I wasn’t saying L4D was succesfull because it had no crafting, but it was succesfull even though it had no RNG-driven crafting. Which was the exact type of thing you were asking for examples of. So did you lose the thread of the discussion or what?
Uuuuh… what? Which point? About why L4D was succesfull? Which wasn’t the thing being discussed at all… We were discussing examples of succesfull games that have no RNG-crafting. And V2 modded is an example of that.
The crafting system proposed in this dev blog has the exact same issues as the crafting system as it exists right now. It’s layered RNG. And that’s the point people here are trying to make, but which you apparently are not understanding: “We” think the RNG-part of the progression system is bad and un-fun. And a progression system with no (or severely reduced) RNG would be better. And we’re disappointed that FS has clearly chosen that that is not the design direction of Darktide.
Look, maybe you got a little confused because you are debating several people at the same time, and I can understand if that’s the case. But I’m not going to reply to anything else if your reading comprehension won’t be better. We’d just be talking in circles.
I can’t get how so many people use this “players want maxed stuff”. No. Players want a reasonable path to earning high end stuff (and that’s not just the numbers, but also perks/blessing combos) through their agency. What is reasonable may be up for discussion, but I believe almost everyone would agree that what the DT is asking from the players is not reasonable: blind faith that eventually you will get lucky.
If I level all 4 classes once, I should not need 30 heresy+ missions to get one or two items for one character that I would feel are worthy. By the moment I invest 100 hours in one character (siloing, oh yes), I should be guaranteed to have enough good items to try very different game styles and after 200 I should maybe miss one or two items for most characters.
I was asking about games with crafting/progression systems. So naming one without a system like that wasn’t actually what I was asking about at all.
I’m fine if you want to argue for features that made L4D2 successful in spite of a lack of crafting, but at that point it’s off topic: it’s not like lacking crafting was a requirement to implement those other features.
Modding was mentioned. Well that’s not crafting and is an off-topic reason why other games survived in spite of lacking crafting/progression systems. I’m fine with players suggesting systems like that. I’m not arguing against modding. I’m pointing out that crafting/progression is fine to have, and generally needs to include randomness in order for the system to offer interesting choices to players (in order for the crafting system to also be a source of game depth, like the core gameplay is).
It doesn’t. You can generate near-limitless base items (5k ordos each), which isn’t a random item shop like the current system. You get an item after each mission whose value is modified by things like difficulty. So those two points are very significant changes that address the criticism of the current shop which is extremely random (to the point where I can’t get a specific item type if I want it).
It’s almost identical to “blueprint” crafting of V2, which if you read those reviews several of them will mention wanting that sort of system
Many players in this thread have explicitly stated they want maxed items. They’ve outright said they’d be happier with pure max everything but players just customize which perks/blessings they happen to be playing with in any given run.
So that’s why people say “players want maxed stuff”: because players say they want maxed stuff!
You’ve brought up a way more interesting topic to me in the form of how many Heresy+ runs should it take to “max” a piece of gear? As long as “max” means getting it to max rank, and choosing one blessing, one perk to reroll.
I think an interesting sub-topic to that sub-topic is how many runs should it take to get to the point where you realize a weapon can’t be salvaged, in terms of ending up with too many undesirable perks/blessings so that you can’t even reroll it into a decent item. And that’s where I’d again bring up that we need a blessings/perk pass so none of them are outright bad, but we might discuss whether anything should have three perks, which actually dramatically increases the chances of ending up with something bad compared with if you only had two and you’d reroll one of them. Locking in two separate perks is definitely far more limiting, and means that if it takes you like 10 runs to max a curio you could end up discovering that curio is permanently bad because it has at least 2 bad perks even if you reroll the 3rd one (the worst of the three). The order things unlock also matters, because you can imagine the third perk appearing at blue rarity, at which point far fewer runs are required to discover you ended up with 3 bad perks together, compared with the current system where the 3rd perk appears at the last rarity.
Gear aqcuisition in darktide is boring, especially if we’re expected to waste time on weapons we dont want, just to figure out if it’ll end up in the scrap heap.
Speaking of Blizzard, this particular blog post reminded me a lot of Ion’s ill-fated BFA reddit Q&A where he got raked over the coals about the abysmal state of the expansion’s primary systems, itemization, classes and Blizzard’s excessive use of time gating. I still love the ‘grand scheme’ meme to this day.
But in the proposed crafting system those elements cause our items to be slightly different in an interesting way, and cause the crafting itself to provide interesting decisions. (Interesting because it’s not a simple matter of just going straight from point A (basic item) to point B (maxed, perfect item), but instead you have various challenges you encounter along the way that you have to deal with.)
How can that seem reasonable to you, given the huge history in games of progression/crafting systems driving player retention? Or do you just ignore that evidence and say something should be a certain way despite the case against it?
I think you just don’t understand how you make a build, luckily in Darktide there are very few perks and blessings that are bad but that is not the point people are complaining about.
If i get one weapon that can oneshot damnation pox walker but i have locked on it a perk that gives +25% damage to infested that doesn’t help me reach any breakpoint then i have literally a wasted slot on my weapon.
What challenges? You either get what suits you or you don’t! There is no in the middle in this case!
Sorry, are you saying you think all Blessings are perfectly balanced?
Headtaker provides +15% power on hit, stacking 5 times. That’s +75% power. Basically a 75% DPS increase (in addition to more stagger; and cleave might improve with power too, I haven’t investigated that in DT yet).
Rampage provides 20% damage on multiple hit.
So the requirement is bigger (multiple hit vs. hit, though both are common) , and the payoff dramatically smaller.
If every blessing was balanced, then there’d be no reason to complain about locked blessings: because any blessing you start with would pair perfectly with the one you choose to reroll and it’d be an amazing combo. But every blessing isn’t balance. Some like “up to 5% power scaling with Stamina” are either outright horrible, or at least explained horribly (because that blessing definitely doesn’t indicate you’re stacking 5% power on hit; as written it only implies that at max stamina you get a 5% power increase, which you can compare to the 75% power increase above to know it’s not even remotely balanced).
The challenges are that as you upgrade an item, more perks/blessings are revealed, some of which aren’t optimal (or at least don’t synergize with one another). So then it’s up to the player to understand how those things relate and reroll as appropriate.
Honestly I really like the concept of working to make my weapons better. Like RNG aside, i think it’d be neat if you could slowly raise the base stats by usage or challenges.
First of all, you are combining all the comments into one. When there is talk of the max stuff, there are people who would be OK with having all the max immediately or after the short unlock , either generally, i.e. even if the system was switched to athanor, or, in particular, as opposed to the current system. And then there are people who talk about the max based on earning it with a reasonable time investment.
Secondly, the ‘max’ means simply getting an item with a combination of perks and blessings that the player is happy with to the maximum statistics for the item in the game. Your definition is not ‘max’ in any way, your definition is a way to introduce the limitations of the current system and to diminish the significance of the elements on the items, i.e. to give the player something with max statistics, irrelevant of whether the player wants it.
Finally, ‘max’ is not one item in this game. Or, indeed, for some people it might be, but not for the people who want to experiment with the builds and try different styles.
Ive played a lot of games and I’m very loot driven, I dont believe darktide should be that style of game. Fatshark have made the gear progression like borderlands, where I think it would be far better off being a linear unlock tree like deep rock galactic.
