I have literally no idea how the war for Atoma is going. There is no storytelling going on. There is just commentary in the form of vox communicated single sentence voicelines on some local event or mission, which we never have any way of figuring out how fits into the overall campaign (if at all).
Go there, fight. Go there, insert battery. Kill some guy in a train station. Fly back home. Great. What did that accomplish? There is no sense of progression.
With respect to character motivations, I have Z E R O investment in Darktide’s story. There are no characters to care about. There is no sense of urgency or importance. At no point do I get the feeling that there’s something on the line for my character, or someone they care about. I never get the feeling that my character cares about anyone, or anything, actually.
The people in the Mourningstar are completely unengaging. The banter between them is weak, short, and infrequent. Nothing storywise in this game makes me care about the setting at all. It is just “combat takes place in the 40K universe in some hive city, the inquisition is involved, you fight heretics.” Whoah, I’m trying to keep my bloodpressure down.
From a storytelling perspective this game feels basically pointless.
I feel like something this game desperately needed (and maybe was planned but scrapped) is something like what Planetside 2, and I think Helldivers 2?, did with there being like a global front. The whole of the map would be displayed with the missions maps being displayed, if you’re picking a mission inside “friendly” territory, the difficulty would be lower with less heretics and less rewards/contribution while fighting on the frontlines would be much harder, more enemies, more monsters, more specials. The mission you have to do on the map would be randomized (because I think there’s a few maps that use different objectives, I could absolutely be wrong it’s been a while since I played since Fatshark won’t give me solo mode), and the modifiers to the maps could be randomized as well with, again, harder & more modifiers the deeper into enemy territory you pick. There could be daily/weekly assaults that decide how the chaos factions are approaching the hive and where the frontlines would be (naturally as more people are playing harder missions the other areas are left more exposed).
Throw in the ability to create custom games that don’t give contribution to the war effort (still reward you otherwise) and you’d have a decent system. This is just a rough overview, I’m sure someone who’s actually good at game design could polish this into something amazing.
Edit: Just had an extra thought. Maybe a global bonus to players for doing well in the war effort. The better we do as a collective, the better the rewards get?
oh, we don’t find out anything about the front lines either way. really it doesn’t much matter for us, we’re under the inquisition and they don’t care about the war effort so much as how they an use it to uncover the source of the cult, which they’ve been doing for over a year and now they threw right in the face of everyone that couldn’t figure out the details of the cult of admonition until now.
the front lines are down on the ground level outside of the hive. you an see the main area of military conflict if you want in dukane terminal before you rush to open the menu. darktide’s missions never go near it.
What’s weird is you can kinda see the leftovers of the ‘randomize missions enough to say that they’re different areas’ stuff in some pieces of the map design/zones chosen.
Like if they’d gone through with that, we probably would have far fewer objections to the randomness. Assembling pieces of hive architecture out of pre-selected environments would’ve actually been pretty neat.
Once upon a time I was sure that’s what was coming, an evolution of L4D2’s/Chaos Waste’s branching paths by swapping out entire tiles to mix and match a map based on a biome. When playing the beta it felt like it was intended that way with the tiny hallways, elevators, and air locks.
And then release came out and we discovered it was just them reusing entire map sections in general
