Fatshark, I've got some fundamental questions about Itemization

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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Fatshark, CM’s, whomever may read this.

I’ll start by saying I like that we’re moving crafting and itemization away from being RNG for everything all the time, and that the locks are going away. I like that you’re giving us several dev blogs in quick succession. Genuinely great moves. Most especially, thank you for addressing Recon Lasguns in the latest patch.

That said, I’ve got a couple questions regarding the upcoming crafting system at it’s most basic level.

First, why retain the RNG component on item stats at acquisition? What role and purpose does this serve? I’m genuinely curious what game resign role this plays from your point of view.

From my perspective, it feels like you could ditch it and a lot of associated stuff altogether, and be out relatively little of value. If the purpose of RNG is to keep players engaged and fishing for “perfect” weapons, I don’t see the utility when you have so many different weapons available to grind through, and could attenuate that engagement through the upgrade grind instead. If it’s to make weapons “special” or “unique”, that’s a really hamfisted way of accomplishing that, and ultimately I believe results in more player angst and butthurt than genuine engagement, you can probably cover those bases with cosmetics+blessings/perks. Pulling slot machine levers at automated vendors isn’t fun, and was one of the core concepts most players were hoping you’d depart from entirely. While much of that has gone out the window with the new itemization, some still remains, and I’d like your perspective if you’re willing to offer it somehow somewhere.

Second, and this ties into the above, what’s the deal with capping item stats at 80%?

That representation feels basically meaningless, as 80% is simply a disguised 100% in that situation. If that’s to leave room for future expansion, we’re almost 2 years into this game and even with the upcoming itemization changes you’ve shown no indication that breaking that 80% cap is in the cards, so that feels unnecessary from that perspective. With regards to the new crafting system, is this something that could be elaborated on?

I’m hoping the new system works out to be less frustrating and angst-generating than the existing paradigm, looking forward to seeing what happens with it, but really had questions about these items.

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I don’t think they have confidence in their gameplay systems, or enough confidence to think that they can carry people’s interest enough that we would stick around if we had deterministic progression. They don’t want us to calculate how much time it would be to get everything in game and go “WTF, that’s way too long.”.

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I would say that the big thing that has me confused is why they are so married to the random stat block idea.

Everything else actually seems really positive about it but i don’t know why they are so dead set on having the caps as well as making it so we still need to find a good start block just to start the grind itself.

The caps i could maybe understand if they still intend on bringing in red items that go up to 100 but it doesn’t even seem like that’s the plan. Ideally it should just be a point buy where if someone wants to set one start to 100 and another lower than so be it.

I’m trying to stay balanced with this, it’s definitely a positive step in the right direction but it feels like those 2 factors are something they for some reason just cannot let go.

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Because they still have no confidence in their product and can’t possibly understand why anyone would be playing without a carrot dangling in front of them.

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They were confused with the amount of people who put in hundreds of hours into VT 2. They were expecting people to put in at most 100 hours into the game and then move on to other games, despite that amount of time not even being close enough to getting reds on every character or the gameplay being good enough to play beyond getting said reds.

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Even then most people have the common sense to stick to one progression system instead of just doing a weird homunculus system that tries to cram rng and a classic progression system together after people already complained about too much grind.

Even Warframe, thought to be the grindest game of all time, had the sense to have a lot of their systems be deterministic like the Incarnons system but just locked to a weekly rotation.

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Don’t give them ideas to introduce another time lock, the hourly and daily shops were bad enough already.

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