This. This right here is why I don’t play more Darktide.
I am so tired of finding an item with good bar stats once a month at most, and then having the RNG roll a bunch of perks and blessings on it that I don’t want and that don’t go together.
This is always the experience with this game. You get excited about finally getting a new item, and then the game takes that item, and destroys it right in front of your face.
The stupid crafting system with its locks is the biggest motivation killer for me.
I’m the kind of player where if I could fix this sword by killing 100,000 enemies with it I would, but I just refuse to put a lot of time into a game where it’s pure luck if your effort ever pays off.
At least I don’t think the locking system is bad. If everyone could get the best weapons with less effort, the current game system would collapse.
The problem is that there’s not a lot of crafting materials available.
The game wouldn’t collapse. We have people running Auric Damnation and wanting even higher difficulties (I’m guessing they’re geared up plenty and are very skilled to boot – I’m not there, I’m mediocre and my gear is even worse).
We play the game because while actually playing, it’s a good time – well, when it’s actually functioning and not cratering performance or eating inputs and audio cues actually play properly…
Look, the game itself is fine. It’s why we want to see the rewards for playing it improved, it’d likely get us to positively engage MORE, not LESS.
Rolling a 380 with only two modifier categories in 80% (oof), still managing to roll a t2 perk AND “meh” blessings just feels crappy.
I have in my possession two 380 weapons… and they’re some of the lowest possible 380 rolls I could have pulled. I genuinely have weapons with a 360 base rating with better modifiers.
I’m already running my favorite builds with 4/4 stats on 370+ weapons.
It’s just stopping me from testing new weapons/builds when I want, and alienating players who can’t chain run quickplay damnation for 700+ plasteel a match.
The gameplay is what keeps the game alive, not some stupid gacha grind.
i dont see the point in having everything unlocked, if you could put whatever you wanted on a weapon everyone would just immediately lock the most hyper meta blessing and perk selections
The problem isn’t that you can’t get everything you want instantly, the problem is that it’s pure luck whether or not your effort is rewarded.
What an item system should do is allow you to tweak the mechanics of the item to your liking so that you can make builds and try new things, and then it should give you a very long run of increasing the power of your item that includes random elements.
What the system does in this game is allow you to very quickly max the power of your items, and then it gives you an excessively random and time consuming experience trying to get the mechanics of the item right.
It’s the exact opposite of what creates positive engagement and long term motivation in progression systems.
You still have to hunt for a decent base and be lucky enough to have the blessings you want on the weapon. How does permanently rendering your effort void make for engaging progression?
At least I think the locking system is good. If everyone could get the worst weapons with more effort, the current system would be great.
The solution is to increase the crafting materials available.
So, let’s try again - why do you think this system is so unpopular?
The heavy RNG makes for a bad play experience… not having everything unlocked is FINE, but the game needs to be biased to help unlock blessings you don’t already have.
I’ve literally spent millions in dockets getting a store of gear to then run those items through the other gambling machine only to receive the exact same blessing and the same TIER of blessing 5+ times in a row.
It’s not about having everything unlocked immediately. It’s about there being SO MANY blessings and tiers of blessings on so many different weapons (plenty that share the same blessing but because Fatshark decreed a blessing on one weapon class does not unlock it for another weapon class) that getting ANYTHING you actually want isn’t up to how much effort you put into the system, it’s about time.
Sometimes you get something good straight away - but because it’s ALL RNG, you might able to acquire what you’re looking for early, and if you don’t, it becomes about struggling to get anything halfway decent for hundreds of hours, sifting through the same pile of garbage Hadron pops out of the RNG machine over and over and over.
It’s quite literally designed to artificially increase engagement by wasting people’s time.
It’s not rocket science, it’s a manipulation tactic.
I wouldn’t say that there are any “best weapons”. There are just whatever weapons you want for your own builds. But regardless, if you do think that removing locks would cause the game to collapse into a metagame build singularity, this method of prevention is all stick no carrot.
There is nothing quite as infuriating than finally getting a good base stat weapon with an awesome stat split just to have Hadron brick it.
That being said, that one is kinda salvageable.
I dont know what you actually wanted on it, but you could keep shred and the maniac damage, slap some flak damage on it and maybe put slaughterer or uncanny strike for the second blessing.
Its not gonna be perfect, but at least you get something usable out of it.
I’m going to sound like a douche now, but this is the crux of the current gamer’s problem: they’re so indoctrinated by gacha and season/battle passes that they can’t enjoy games without that constant RNG FOMO progression that they are addicted to.
Because they need something to validate their computer time. Self-worth.
That playing video games for hours have a real value outside of entertaiment.
To sound like an old fart, we used to play games for hundreds to thousands of hours without any progression, cosmetics, season passes, FOMO and micro (macro) transactions simply because the games was fun to pay (shocker, I know).
Don’t worry about sounding like an old fart! I remember back when you could go out and buy your games on DVD, insert them into a console and then play them straight away - no internet required. That all stopped around 2013 with Grand Theft Auto V and Battlefield 4. That’s just a small part of the reason why I ended up switching to PC back in 2020; the main reason was the subscriptions required to access online multiplayer on consoles.
I’m old enough to remember those games. They’re still around.
I’ve still got Tie Fighter on friggin’ floppy disks hanging around in storage.
You can make that argument with a competitive MP arena shooter where your experience, map knowledge and twitch skills were all tested by other players, not hordes of bot controlled enemies.
You can make that argument about single-player games shipped complete at launch.
If Darktide were designed along the same path, it wouldn’t have shipped with any gacha mechanics. There’d be no crafting system. We’d get weapon classes with fixed stats and learn how to effectively utilize those tools.
Darktide isn’t that game. This game was never intended to be that.
