Now, I wonder… When?

I can undertand for the blessing, and even for the perk
However, my concern is about curios. This is really annoying to try to get the curio you need cause when you refine 1 perk it blocks the 2 others…

Please fatshark, find a solution to this problem

9 Likes

Totally agreed too.

The dev’s seem to be really excited about this idea that weapons have some “hidden potential to be uncovered.” From the player’s standpoint, NO ONE CARES. We don’t care about “hidden potential.” We care about just being able to craft an item with the abilities we want.

Seriously, look at Deep Rock Galactic. You pay an initial cost to “unlock” a given weapon property/effect, and then can just freely pick from those unlocked traits whenever you want. Darktide can work the same way. Don’t lock perks and blessings, for the love of god.

25 Likes

The system is really, really bad. The problem of locked perks on Curios (and weapons) is a problem they have specifically created in order to increase RNG and make sure you never get what you want, not even with 1000 hours in the game.

19 Likes

I don’t want to even think about curios. I just accept 2 bad perks on them. locking is just…bad. I leaves bad feeling and makes you feel even worse when you make mistake with it. I don’t have issue with rng shop, its wahtever (I don’t need the best roll to clear missions) but let us choose things. Even if by choosing FatSHark means clikcing for 10 minutes to get good perks

5 Likes

Oh man, basic systems that have been around since VT2(& 1?), and the months-late implementation of a crafting system that continues to just be worse and more restrictive than the systems in base VT2, let alone the Athanor. I’m so impressed, I think I’ll re-install darktide and spend 100$ on premium currency!

Pffft.

You could say it’s a step in the right direction…One step up a goddamn mountain.

9 Likes