Divided and Underdeveloped - Fatshark's Failures at Multiplayer and Narrative

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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This is going to be a rant.

Darktide is a conglomerate of several underdeveloped and underbaked game modes, and I want to walk y’all through the process to try and understand how we got into this mess.

Well, how many game modes does Darktide actually have?

I would say six at the time of writing: ‘regular’ gameplay, Maelstrom, Auric, Auric Maelstrom, the ‘Special Mission’, and now Havoc.

Of these, five are essentially completely random, with various mitigating factors. ‘Regular’ gameplay has five difficulties and multiple intensity modifiers, Maelstrom has three with a completely random mix for whichever one mission is rolled, Auric and Auric Maelstrom have 2 (Heresy and Damnation) with a guarantee of high-intensity. Havoc, billed as an uber-high-difficulty, starts at Malice and works its way up to Damnation difficulty, with somewhat guaranteed modifiers (The Emperor’s Fading Light levels) but random rolls on everything else for each level of Havoc and each party host.

The only completely deterministic game mode is the Special Mission - which allows players to pick their difficulty and has no modifiers, and features a mission that cannot be accessed.

How did we get here?

At launch, Darktide possessed only ‘regular’ difficulty, with random rolls on difficulty and modifiers, to say nothing of which missions were on the board. Global modifiers were attempted, and after a two-month period of Pox Hound Purgatory basically vanished. None of the starting missions contained any overarching narrative - the random rolling of which missions could be completed and the complete lack of choice for players guaranteed that.

After some time, ‘Auric’ was created alongside both Maelstrom difficulties, in an attempt to offer higher-level players an improved experience without overly crowding the random mission board. This was still random in terms of which missions would be available.

During late 2023, the ‘Special Mission’ was added, which seemed to be a push towards a better narrative structure outside of randomly picked missions, with the possibility of future missions being added to Zola’s menu in order to let players, gasp, actually play through a story that was coherent.

However, this was not borne out across 2024. Some missions were added to make sense of new arrivals (Rolling Steel) and to close out a long-developed story-line (Dark Communion), but both of these were not added to the Special Missions section.

This, in my view, was a mistake.

Fatshark has consistently failed to build a coherent in-game narrative, and has actively refused to set up any kind of structure in how players access game content. The Karnak Twins are around, but most of their story is transient and outside of the game outside of the one mission in Zola’s menu, which some players might not even access before starting Dark Communion, which is ostensibly about ending things for a plotline started there! Rinda Karnak being revived was relegated to a YouTube audio-log and a trailer for Havoc mode, and thanks to the incredibly short event that served as ‘padding’ for her, nothing about it is accessible in the GAME! Most players starting Dark Communion after a few weeks from now are likely to know nothing about the guy up on the cross at the end event or why they’re important!

And now there’s Havoc mode - which, in reality, has no purpose apparent in its game direction. It is allegedly supposed to serve as a ‘harder than hard’ game mode for the elite - but it lacks rewards that would appeal to endgame players or an initial difficulty curve to act as gatekeeping!

All Darktide’s development has done is needlessly divide up content and the player base when it could have easily compressed everything down into three layers of play at most.

Layer One: The Campaign. The acknowledged mission order, with an actual story structure, non-random difficulty, and a narrative. The ‘Special Missions’, in other words, and the one that everyone should engage with to understand things.

Layer Two: Quickplay. Pick a difficulty, go to town.

Layer Three: Auric/Argentum/Havoc/Whatever: The tryhard mode with fancy drip and high difficulty.

Tl;dr: Fatshark has made a ton of extra game modes that don’t actually do anything and get in each other’s way for no reason.

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Don’t forget operations! Of which there is one. (Not that I don’t enjoy it, just pointing it out)

But yeah, more than that for me is it’s wild how much better storytelling is in Vermintide 2 by comparison. At least there was an easily (sort of) identifiable sequence of levels/acts to play through in order.

The weirder part is they clearly have the capability to tell a more cohesive story. They’ve done this in their own cutscenes in house as well as through hired creators like Janfon. They just don’t tie it all together for better readability.

In their defense, their recent maps have been better in some regards than the previous levels. Even if Mr. Edgelord on Gloriana just stands there, at least he’s there. The failstate cutscene for the train level is cool too as well as extracting and insertion via actually jumping on and off the valkyrie is pretty rad. We did also get another 2 cutscenes in the new map, regardless of how short they were.

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Doesn’t really count since it’s treated as a regular rotation in everything but length and some penance padding.

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i would say lessons learned in the vermintide games, and the two maps played in either game , slight exaggeration but i love actually having some variation in what i quickplay into not just the same few maps over and over.

yeah i agree but i also dont mind, i think the lore is there for those that want to dig and find it? its not a single player game the maps get played over and over i dont want story based screens to have to skip over and over.

i actually liked what they went for a story told in bites be conversations at locations not a story so much as a history or state of affairs slowly revealed if you wanted to pay attention. i agree they did not nail it :wink:

tbf i haven’t even played it i was unimpressed and uninterested from the start
i thought Auric was a good step forward a bed to test out modifiers and conditions but there has been so little movement and it killed every other avenue for exploring difficulty.
havoc just really adding stat modifiers what i think of as artificial difficulty was a huge dissapointment , i wanted to see second tiers or elites and specials that are harder not because of being sponges that one shot you but because of the gameplay required to beat them.

dont think you really need the first, and strongly suggest the third doesn’t have special cosmetics
one of the big errors this games makes it to make the difficulty look like a progress path you are all meant to get to the end of leave high end for those that just want to do it. i think all content and rewards should eb available at all difficulties you can have the harder reward faster but i do think all difficulties need to look valid. people shouldn’t feel like they are missing out just because they arent getting in the way at the top levels.

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I would argue it counts more for the purposes of a rant, since it is another mode in name only. In practice it is meaningless. (Again, barring how cool it is as a map on its own)

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The issue I have is that they’re clearly trying to. They’re doing the whole live service ‘release the plot moving forward one step every three months’ thing but it runs smack into the reality of the 85% random game selection and dies on arrival once each mission release vanishes from its guaranteed slots.

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Maybe the issue is just that they have a grand scope in mind, but then just don’t have the manpower to implement it? Because the level of quality of the stuff that is good in the game is really good. Old school AAA good in fact.

Which makes sense if you consider that AAA game studios could be considered to be so with as few as 100 employees. But that is still on the low end as far as AAA is concerned and FS only has around 200.

Couple this with the whole flat hierarchy thing we talked about before, it’s pretty impressive they made it as far as they have without falling apart.

But having said that, I do still yearn for the game to reach its full potential.

Adding P2P map/modifier selection would definitely alleviate a lot of people’s frustrations. Dunno if that is even possible with their current framework though.

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There’s also the matter that we’re never given any initial context. You’re an escaped prisoner who narrowly avoids a death sentence and then they throw you into a whole different thing where now you’re part of a war effort, of which you’re told nothing about, now go kill heretics. Also something about someone being shot and you’re a good boy now. The end.

This signals to pretty much everybody playing the game that any story that was going to be relevant does not exist. Maybe the hardest of the dickriders are going to say “well it’s 40k and we’re playing as a reject, of course we wouldn’t get told anything!” but any random person wants a reason to be invested in the story and characters.

There’s no codex a la Modern Doom divulging the history of the world. Any passive dialogue that tries to expand on the context for the War for Atoma is either quickly shut down by mission control that doesn’t want you yapping heresy or exceedingly rare or exposited in intro dialogue that you’re going to stop listening to after the fifth time without remembering what any of it said.

The developers are trying to tell a story, but nothing short of a full restructure of how the game works is going to allow us to experience that story unfold. Instead all we get are random fragments and uninteresting mysteries that can’t be coherently cobbled together to say something interesting.

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The funny thing is it all could be cobbled together if all the lore points were easily accessible in game. Like a record of conversations from recovered martyr skulls or a record of dialogue you’ve heard between characters.

It wouldn’t take much to take us from the current realm we are in of “disjointed incoherent mess” to the realm of FROMSOFT’s “disjointed mess but almost all of it can be accessed in your inventory if you’re willing to sift through it”.

Still not my preferred mode of storytelling, but it would be a step up.

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I’ve been saying for a while that all vox logs and media should be accessible via one of the random adepts sitting on their butts around the mission board.

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Eh, screw it. Not every pve game needs to be CoD Zombies, L4D or World War Z. And luckily, Darktide is already in the Warhammer universe. So imma jus use this as a gateway to learn more things about WH40k.

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Yes, the narrative assumes you have been playing since beta and weekly to catch onto the dialogue updates/additions which is funny. Its like a puzzle with pieces disappearing, hard to follow!

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Still waiting on the narrative to acknowledge we’re not rejects anymore.

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They further kneecapped themselves narratively by presenting the entire setting as a hive-wide conflict, but then having you go to the same maps in the same areas with the exact same designations with the exact same layouts over and over, making the conflict look non-existent, our controllers incompetent and the hive tiny.

They made a hive city, a planet straddling megastructure containing billions if not trillions of people and other things, feel tiny.

All the missions narratively feel disjointed and divorced from each other and themselves, and as they are currently presented, actually futile, not just in a grimderp “it’s all futile” way.

To paraphrase a comment I saw from somewhere:

  • Deep strike into enemy-held territory.
  • Kill hundreds or thousands of heretics and victims to turn on a machine.
  • Leave immediately.
  • Heretic immediately turns off the machine as soon as the Storm Raptor flies away.

The missions fail on a meta-narrative level because Fatshark didn’t go all the way to implement systems that, truly or falsely, simulated a hive city-sized conflict.

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don’t act like you’re supposed to get spoon-fed the narrative. the narrative isn’t in the missions, like 95 percent of it is in morningstar voiceovers, the cutscenes when new content drops and fluff attached to the gear we get. if anything i’d say we need more needless fluff missions so they have more room for funny voiceovers. the whole point is none of our dudes are supposed to know what’s going on so we have to dig to find answers outside of what they’d know.

part of why i’m confused how they decided to make weapon marks something you an just swap out, seems unintuitive to the lore being found.

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I give you that. I learnt more about the in-game narrative from 3rd party videos than the in-game content. Someone had to enlighten me that the “traitor” ended up being a servitor in the hub area. On other hand I couldn’t care less about the narrative in Tide games. Sure you could say the quality of writing is better than the modern Dragon Age game, but that’s a really, really low bar :joy:

The multiplayer aspect suffers for me, because of the lack of player agency in choosing what you end up playing. Havoc is an “interesting” addition, which fails due to how restrictive and convoluted it is, if you actually want to jump into a more difficult game.

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Hrm, generally spoon-feeding the narrative to players in a shooter game is pretty acceptable and practically universal.

If you need to piece together a narrative from elements of mistmatched gameplay/lobby/loadingzone snippets, website postings, and youtube videos, that’s typically more appropriate to games where that’s the whole point, like Secret World.

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I agree. Do you want my two cents?

Base game: from T1 to T5;
Regular endgame: Auric T5 fixed HiSt + one possible regular modifer (darkness, dogs, etc etc);
Special endgame: Mael T5: fixed HiSt + x number of special modifiers (like more bosses);

  • T4 Auric makes no sense;
  • Operations (train mission) should not exist (make it longer and put them among regular maps);
  • Havoc should not exist, it’s a terrible mod with terrible ways to increase the difficulty + tedious mechanics/aspects;

For those 37 players who find Maelstorm so easy to be boring, Fatshark should work around new Maelstorm modifiers

But the most important thing: let us choose the map (like Vermintide) and the modifiers (unlike Vermintide :stuck_out_tongue: )

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Out of all the half-baked systems they made that seem inspired by Destiny, it’s upsetting that disappearing/external to the game lore was the one they decided to fully realize.

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you can get all the game’s lore internally, and it’s actually easier to parse if you ignore the out-of-game sources (fatshark tends to screw up their blog posts in the details. and patch notes. and sometimes they bork the whole update in the process somehow).

i think it’s fun, actually. with vermintide we play the big heroes of the conflict, so we understand why things are going on directly. with darktide we’re an ad-hoc penal legion whipped together on site and supplied with surplus from other military units and law enforcement and sent to die. they have no reason or interests in providing the rejects with information they might get tortured out of them so the players have to dig for the interesting details.