I don’t understand this complaint. There is a sound cue that gives you plenty of time to block. Spawn points and drop downs are learnable locations then you simply don’t fight in those spots. I can remember getting caught out by an unexpected enemy in this game maybe once in nearly 60 hours now. I remember this being far more of an issue in VT2 to be honest.
Also, having your head on a swivel and maintaining situational awareness is a big part of the skill curve in these games. There are always spawn points behind you and you should never expect your back is clear unless you have a team mate you trust to watch it.
I know this sounds a bit like “git gud” but I don’t mean it that way, I just feel like your expectations might be a little misaligned with how the Tide games operate.
No it’s a big problem but it out right feels awful.
Thing is I know for a fact if you rush into melee and kill 2 troopers you can see your sides are clear since you are in a clear spot with only 2 guys.
Once you are right on top of them and chop them in half 2 to 4 spawn right on top of you to your sides and back.
It’s not that I didn’t see them it’s that they spawned right on top of me.
I see it when fighting and they spawn on top of my team mates.
It’s not so bad I’m 100% gonna be hit but it’s not fun.
I think it’s got something to do with half the squad spawning then the other half spawns right on top of you when your close by.
VT2 was very good about spawning enemies far away from the players and straggler quantity was also dramatically lower.
Playing melee/frontline will tend to see less of this in Darktide as the guys to your rear will be clearing them and the viewing cone of those to your rear will reduce or prevent spawns, leaving you only to deal with prespawned enemies hiding in corners and such.
There are other things going on that make it hard to tell whether a spawn is truly a backspawn.
I think in most cases where a player turns, gets hit in the back, turns back to fight that enemy, then gets hit in the back again immediately, is due to enemies being glued to a directional-facing dependent position. If they’re already in an attack animation to charge attack your rear, turning will just spin them around the player and so give the impression they had just spawned from the direction the player turned from. Which obviously feels like crap since you were literally able to see there were no enemies there before turning around.
Because of these magnetic charge attacks, turning is less useful as a defensive mechanism and rear players are better off assuming they have stragglers going after them with some regularity and just dodge/slide more often, particularly before turning to check if there are enemies.
As for true backspawns, it is somewhat regularly difficult for me to tell where the guys I’m picking off from attacking my allies to my front just spawned from. I am checking pretty consistently to try and figure out where they’re coming from and sometimes things just don’t line up. It’s more suspicious in areas without any ceiling or with specific architecture that would prevent spawning from above. I’ve come to suspect that enemies can spawn in “closed” environments (ie ones without appropriate doors/holes etc.) so long as a player is not directly looking at the spawn point even if the player is in range to be charge attacked. So if a corner that is used as an “open” spawn (by which I mean a spawn where enemies just appear out of the air relying on not being seen for versimilitude, as can be seen sometimes when a player is downed, enemies will just mass spawn on the player waiting for rescue on occasion) has a player turn away from it an enemy can immediately spawn there and go into its attack animation.
Another thing about having a ranged weapon out, it makes the window for blocking pretty small and sometimes the sound plays relatively delayed.
it did sound like a ‘git gud’ post if I am honest lol
Every single person I know that plays the game complains about this during a match more than anything else we have problems with gameplay wise.
I see poxwalkers dropping from a hole in the ceiling to hit the veteran in the back way too much. Like right ontop of him again and again. Move to the next area, same thing again.
We spend a few minutes clearing an area of enemies and do a bit of resource hunting. We start moving to the next area with no bad guys spawning anywhere. We enter battle and the vet starts shooting from the back line. Out pops a poxwalker from nowhere and BONK. The game literally waits until your in combat to spawn them on you
I dont know anything about other tide games and I dont care I am playing this one
Then now you know about that drop down and are wary of it in the future. That’s the joy of gaining map knowledge.
Yes it’s intentional, the game doesn’t want you to have an easily defended backline unless you actually position smartly. If your vet stands with their back to a corridor they SHOULD expect enemies to come up behind them in the near future.
My point was just that this is an intentional part of the design to keep all players threatened and on their toes at all times. If it was easy for backliners to stay completely out of harm’s way just by standing behind the frontliners it would make them even more powerful and less skillful to play. Adapting to the constant risk of enemies sneaking up on you is a core part of the combat design. Hence why there are spawn doors basically everywhere.
Obviously enemies literally spawning in plain sight is bad and shouldn’t happen. Obviously I can’t convince you you should like this mechanic. I referenced previous Tide games because after getting used to and adapting to the constant threat back spawns presents, I’d honestly severely miss it if they were ever removed.
This has a good video example near the end. The player turns around from a “closed” corner, which has no visible spawn points, but because the game treats it as an “open” spawn (one where enemies aren’t spawning behind a door or with an obstructive environment) a horde immediately spawns to his rear. Given the rapidity of the ranged enemies nearby to begin firing it’s reasonably possible that they also spawned “in the open” once the player was turned away, but harder to tell. The other two are still clearly in their walking patrol animation, and there wasn’t enough time for them to be walking a pat route and one to start firing by the time the player turned back. That’d imply the patrol spawned there and one of the three was close enough to detect the player and begin attacking.
I’ve noticed that corner is a spawn point as well. I cleared it for loot and then all of the sudden a horde started flooding out of it while I was right next to it lol
From memory I don’t think there is and the player pans around after being downed and I don’t see one. Spawning from a door they’d also have had the foremost ones (or a dropdown or climbing over an obstacle) attacking first rather than being all clumped up and hitting the player from full to dead in 3 seconds (33 to 36).
Yeah that for sure looks like BS. I said it in V2 too but there really needs to be a set radius around players that enemies can’t spawn in. Cases like that are just immersion breaking and unreasonable.
I think the open spawns are also the primary culprit behind facespawned enemies, they’re supposed to be spawning before the player gets there but the system hiccups or something. Player positioning does seem to affect spawns in some specific areas but spawns don’t seem nearly as controllable as they were in VT2.
I can’t help but wonder if performance concerns is driving part of it, as they may want less enemies doing nothing but jogging towards the player because they can only spawn so many without taxing people’s systems too hard.
I’ve had similar thoughts. My current hunch is that the server handling the match sometimes doesn’t keep up with the game, or there’s some weird purposeful slowdown to limit bandwidth used, and so enemies sometimes don’t load in fast enough. That results in the players walking past mobs and individual mooks that are still waiting to spawn. When the server finally catches up, those enemies pop in, and immediately get their cheap shots.
Of course, between the technical problems already in the game, and how many people say Vermintide had this same problem, I wouldn’t be surprised if I was wrong.
I think you probably hit the nail right on the head about those weird spawns. I haven’t had hardly any of those since the beta though so idk about other peoples experience with it.
Daily reminder that this post exists. Have another new Darktide player in my friend group now. He plays zealot and didn’t know why his passive was inconsistent. Melee bleedthrough doing its diligent duty to muddle the new player experience.
Sound cues exist you are right on that.
Gotta say though the game still likes to spawn enemies right behind you. Had that happen today. Was standing with the back to a wall, no drop down in sight, no doors no nothing. I kill a trapper and bam get hit by a poxwalker from behind - not fun.
Then again in terms of spawns - my biggest gripe are still the pox bursters that spawn from the door you are standing next to and therefore have little to no time to react to. Would rather they can only spawn from doors a certain distance away from you.
Wtf is even the point of this sh*t? Why the hell don’t characters have stat sheets to tell us this?
I also don’t agree with most of these numbers. Why can zealot dark souls roll(slide) through damage when this is not that kind of game? Why does the veteran have such wonky numbers like getting more % melee kill toughness, making melee combat easier, while taking more damage while sprinting causing ranged combat to be harder? Isn’t that the opposite of what veteran should be? A lot of these weird hidden modifiers only seem to make the game more convoluted and confusing.
