Your post is a well constructed and thorough examination of every problem I’ve had with the game so far, kudos to you man.
FATSHARK, this post is one you should heed.
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Respect for post. I hope all the feedback we leave will find way to devs.
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Enemies always shoot at the player’s head, and with the exception of Heavy Gunners and Reapers have 100% accuracy. This is probably why it feels like cover does nothing right now.
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Appreciate the long post (though please give a tl;dr next time, there’s a lot of flavour text in there) but it might be good to put some context around your post. I’m assuming you’re L30 and playing high difficulties?
Edit: Derp, you said you were L30 in the opening paragraph. I lost it in the wall of text that was the opening, lol.
I have noticed one thing though, they should rename the class to Veteran Grenadier since the grenade generation is so good. I find myself throwing more grenades than i do shooting since shooting and ammo pickups are so unreliable
Howdy,
First off, I can always respect big posts with thought out logic, supporting references, and video links.
I think you bring alot of valid points to the hybrid Tide game that’s being attempted here with DT. I definitely give this a thumbs up so the conversation and brain tanking can happen between constructive feedback, such as this, and the dev team.
Thanks,
Gunship
I hope they don’t nerf anything, and instead buff everything else that needs it.
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I will not lie. I was a little salty when posting. Ultimately I’m enjoying the game but I’m just dissatisfied with Fatshark’s decision making.
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You made a solid post. I didn’t even realize the behavior of shooting while switching between ADS and unaimed until you demonstrated it. I play all the games you linked and now that you say it…Fatshark’s lack of experience with true FPS gameplay is starting to show itself. I don’t think these are intentional or malicious decisions (God Emperor I hope not.) But rather that they just don’t really have the background in DAKKA and so there’s lots of jank to sort out.
I would add that the issue with cover isn’t, I think, the height slider. It’s that Fatshark’s game engine has always erred on the side of being fluid rather than being specific. In VT2 hacking a horde down through a wall is a completely viable strategy because the game engine allows it. Melee weapons don’t hit walls, for you or the horde.
And DT is the same way. Don’t want to cram into a doorway with your other three friends swinging away at melee? Just attack the wall next to the door, you’ll kill plenty of horde that way.
My guess is that many of the meshes do not match what you see in game. They’re rounded or don’t track completely to the model, because the more detailed the mesh, the harder the AI has to work to calculate LOS. And their CTO has already stated that the game is CPU intensive. So I think this is a CPU saving short cut…which results in cover looking and acting functionally useless unless you’re so far inside it the AI can’t see you at all.
Noticed this tonight while playing and having our whole squad wiped because las guns were shooting us through the corner of a wall. For all the visual goodness of DT, I think it disguises some pretty unfortunate shortcuts that only really come out when the difficulty is cranked up and every shot matters. You can write off the occasional errant round that hits you in cover when you think you’re safe on Uprising…but in Heresy and up where one round is a huge chunk of your toughness, you start noticing every single instance where you’re getting shot and the enemy has no earthly business being able to hit you.
Like I’m really loving the Plasma Gun right now. And after using it more, I started noticing that I was able to kill guys through cover. I stopped aiming for the part of them I could see and started just aiming for center mass…and noticed I could kill guys lurking around corners through the corner itself. At first I thought “cool, the game has materials penetration and the Plasma Gun penetrates because of course it does.” But the more I look, the more I realize that’s not the case. The game just doesn’t give a ****. You’re either invisible to the AI for LOS purposes, or it can hit you. There is no real in between state.
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I wholeheartedly agree that the autoguns are trash, but I actually really like the braced autogun as a zealot for suppression and horde blasting lol
I haven’t had the time and energy to sink into DT, but I’ve noticed similar problems. Especially the bumpy ride that is combat flow right now. Weaving in and out of melee/ranged combat with dodges, parries, shoves, blocks, heavy and light attacks etc. Just doesn’t feel fluid.
On the point of firing during the aiming animation: It would be silly in real life to fire full auto and then try to bring the gun up to your shoulder and eye while retaining even a modicum of accuracy, but if not even MilSim games adhere to that reality, you know it must fiercely get in the way of gameplay and the enjoyment of it.
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I am too brother 
This game has great potential
Excellent post! Despite some good starts on how the game looks and feels to play in certain scenarios, Fatshark has really taken multiple steps back in a lots of areas. Darktide isn’t just a worse FPS than any of the examples you listed, it’s also just a worse Tide game missing the years of quality-of-life and refinement that was put into Vermintide 2. I don’t know how they’ve messed up on so many fronts that have already been solved not only by competitors but by themselves in earlier titles.
The only thing I can think of it that they had a separate team working on this that is somehow completely ignorant of the progress made on Vermintide. Still, can’t wait for that classic Fatshark fix-up two years from now, if it ever happens.
To be fair Fatshark has made sure that now:
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We spawn in with our friends now, at least after missions.
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We can see an indicator of our teammates ammo levels.
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We can switch chat filter on and off
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We can read descriptions for GPU impact on each video setting.
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We can equip a weapon without being backed you out of your inventory.
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We get partial XP for secondary objectives.
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We can expect some sort of scoreboard and damage numbers (in place of bars) post-launch
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We can compare weapons in the store to your currently equipped.
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We can adjust mouse sensitivity in-game
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We can hear elites and specials better
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We can test our gear in the grinder that was added after the last beta
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We can see the toughness of our allies
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We can now dodge with ranged weapons
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We can also tell that it’s us that work part-time as quality assurance for Fatshark lol
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You know what really pisses me off? That OP made this beautiful and curated post, basically doing the work that fatshark game design team/person should have done… and it will be ignored because it’s fatshark.
The only thing that will move this company is a huge amount of refund on the 29th.
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This was a fantastic read, Spazz. Thank you for writing it up. I very much enjoyed reading through your feedback. For me personally, when it comes to gunplay, F.E.A.R is the gold standard. That game does a terrific job of handling how guns should feel. Any developer planning on creating an FPS should at the very least play that game at least once (the first one not the later sequels) and take notes. It should be part of any aspiring FPS developer’s lexicon.
Anyways, one of the things that I didn’t like for how ranged is implemented in this game; is the fact that there’s no lean function. It’s kind of absurd how a game that utilizes a cover system in order to defend against heavy enemy fire, doesn’t allow you to peek out of cover to quickly line shots. This is another thing that F.E.A.R did better. In F.E.A.R you had these tight corridors that would make for perfect choke points against the enemy. It got very tactical when you engaged in these prolonged shoot outs with the Replica Soldiers. For example, using short bursts to suppress the enemy as you cooked a grenade in order to throw at them so you can swiftly slide into a better position.
Or watching both flanks as Replica Soldiers slowly advanced at you yelling out their orders. Then you peeking out from corner then using long bursts from an automatic rifle, so you can halt their advancement in order to create some breathing room. It was both engaging and awesome to play.
Suffice to say, I’d just appreciate if the keys Q,E allowed the player to lean.
My biggest beef is how the game show on the tutorial the suppression thing and is COMPLETE BS inside the game. You take cover and the enemies don’t stop shooting at you, the best is to shoot back suppressed.
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I think OP spent more effort deconstructing Darktide’s gunplay than Fatshark’s game designers were making it.
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As someone who now has close to 100 hours as the Veteran Sharpshooter I honestly can’t agree to most points you’re making here.
I’ll agree on that some guns feels a bit bad to use and having too high recoil and being uncontrollable as a person who is supposed to be a Veteran Sharpshooter. The gun combat being unresponsive is subjective, and I do agree that it’s uncommon but that is more realistic in my honest opinion. When would you ever be hip-firing a gun and then in the middle of it pull it up to your face and aim with it, while still shooting? You wouldn’t do that ever right? So why should the game be that way too? I honestly prefer it this way ngl, just something to get used to.
Autoguns have less ammo totals than Lasguns but Lasguns also take more ammo per shot without traits and in general have roughly the same ammount when it actually comes down to it. Autogun also kills alot better in general than the lastgun in shorter windows. Lasgun is more accurate tho and can as a result last longer ammo wise because you’re more accurately hitting weakspots but that usually only comes down to long range.
Regarding the toughness issue, I’m not sure where you’re getting it from since I’m almost always on full toughness with the elite killing one in ranged combat. You could with a lasgun use the weakspot kill toughness and pair it up with the 30 talent to show you the shooters ontop of what it normally does to easily dispatch the ranged units.
The talent “Camo Expert” is the most broken talent in the entire game, period. You can litterally stand still next to ANY ally and nothing but mutants and dogs will actually target you, including monstrosities. This talent allows a 100% safe and ZERO damage taken playstyle when doing ranged, especially if you have an Ogryn using a shield who can then infinitely take ranged damge when he bunkers down with the shield.
And we have a ton of weapons to pick from now in the pre-release open beta where some are meant for flak armor, carapace armor, unarmored and so on. Boltgun kinda does it all, including heavy burst on bosses or monstrosities. Plasmagun is also capable of one shotting most elites and specials in the game except a few targets on the highest diff.
Using a braced autogun or a lasgun basically allows me to more or less almost never touch my melee weapon even towards hordes since your grenades with bleeding mostly obliterates them or get them low enough for them to litterally die to anything else, given Poxwalkers has 300 hp and Infested Humans has 200 hp in Damnation difficulty, which is essentially nothing.
My biggest gripe with the Vet.SS is that some talents are more or less completely useless and that Camo Expert is so disgustingly OP it’s essentially Shade Vanish all over again.
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Also coherency of ammo regen with every special kill doesn’t stack , so if multiple Vets in game, they wont benefit each other, which means more ammo to be spent and less ammo to find.
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