So after 52 hours i have to write something as i fear some short sighted demands might be heard that are totally unnecessary.
I have to disclaim that i’m really much against some mayor points how the development and release management is handled and the communication could be much more streamlined and centralized. I also think that we get shafted by the price/value, the cut content, and the communication and management of these two points is also not so good.
Toughness:
The Toughness bleed trough is fine. It just tells you not not get hit in melee and any changes to that might break the game and the balance between ranged and melee combat. You effectively gain toughness by killing enemies in melee so any 100% mitigation on 100% toughness might break the balance even further. Classes like the zealot might be determined to have some sort of bleed through mitigation but very small and only to tank one or two basic hits.
Progression and Gear:
The progression is fine. I blazed through the missions and levels as i just kept playing and trying higher risk mission. I even felt reaching Level 30 after 40 hours felt too quick as i now fear i don’t have not as much motivation to keep playing my Char.
Which is a good transition to the point of sharing anything between chars. I don’t think its a good idea as this effectively shortens the game progression even more and as i said its really quick if you just keep playing and having fun. But i see the point that this is an artificial way to stretch game length and forces you to play more. Maybe give People a semi hardcore mode that tags a character as “Self Found” in the portrait to have the prestige of not boosting.
This ties into the shop. The shop is fine. Every two missions it has resettet so basically you play two missions collect money and go into the shop and look for stuff you can buy. If there is nothing - OK, just two more missions and you can take another gamble. Its a pretty good design for a simple system. For my taste i would like to see more tie-ins with the missions directly. You can play missions and get a reward you see before hand. Or maybe have the choice of the item reward or cash. And if the crafting system hits, the shop should default to Salvage and Black market tier to get a good base to upgrade and further tiers should be only obtained by upgrading, mission rewards, Emperors gifts or Contracts.
Overall to the people that are really focused on the progression and how fast it is. I think its fine and i can only recommend to waste less time in forums or chatroom’s complain about how much time it takes and that you don’t have time for that, to instead keep playing the game.
I dont really care either way about the progression but that isnt the game. The game is about completing the highest challenge you can. The problem is once i beat the hardest difficulty i want to add more challenge. Vermintide was able to satisfy this with deeds and weekly modifiers i could add onto cata maps for live server and cata 3 in modded server. These were fun and this game will also need difficulty modifiers to make it harder because currently level 5 with endless hordes on is already farmable with pugs. In my opinion the tzeentch twins was the most fun i had on vermintide and i would love to see that modifier added in this game.
I really don’t like the bleedthrough, despite having over 80 hours into the game. At higher levels that chip damage is going to happen anyways since toughness isn’t as good as thp is in VT2. The health attrition is going to happen, we don’t need the additional damage thrown on top of that.
Your views on progression feels like you ‘enjoy the journey’ instead of ‘enjoying the destination’ if you’re not feeling motivated to play once you actually have everything unlocked. Most of my personal time playing VT2 was once I got characters to max level, and my enjoyment of the missions increased significantly once I didn’t have to chase loot anymore.
From what we’ve seen so far from crafting, it’s leaving much to be desired, but I’m going to reserve judgement either way until it’s actually released. I’m not going to claim that it’s less then the already not good VT2 crafting, but I’m also not going to claim that it’s going to make the shop fine.
The main thing is that I don’t want to chase gear. I don’t want to grind levels. What I want is to play the semi random missions with my loadouts, the same way that I play VT2. The fastest way to get me to stop playing a game is to lock those parts behind a grind.
Not trying to get too nit-picky but “grind” implies you do a simple and dull task that repeats itself over and over. But this is not the case in Darktide. You do the same missions in the beginning the middle and the end in various difficulty. One could even argue it is, in parts, artificial as one part of the increased difficulty is to give the enemies just more health and damage.
Playing lesser difficulties because I don’t have the gear nor the levels is a simple and dull task. It’s why so many people dropped VT2, because they were limited to the lower difficulties for long enough that they got the impression that was the game instead of the game at higher difficulties at max level with ‘good’ gear.
The increase in difficulty is not only the increase in health and damage, but changes when and how enemies spawn. Anyone who thinks that rank 1 is the same as rank 5, just with more health and damage really hasn’t played at the higher difficulties.
Well so making higher difficulties easier too access by have faster and more progression or faster access to good gear will only burn the fuse out faster.
Its part of the fun to progress the difficulties and feel the gain in Power and Skill.
Its also a personal thing if you choose to run lower difficulties because its slow and steady or to take risks with grims/conditions/scripts and higher difficulties to level up faster but maybe fail and only get little progress. The system from an, objective standpoint, is good. Not perfect, but good.
Yes i know it also changes the directors behavior so i wrote “in parts”. Most of the Power you gain by items and levels is just too offset the increased life the enemies have and the rest boils down to gamesens and skill. Which is also good.
