I still like the game a lot. It is the most fun combat in any coop game. However, some problems become more and more glaring, the longer you play. The main problem this game has, is that it cascades small annoyances, which by itself aren’t too bad, but which all add up. They pretty much amplify each other, as each of them could be easily ignored, if everything else was fine and streamlined. I will go over the worst ones.
First of all, it starts with the loading times and the amount of times you are forced to go through loading times. It is horrible. This becomes super annoying, especially when you are being forced back onto the Mourning Star for absolutely no valid reason. I got the game on an m2 SSD and running on a 13600k and loading times are still way too high.
The next thing, which did not bother me too much in the beginning, is the way you handly cosmetics. I do spend cash on cosmetics and I also did in Darktide. In League of Legends for example, I spent a lot more than 100€. However, in Darktide you do everything related to cosmetics pretty much wrong. First of all, the balance between bought cosmetics and cosmetics gained ingame, is still absolutely horrible. The question that comes to my mind is “are you out of your mind”? You mostly offer rags ingame and most cool outfits have to be bought with cash. This feels super wrong. Cool cosmetics is what keeps people come back and play, if they can farm them. So obviously, most of the cool cosmetics needs to be farmable and only a fraction should be for real cash.
Seriously, whoever is doing your shop, either has no idea (about gameplay and psychology), or is actively and purposely sabotaging your game. It is completely idiotic, to a point that is hard to comprehend.
Also the prices are totally off. Yes, i did pay more than 20€ for some LoL skins, but that is a PvP game where you constantly see your skin and where your opponent sees it, when you slap him around. I would never ever spend this much for a skin in a coop game. It just doesn’t make sense.
Also your attempts to force us to see the cosmetics, appear super pathetic. Honestly, i’m sorry to say this, but I would fire the person responsible. This is pure sabotage and it is so obvious, that i wonder if the person in charge wants to ruin your steam rating on purpose.
On top, you force people into the Mourning Star and through the loading screen, just to show off the skins. You pause the game after the match, so we stare at the skins while waiting for the scores. Even the loading screen before a match, has the sole purpose of showing the skins. I honestly can’t even describe how pathetic this appears, after 360 hours and it gets worse and worse. This is not professional, it is super primitive and dragging the game down, and it becomes worse, the longer you play.
So unless you can magically remove all loading times, we need to be able to start matches without entering the mourning star, right from character select. We need to have shops in the Psykarium (can be via menu, or remove the loading screen and add the Psykarium to the Mourning Star) and we need to be able to start matches from the Psykarium and we need to get into the Psykarium, without going to the Mourning Star first (unless you merge them).
When we are in a high level lobby with obvious newb players, we need to be able to start matchmaking again, without being forced into the Mourning Star loading screen again, unless of course, you prefer that we stop queuing, if we don’t want to play high difficulties with new low level players. And after a match, we need a button that allows us to start matchmaking without going back to the Mourning Star, too.
It would be super nice, to be able to switch character without loading screen, or at least allow us to select another character in the matchmaking lobby. I also want to see the team’s loadout in the lobby, obviously.
One more thing that could realy need some improvement is the character frames. Overall it isn’t bad, but you could get much more out of it, if you improve on each line of frames in a more consistent manner. For example a frame for killing X enemies of a certain type, could get one more skull per 1million skills and a sort of mark for every 100k kills. Kind of bragging rights, which are easy to understand and which are an incentive to keep the grind up.
As i mentioned, there desperately need to be more outfits that can be obtained by playing and i do not mean rags (which is kind of embarassing imho). If you lower the prices, I would also buy more cosmetics. However not at those utterly pointless prices.
I realy hope you improve on those points. I’m fine with the crafting system and pretty much everything, but those annoyances realy drag the game down. Plus they add up and cause you to be much more picky. I wouldn’t be surprised, if a lot less people would complain about the crafting system and weapon RNG, if you would have had those points correct, right from the beginning.
One last thing i would like to mention is, that at first i thought, skipping the score board is a good thing, as it improves team work. However, I think i was wrong. I still try to get as many kills as possible. Even my girlfriend, who rarely has top scores, said she would like to see her performance, to see how she did and if she improves. I think the Vermintide scoreboard was pretty good. I would think about adding it back and maybe improving on it a bit, by adding some extre team based stats.
