Early Game Ogryn Feedback

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
1

Don’t get me wrong. I kraking love the ogryn, but there are some gripes I do have with his gameplay, especially when he’s early level.

His ranged options all focus on close range, which is great for his gameplay feel cause he’s supposed to be the frontline and knocking everyone down in melee. But this means he feels absolutely terrible to play when all the heretic guardsmen are hunkered down 50m away guarding a chokepoint with only one way through [notable example being the bridge in one of the levels]. (could be fixed with some environment redesign but that is a lot of resources to invest). You are basically forced to hunker down which already sucks with his massive body or you commit and charge at them and lose half your health. The beginning starter weapons only make this worse, with both the ripper gun and kickback not exactly being stellar for these long ranged engagements. (And in my opinion, the kickback lacks damage as it can’t kill even guardsmen and medium range sometimes and reloads a tad bit too slow).

With how an ogryn is designed, this might be an inherently designed weakness of the ogryn, but it does mean that sometimes the ogryn has to sit crouching behind a wall for 5 minutes twiddling his thumbs while the one veteran does the shooting. One fix could be giving the slab shield early, but this seems like a cop out answer as that means taking any other melee other than the shield means getting absolutely shredded by lasfire and there’s still the problem of hiding behind cover except it’s a shield now. The other answer could be giving the other weapons more effective range (less spread and damage falloff maybe), or giving the ogryn a kickback that shoots slugs.

My other minor issue is that it does feel like the ogryn lacks damage or knockback sometimes, mainly for specials or some elites. For the first heavy attack of an ogryn, it’s a massive downward strike, yet sometimes it can’t even stun ragers who don’t even show any reactions and attack you immediately, and many unarmoured specials are still alive even after that strike. For it’s chargeup, most of the time that heavy single strike isn’t even worth it when I can just hit the special attack button to knock them down and them wail on them with my light attack combo. Hopefully the numbers can be tweaked a bit and a normal rager can not defy physics when he gets dunked on by an ogryn and still remain standing.

I know this make me look like I’m shitting on ogryn, but I honestly do love when you guys at Fatshark did with his gameplay, the feeling of charging into a swarm gives me the monke dopamine rush like no other, and those meaty SFXs when you hit something with your melee attacks is perfection. But this is a beta and there are some changes and feedback I have to suggest. But take it with a grain of salt if you would, I’m not a paid game developer after all. Simple as.

2

I’ve been playing only ogryn in the pre release beta so far and I agree with basically everything here. None of the ranged weapons available allow you to deal with mass ranged enemies, especially once they are in cover. It also feels bad that most ranged weapons can only kill specials in one hit if you manage to land a headshot, which is hard with scatter guns or arcing grenade launchers. I haven’t unlocked the heavy machine gun yet, but from the little gameplay I’ve seen from it, it doesn’t exactly look like a pinpoint accurate special slayer.

Ogryn’s grenade is also basically a joke. You only get 1 and it can’t even one shot some of the heavy enemies that you would want to be able to delete with it like crushers. Because you can only carry 1 it’s not worth it to invest the talent to actaully make it a functional grenade.

And then there are orgyn’s melee weapons which is clearly the meat and potatoes of the class. They feel fun to use for the most part, I personally don’t like the shield weapon but I never liked the shield weapons in Vermintide either. But it feels like ogryn is missing a good armor piercing melee option. The smaller classes get access to melee weapons like force sword, power sword, or the chain weapons to get access to a heavy damage attack that can deal with heavy enemies but orgyn is lacking that option. All we have is the ability to slap them with stagger until one of the big boy party members comes along to actually kill the target.

All in all, the ogryn is a fun class to play to keep hordes in check but it feels like they lack weapon options to deal with specials and armour that the other classes have access to.