Fixing Expeditions

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
1

I love the concept of Expeditions and hate to see the player count drop. I have the following small fixes that will breathe a ton of life into the mode:

  1. More things to buy in the sanctuary. Instead of just grenades and supplies, also provide temporary weapon and armor augments. Don’t make these bought with salvage, have them bought with plasteel, diamantine, and ordos. This rewards players for their massive hordes of resources that they will never otherwise spend. You can even throw in skins to buy that only show up in the sanctuaries. Additionally, I would put actual Deadsiders at these stalls to sell the items.

You will get closer to chaos wastes without stepping on the toes of Mortis Trials.

  1. Make some areas of interest unlock a new area of interest. This gives the players a potential planning dilemma to go for more or to move to door or extract.

  2. Put a “crypt” key in every zone at one of the sites of interest. If you collect each crypt key, it unlocks an alternative ending at the last zone where you fight your way through an underground cultist base and fight one or several bosses for additional reward.

  3. Most obvious, but there needs to be more than sandy map and sandy map at night.

  4. DEAR GOD FIX THE BOTS. They don’t rez you. They hit like wet paper and fold like it, too. What’s hilarious is that they don’t even use their grenades and yet, when you spawn in via quickplay, you don’t have any, they’ve spent half your ammo, and you’ve got 3 bars of corruption.

At a bare minimum, have it so that the first time a bot is replaced, the player gets to start fresh with full health, ammo, and grenades. It’s so punishing to just play the damn game via quickplay and the player count has dropped enough that that is the only viable route.

***EDIT** ----Here is a recap of some of the good ideas from below:

**Game modes:

Timed Aggression –** Killing enemies slows the timer, killing enough elites adds time. Rewards players for killing and aggroing enemies.

Boss Hunt - a “hunt” mode, where each level has a boss or series of bosses and you have to try to find and kill them before time runs out.

Escalation - The mission starts at Malice (or lowest difficulty) and each 0:00 spawns a horde, a taunt from the enemy over vox (or warning from Hadron) and bumps the difficulty to the next tier.

Transitioning to a new zone could bump the diff up as well, or simply just adjust the timer.

**
Patrol Elimination**:If they’re going to have patrols have a way to intercept and take them out fast enough before they call reinforcements. Add those backpack radio enemies that they have.

Sites of Interest Suggestions:

**
High Rad Zone:** high Rad sites of interest where you dip into a crater to extract tech remnants, but take corruption damage. Not another auspex interrogation, but a speed run site of interest. **

Underground Arena:** a site of interest where the player unlocks a tunnel segment filled with a boss. You could decide to move through it, collect the loot and fight the boss, or ignore it and go to another site of interest. **

Boss Spawn:** Create a new Unique Objective (once per game only accessible after z2) on the map for players to intentionally spawn a boss. Give the boss fights flair for this, think the twins fight with mechanics. They already have the electric zones with switches.

Battle Servitor: open up a site to reveal a battle servitor that we get running. Harder to implement, but would be incredible. also spawn a boss once it gets going.

Underground Zone: , looking at the assets they developed for the Sanctuaries, they definitely should make an entire map that is about half underground. It’s a missed opportunity.

Weapon Cache: the occasional ammo or grenade added to a site of interest would be greatly appreciated by players as well

Sanctuary Upgrades:

Armory: we could spend ordos/diamantine/plasteel to boost our weapons past 80%. It would be so simple to implement.

I also really like the idea of being able to temporarily buy weapons from other classes, sort of how Melk has his shop, where you might find a weapon with awesome synergy from another class. Have like three weapons available at every sanctuary.

Add chem or fire or electric damage to weapons. Modifiers that increase Rending or impact, etc.

They don’t have to be game breaking, just “tune-ups.” I think I’d do 10% on a weapon per sanctuary. All weapons are currently capped at 80%, so you wouldn’t be able to boost both weapons to 100% unless you had a 5 zone expedition.

It would be an easy way to slot a new NPC into the roster as well.

Tip Jar: You could have a little table you throw the currency on when you have more than you need or even sell back upgrades. Basically, a tip jar, leave it on the table for teammates and anything else once players leave the shop is tipped to swagger.

Buff Station: Buy temporary talent points. One per scavenging zone. It would really open up new class builds.

“Desecrated Sanctuary” that you enter, fight some boss and horde, then enter airlock into the good Sanctuary to resupply/heal, etc and then go to airlock to exit to the Rad-Wastes

2

Night maps should also be friggin’ dark. It’s as bright as a Skyrim night.

3

True. Imagine running up on a patrol and BOTH the player and the patrol being surprised.

That said… not all nights are dark, so moon-filled nights should be bright.

4

For me it’s trying to be like helldivers. But I would make it more like chaos wastes.

Just add some rogue lite elements, have you do a series of expeditions so when you go to the sanctuary, you stop and vote on where you want to go next. Need a lot more maps and variety.

If they’re going to have patrols have a way to intercept and take them out fast enough before they call reinforcements. Add those backpack radio enemies that they have.

5

You could also have High Rad sites of interest where you dip into a crater to extract tech remnants, but take corruption damage. Not another auspex interrogation, but a speed run site of interest.

6

It would also be cool to have a site of interest where the player unlocks a tunnel segment filled with a boss. You could decide to move through it, collect the loot and fight the boss, or ignore it and go to another site of interest.

7

Adding the occasional ammo or grenade to a site of interest would be greatly appreciated by players as well

8

Additional idea: spend tech remnants or other resources to equip weapons your class usually does not have access to.

People would love that. Have like three weapons available at every sanctuary. Could get some interesting combos

9

there’s no more fixing, when it’s dead as game mode and so now it has a bad reputation and players will never come back to it. especially with grindy penances like the 250k tech remnants

mortis trials in comparison is way more alive and played by people than expeditions

10

i agree with some of it and recently started trying it out again and it’s pretty fun. the missions without timer are great. no timer completely fixes the bad dynamic this gamemode had. people don’t split up, which means you don’t break the spawns, which means the whole thing stays interesting.
skitarii being able to automate the auspex kind of is removing another main gripe i had with expeditions.

agree also with some more for-fun things to add to it. it needs a lot more.

i think it’s a matter of marketing, if they keep going in a good direction with expeditions and actually make an effort to communicate this to people (the current no timer maps werent advertised and they improve the mode tenfold for me) then people will come back to it.
maybe add some more penances/cosmetic rewards as a carrot to bait people back in, worst case.

people love the concept of “the engoodening of x”

11

I think the mode still has promise if they implement the kind of fixes suggested here.

And Fatshark does actually read their forum

12

Scrap the mode and use the assets to make adventure/havoc maps.

The entire idea of the mode is an anti-thesis to what darktide is about: engaging in hybrid melee/ranged combat.

Yet the most effective way to play expeditions is to rush and avoid combat whenever possible. It also is so open in terms of map design that players get surrounded and swarmed from all directions, which is inherently hard to balance, given the already high power creep.
They made an attempt with the extra bombs and grenades to offset that but it just doesn’t work and isn’t fun.

It boggles my mind why you’d think that tide players would enjoy that.

13

honestly i was of the same mind but the missions without the timer change that dynamic completely and made me reconsider. if fatshark removes the timers, i think the mode is equivalent to adventure mode and worth building upon as a gamemode to move back and forth from. there are other major structural issues with it too though, like how people can just speedrun to the door and cut everyone else off, so fixing it up would take a bunch of effort.

that effort requirement is probably why realistically you are correct because i doubt fatshark would make even just the timer removal change. they’ve shown time and time again they don’t walk back mistakes. but the potential is honestly there

14

Mortis has 1 search queue and I’m still managing empty games. Alpha/Beta gridpoint I haven’t been able to solo because people keep joining. I end up playing normally with people showing them secrets in the mode, everyone wants to clear the map and find every boss because the timer isn’t there. I literally asked @gpkgpk to make me a mod that turns off the timer for expeditions when using solo mod so I could go back to solo desert mirror’s edge mode if I choose, because people are playing the early grids.

15

Trivial little thing if anyone wants it for the same reasons listed above.

SoloExpeditionHelper (2).zip (1.5 KB)

16

I disagree. It makes no difference. Just because rushing is the most effective way to play, doesn’t imply that removing the timer makes it fun.

The fun of tide combat is being forced into corners and walls, having to fight. Expeditions is pretty much purely open space. You can kite/run away indefinitely if things go sideways. It fundamentally changes the way the combat flows and not in a good way.

It has been and always will be a waste of dev time, considering what makes the core of tide games. And it’s a shame that the design lead is too blind to understand the success of his own game (I’m sure some people remember the interview and his comment about not expecting or understanding why people play Vermintide 2 for longer than 50-100 hours)

17

I feel like that’s pretty ridiculous. I don’t sit here and tell people Havoc isn’t a challenge even though you can tell people to run all HP curios so you can infinitely revive them as stealth zealot and win any situation. Similarly you can inflict upon yourself in this mode an elimination condition where people can’t be revived, and get tons of additional pressure vs auric.

The renditions of ‘bread crumb speedrun’ were not very compelling but this survival mode one with very high tempo above auric and no cranking of guns like havoc (oh how I wish you could have just the melee buffs of enemies) is actually pretty fun. And the orientation of the board flipping so much stuff around makes a run more fresh than the usual lets go scan this garbage can and then wait for a tree to stop computing.

Like it or not there are players out there who don’t really like how same-y Havoc can be without friends (the 5 maps doesn’t help) who would appreciate something that gets the blood flowing more than auric maelstrom. Which honestly at this stage in power creep can be easier than an auric adventure a lot of the time, freaking hive scums with 5 bazookas…we exist. We wait for cataclysm, but this is a good half step in the mean time.

And when you’re playing the mode as a team now breaking ranks just means you get to fight even more stuff. Its great.

18

If FS really want to make Exoedtions somewhat better then they could look on some sucesfull games from that genere like Far far West, yeah sure that game is Early Acces but its core is actually there from begining and devs only need add more staff to keep it fun and fresh.

19

Solid ideas!!!

20

That would be good intermediary staging point like a “Desecrated Sanctuary” that you enter, fight some boss and horde, then enter airlock into the good Sanctuary to resupply/heal, etc and then go to airlock to exit to the Rad-Wastes