Personally I don’t care much about the crafting, but it is a major problem that has soured the community since a long time ago.
Though they are the most visible issues, they wouldn’t matter as much if they fixed 3 things.
Getting good bases: to those that try to get optimal (or optimal enough) weapons who complain about the lock, look at your inventory and count how many weapons that don’t even deserve to be upgraded.
This is to me the biggest problem, and would need to be buffed at all 3 weapon sources, Brunt, Emp’s Gift and Melk.
To keep Melk more relevant in the case that Brunt and Gift are buffed to a more usable level it would gain a new Melk coin sink.
Getting currency: Mostly Dockets and Plasteel, this could in part be able to be alleviated by having Diamantine to Plasteel exchange and/or Plasteel-Diamantine rebalance (exchange would be best)
This is a problem that had happened in Vt2 too, and got for the most part fixed by simply giving dust conversion (though iirc it had to be buffed further after the change)
Unlocking specific Blessings: this is mostly due to certain blessings being vastly more effective than other, thankfully not to the point of Vt2’s Swift Slaying, but still is an annoying thing to find specific blessings.
This here is where I would pick Melk to be able to help on that front. Selling a specific selection of blessings (much cheaper than buying a weapon for a blessing) or selling them as random lottery (as I don’t expect them to fully give the catalogue to be bought as wanted.
Now on why locks won’t disappear, it’s through them that the weapon acquisition can remain relevant, they want to avoid a scenario like Vt2 where people didn’t care about weapon acquisition and didn’t care for Tomes and Grims after a while.
A well-made system is one that keeps you playing the game for longer. Were the people who stopped caring about items in VT2 no longer playing the game? Or were they actually enjoying said game all the time and just not having to acquire new weapons for it?
If FS just straight up removed the locks, people would engage with the ‘crafting’ long enough to get their ideal weapons, and then ignore it beyond swapping out stuff for new build tests.
And that’s a good thing! You don’t want people stuck in menus rolling dice, you want them experiencing the core game!
If you do see weapon crafting as an intrinsic and necessary part of the game, you need to make it deteministic and seamless. Fatshark’s approach is neither of those things.
Honestly i don’t see them staying because it makes acquiring new weapons a pain and part of the most cited issue is that try out specific builds and setups is painful to acquire.
I don’t think it’s really going to make acquiring new weapons less relevant as that’s where balancing comes in and with less chance of having to spend resources just to fix an item being locked there is more chance a person will actually branch out and put those resources towards trying a new build or setup.
The other half of this is going to be revisiting weapons that aren’t seeing use anymore and actually buffing or changing them as well as revisiting perks and blessings as well as adding new ones.
The way you get people to buy new gear and try new things is by throwing them a bone and giving them a reason to experiment.
On a personal note even in other games such as Payday 2 ill often have 2 different versions of the same weapons for different builds, one may focus on a stealth setup that is designed around knocking enemies out without making a sound or another might be centred around around raw horde clear and even a 3rd might be centred on accuracy and special clear.
I think the biggest thing that will drive up trying different weapons is less locks and more to do with making those weapons actually attractive to try out and experiment with. Taking Helldivers 2 as an example the reason assault rifles got popular again and people are trying different builds and setups is because there is now a reason to use them and a reason to experiment. It didn’t make the existing weapons worse it was by making the unused weapons competitive again.
If locks were removed and selling an item also gave you some of the plasteel and diamantine back along with dockets… Then that would be just fine.
The base stats would still be RNG so if you wanted multiple equal stats with different builds then you’d still have to grind.
You’d also still have to grind if you wanted to change the blessings on 1 weapon as you’d need materials to do so, even if you have the blessings unlocked already.
Yeah, locks currently serve a purpose so that you have to collect multiple weapons of the same type. The “break the locks” thing is severely misguided that would only make the current system devolve into the VT2 system, same with “maxed stat” type reds.
In theory making swapping progressively more costly would serve a similar purpose, where the swap cost would be so high after a time that it would just not worth it, but the locks are a fine enough to both prolong item acquisition and to make you feel like you are building an armory.
Moving parts RNG system to something deterministic, with high cost should be the way to go to alleviate most of the current woes people are suffering. This could be done by an interface where you can upgrade your current gear’s stats for a cost that gets exponentially higher the closer you get to “maxing out”.
On top of that introducing unique items (along the lines of VT1 reds), increasing weapon stats past 80%, but keeping totals below maximum, and introducing a bit more interesting itemization for curios would be a good playground for crafting, if we aren’t considering even more wild ideas like a whole attachment system and/or a new item types.
BTW, I hope if they add unique/red items it won’t just be RNG drops. Unique red item acquisition could be done by some time gated thing or by something akin to a crafting “questline” where you need to do specific content and gather specific resources over time to progress. Maybe it could require to have a maxed out weapon of the same type or something as prerequisite.
I don’t even have faith that bugs stay fixed the next update anymore, so I never had any hope for this. And after take 3 or 4 or whatever it is I don’t know why people expect them to sift out the bad. Those fantastical lies before launch were just that and have no connection to now. Weapon attachments too.
Its just a disturbingly bad barrier to a game already limited in replay value. Apparently if you found a fun loadout in a game you enjoyed you wouldn’t want to try others? If anything the current system encourages the opposite - you take your meager winnings and you stop wanting to go back to the table. Aka, you play with even less gear.
Imagine dropping like 8 variants or whatever they’re planning on in this system, its malicious and intentional tone deafness. How hard would it be to articulate a detail about this if it weren’t the case? How many times does it need to be thrown out and redone?
Hate to be a bit of a doomer, but I also suspect that there aren’t any plans to remove crafting locks.
Biggest reason is that prolonging item acquisition is pretty much Live Service Retention 101. Live service games deliberately stagger out whatever player progression they’re able to for as long as possible for any of the following reasons.
The devs plan to link monetization with the progression for easy and dirty money.
They’re a hamster wheel designed to keep players ‘busy’ while additional content is being developed.
These kind of games aren’t really designed with fun at the forefront so much as “engagement”. Hell more often than not fun is sacrificed for the sake of engagement as doing so allows for more hours being sunk in, greater amounts of artificial investment, and most crucially: more chances to pry wallets open with microtransactions. In Darktide’s case, the crafting locks are one of Fatshark’s biggest tools to not only keep players engaged with the shitty crafting/itemization system and exposed to more cosmetic micro transactions, but to buy themselves time in-between content updates. If they were gone and Fatshark’s rate of updates otherwise remained the same, it’d shine a spotlight on how threadbare the game can be which is probably why they’ve stuck around in spite of how much of the player base hate them.
That said I also agree with those that believe that the game would operate just fine if crafting locks were exterminatus’d off the face of the earth, hell I’d love to be proven wrong with not only this presumption but my fears of the locks not being removed. But if I’ve learned anything from watching other live service games (Anthem/Marvel’s Avengers/ect.) run their courses and close down, it’s that unpopular grinding is often added for a reason and rarely is it actually to the player’s benefit.
the combat is great anything that isnt combat or takes you away from it is awful.
delete the mourning star
delete locks
delete all crafting mats
make all loadouts free all blessings all perks
It’s like going from a 2/10 to a 4/10 (being generous to VT2 crafting system here TBH). Just reverting to that system would 0% make me excited to play the game, strongly doubt I’m alone in that.
I mean the weaves system would actually be kinda cool and would at least somewhat represent the process of an agent changing from lowly scum using bottom of the barrel trash to an actual imperial agent who is modifying their own custom gear.
It would even fit with the lore since we have one of the few people on board the morning star that could do that level of modification and retooling of gear.