I was lucky enough that my 6 week recovery period from a surgery timed well with the release of Darktide, the followup to some of my favourite games (Vermintide 1+2). So please no judgement when I say that this review is coming from someone who has now spent close to 300h in this game. This is feedback on the issues I see that needs a overhaul and to be adjusted in a prioritized order from my perspective. This feedback is coming from someone that plays on the higher difficulties and takes the game somewhat seriously. Please keep in mind that that I really like and enjoy the majority of the parts of the game, but these things needs attention asap.
- Bugged pox Bombers - If anything comes close to being a game breaking bug, it’s the pox bombers that are “immune” to being pushed or CC’d. When they are close enough for you to find out if they are bugged or not it’s too late to do the only counterplay to it - killing it before it’s close. This issue seems to happen more often when I’m playing with an American friend (I’m in the EU) and tells me that it has something to do with latency. When playing with only EU players the bombers are pretty consistent, they bug out around 5-10% of the time. When playing with my US friend today we had 5 bombers in a row that was not pushable/CCable.
Something else that makes me think that this is a latency issue is that when mutants charge and you try to oneshot them with the thunder hammer during the charge, the hit sometimes does not register. Me and my american friend today hit the same mutant at the same time with a heavy charged attack with thunder enabled and it didn’t die. This tells me none of the hits (which should individually oneshot it) registered.
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Map selection - It happens often that there is no single Damnation run available to play. And the ones that tend to come in rotation are the same maps over and over again. Yesterday was brutal, we ran consignment yard probably 5 times. If we could just pick any “vanilla” mission on a specified difficulty that would be fine. Missions with modifiers we are fine with waiting for.
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Priorities for fixes with included lies or inconsistensies on announcements from FS - One of the classes with arguably one of the most important roles are almost unplayable since the last patch (surge staff VFX making people nauseous after 1 game, peril stuck at 100% for multiple seconds). This stuff was acknowledged a few hours after the patch was released on thursday. In the patch notes for the same update (1.0.0.20) it says “We feel that unlimited store pages are likely to create confusion and a bad user experience.”, literally 2 days later the p2skin shop got HOTFIXED to add another page where you can buy the previous cosmetics. But leaving the seizure inducing VXF for the CC staff during the same weekend that you add DOGS MODIFIER is somehow OK. That tells me alot about the priorities.
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No scoreboard - I get no feedback to see if I’m improving, if my new build is doing good, how useful I am and the like. I’m just speechless about the reasoning for removing the scoreboard in A GAME.
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Gear progression - It’s pretty OK when leveling up. Going from gray → green → blue you can buy some random stuff from the shop to try different weapons out. Tells me it’s designed for casual play. When you get to 30 and actually start playing the game, you want specific perks on your weapons and curiuos.
Weapons with a high base modifier together with the blessings and perks you want is almost impossible to get. I’m somewhat fine with that this early in the game. However with Curios - you ideally want HP (except vet), stam regen, block efficiency, toughness regen. To get 3 of those to be able to reroll the last one is an absolute insane time sink with an almost impossible way of achieving it. Hedge actually acknowledged this and gave his answer which you can see in this thread https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkTide/comments/zlb8wo/perfect_weapons_are_meant_to_be_raredifficult_to/ . That answer makes me want to stop playing this game until we know how much less of a time sink getting the weapons we want will be. It’s really telling when the devs don’t even wanna play their own game. Why do you want the perfect weapon to be almost unobtainable? Just making one build (the way you can in VT2) would take hundreds and hundreds of hours. On top of this, curios and currency are bound to a character which makes it an even bigger time sink.
btw: When cost hits 0 on rerolling perks, just make us able to pick what we want. I had to reroll toughness regen 15% 9 times to get to 20%, it makes you feel stupid wasting all your time like that. The 2nd time I had to do that I just gave up after 8 times (hundreds of rolls), I’m leaving it at 15%.
Also wondering what I’m supposed to do with thousands of diamantine and millions of ordo dockets that I can’t use for anything?
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Shadow nerf to move tech - Before 1.0.0.20 we were able to use the heavy attack peak lunge into slide movement tech. There was no mentioning of nerfing this in the patch notes which does not look good for future patch notes. The same patch also made sliding when carrying batteries for medicae/events way faster which there was also no mentioning of in the patch notes. The consequence of patchnotes disconnected from the code is that trust is completely lost when there’s no transparency like in these examples.
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Game design around cosmetics - You cannot obtain any cosmetics for just playing the game, they have to be bought with real money. The placement of the cosmetics shop and how much you see the cosmetics someone is wearing in each step before entering a game (mourningstar, getting ready screen, loading screen and game about to start screen, ending screen) makes this feel predatory. Why don’t we have any cosmetics for beating hard things on damnation for example?
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Map design - 30-40% of each map is pretty much unbearable without running 2 veterans due to all the ranged mobs that spawn. This bring me straight to the next point.
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Comp meta for serious games - When playing serious games (damnation high intensity and/or with 2 grims) there are certain comps that can do it way more efficient than others. The current one imo is running 2 or 3 vets and the last one specialized on CC where the surge staff currently outdoes everthing else by far. Noone brings an ogryn to a serious run. When I myself play ogryn on damnation I feel like a useluss lump that are mostly being in the way 50-60% of the time and my only job is to make sure my ranged team mates doesn’t get hit in the back. The reason for bringing so many vets is that the entire game seems to be designed around ranged enemies, and vet outdoes everyone else in that important role.
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Weapon meta - Talking about these serious runs, there are very limited weapons that are viable to bring in these runs. If you bring anything other than powersword/mk12 lasgun as vet, thunder hammer/flamethrower as zealot and surge/voidstrike as only psyker, grenade gauntlet for Ogryn - you are not being as efficient/useful for the team as you could be. Playing on damnation high intensity requires a high amount of damage and control to take down the enemies in the tempo that is needed. What I’m trying to say is that the span between the worst weapons and clearly best weapons for each class is way to big. Generally the melee weapons are too weak.
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Dogs - they are very yanky right now. They can’t be dodged consitently. They go flying very often. Excluding the bugs they are way too tanky for a disabler. I’m guessing FS wanted more data on dogs this weekend, hence the dogs modifier. Doing this without hotfixing the Surge VFX combined with limited map selection is just a painful experience.
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Bulwark design - if you try to get out of a clutch situation, pretty much every enemy is manageable in some way except these. If a stungrenade not thrown from behind could also stun them they would be somewhat OK.
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Crashing - I know FS are working on this. Game sometimes crashes multiple times in a single game, even with the lowest settings on a 11700k with 32gb RAM and RTX3070. Tends to crash in the most critical situations aswell which can make a whole game be a loss instead of a win.
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QoL - please give us a menu for the activities in Mourningstar. Having to run around is just an annoying time sink. Make the running optional please.
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Penances - designed so that you will have to act like an absolute a-hole in games. And alot of people try to do these in random games which is extremely frustrating for everyone else. If you thought having a scoreboard induces toxicity, what was the reasoning here?
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Bots - They are worse in every way from Vermintide. Just to name a few issues:
- Level 1 bots with completely useless weapons
- No curios
- Not being able to take cover
- Can’t tell them to pickup medpacks or scripts
- Chugs all the medicae (which are a rare resource on damnation)
- Sometimes falls of the map or through the floor
Some stuff like bugged maps (I’m looking at you Throneside), weekly mission design and issues/consequences due to dedicated server I’m not gonna mention here.
As I said I really like the game, lots of aspects about it are great! This feedback exclusively focuses on the things I see needs to get attention asap.