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.
