I’ve been playing again after a roughly six-month hiatus, and I’m quite disheartened with the feel of the game. There are only three difficulties right now: Fading light 2 > Fading light 1 > Everything Else. Anything outside of havoc 20+ feels like playing Diablo 3. There are enemies on the screen, they probably do different things. Maybe they have different armor types or resistances. You don’t care about any of that though, because they’re all going to disintegrate in the next few seconds. Maybe you contributed to their destruction, maybe not, but there’s three more players in the match than there needs to be, so don’t worry about it.
This is not a fun place to be. Havoc matches are unreliable, and still frustratingly confined to a subset of the total map pool. But currently it’s the only place to go if you want a match that actually benefits from having a full team. Auric and below are now just competitions to feel relevant.
And just to preempt any “it’s always been this bad” comments: I’m six months out of practice, coming into a version of the game that has had at least 2 major balance passes, and I’m more bored than I’ve ever been. It’s never been this bad. I’ve read a lot of overly dramatic hyperbole on this forum, and been guilty of it myself, but there genuinely isn’t enough fight to entertain four players anymore.
The easiest solution in my mind is to just make havoc more accessible. You have a game mode that’s still fun and challenging, utilize it. Make two new difficulties that you can quick play into and have them correspond to havoc 29 and 40 in terms of difficulty (or whatever the ceilings are for fading light 1 and 2). Put a big fat banner on them that says, “these difficulties are hard for the sake of being hard, and offer no unique rewards”, and let players have fun.
IMO another issue having custom matchmaking and a lobby browser would solve… Give the players what they want, not what you think you want them to want (Expeditions…?)!
Make havok great again, ya?
You need to look at havok thru FS eyes.
We have a game with very high repetave, and there is nothing to do outside main company exclude of achivements and weapon proression.
There is no activity of global plot and new mission content coz FS was making new gamemodes (and already failed twise, hope there will be not a third attempt).
u need some endgame conception ppl could spent time for.
Until “lock and loaded” there was a scoundrely and endlessly grind of weapons - there were no chances to get ideal, so you try and try and try …after about 1k hs i harly could count 2 or 3 i considered as really good.
And when they added “craft” this contception was cast away and they need new one.
Havok is it.
You need to spent a lot of time, really a lot, not coz of some incredible difficult with right way, but coz of ppl. stange build, lack of determination, low skills - its all a really huge heap of obstackles and you cant avoid them, except of premade group. And all of them were made intentionally.
So havok is so disgustive coz it designed to be so.
To offer FS to change it … well good luck
There will be more chances to change Havok thru ideas of some new time spent conceptions that could attract ppl then thru critic of lacks.
This isn’t about remaking Havoc. Keep it as is, change it, whatever. I’m simply saying that the difficulty in Havoc is the only interesting difficulty in the game at the moment. The lowest effort, shortest-term solution for the developer would just be to make it more accessible. In the same form, as a separate entity, I don’t care. The rest of the game’s difficulty needs a big rework, but that’s not what this post is about. Just give me the fun that is available now, and work on a longer term solution later.
I think they just need to keep pushing the balancing across the board and thus - make other difficulties outside of havoc relevent again and not boring
You can’t just press a button and queue for a match. Instead, you have to use the Party Finder, join a group, and wait for the game to start.
The difficulty is so extreme that almost everyone is forced to play the meta. With random players, most matches feel like the same “Gold Toughness Bubble Inferno Simulator” over and over again.
The modifiers aren’t fun, the pacing is slow, and matches take too long, making the whole experience exhausting.
Haven’t played Havoc since… forever. I mainly play Auric (Maelstrom) and the challenge of the missions varies a lot (in my case). I cannot count how often I had to save all 3 team mates because they had gone down and by doing that saved the run. But, of course, sometimes I go down at the end as well because, yeah, I am not THAT good at playing this game. I do mistakes. Quite often, tbh…
What I do is starting a new operative. Level them up, delete them, create the next one. Rinse and repeat. I don’t know why but this somehow keeps me interested in the game (that’s the reason why I am always low on diamantine).
But I get your point. There is this one thread named “maps, maps…MAAAAPS” and I think that new maps would re-kindle the interest of many old players.
But we all painfully know: FS doesn’t listen.
It is very frustrating because, despite all the negative things, I really like this game. So much potential…
I don’t play Havoc for a number of reasons, but Auric really doesn’t seem challenging enough (the win rate is probably 95% now, but I remember a time when it was actually 50%). So I’m actually happy when someone leaves a team and no one rejoins. Just recently, it was me (HS with a crate and a saw) and a psyker with a revolver - almost from the very beginning, and we made it. Finally, the feeling of “play carefully, stay close” has returned, instead of “run ahead before someone else destroys everything on the screen before you.”
It would be nice if there is a “mission for team of three” (or even two) modifier, specifically for quickplay. No additional rewards.
You are both looking at it thru the specific prism of this board, i would however suggest to abandon the notion that the same meal that was served thousands of times will get better if:
there’s less spice and less taste in it
is eaten slowly
there’s a one less person at the table
“Lets play the map we played 200 times time already, but this time…” is the problem irregardless of any possible added qualifier we might or might not agree about!
More content and even more content is the way out of it, anything else is just reheating the same old stale soup and deluding yourself into thinking that less salt and holding the spoon with left hand is gonna make all the difference…
Surely you must know by now that I have been the biggest advocate shouting for new maps non-stop, but that doesn’t mean the balance is not an issue, nor does it detract from the OP position of Havoc gameplay being compared to vanilla.
I have also, on many, many occasions on these forums, also stated that I believe the severe lack of new maps makes everyone knitpick and pick the game apart at the bones…and thus become overly focussed or judgemental of certain aspects. i.e. people wouldn’t moan as much about balancing etc if they weren’t bored out their skulls from lack of new maps/weapons/enemies…but I still believe balance in it’s current form does also play a big part in the OP position of the game being boring. Boredom also stems from lack of challenge.
Auric should be nearly impossible (like it used to feel!) and then the different difficulties beneath it may cater to less sweaty folks. That is how a tiered difficulty system is supposed to work. Rewards should be equal across all difficulties - then people will play the one they find fun.
Unfortunately FS incentivise people to punch above their weight by offering bigger rewards per tier…thus invalidating the very reason for them in the first place.
That might seem like a different issue but it’s all balancing, and how out of whack it is ATM.
I say leave Havoc to rot even as long as the base difficulties become the core pillar that the balance revolves around. You say Auric is boring, so let devs make balance changes that will make Auric feel like the highest difficulty. Let’s not go back to focusing on Havoc and damning every difficulty below in the process. It will just make them an even bigger snooze-fest than they are already.
It’s a bit like the issue with enemy spam, in a sense. Players are too powerful so Chaff enemies become a non-existent-threat. The best solution would be to nerf the player power or buff the power of Chaff enemies but the devs instead decided to start spamming Elite enemies. Now Elites are the Chaff and hordes of standard Chaff are an even bigger non-threat than ever before.
Yeah I love the start to Glorianna! Everyone moans about barrels…but just be aware of surroundings surely?! If there is an active barrel then don’t stand near it. Not rocket science.
I’d LOVE to see that initial area expanded upon…having to move from hab block to hab block, all crumpling and broken apart and abandoned. Would be very cool. More verticality would be appreciated as many maps feel very horizontal.
That’s the forum talk speaking here, in reality Auric is plenty challenging for a significant portion of the players, with “keine Auric” crowd being a very real thing. I wager that between the two of us we can pull 6000 hours together, don’t we?
Are we really fit to pass ever encompassing comment on difficulty or do we transcend it?
We are labouring under an absurd misapprehension that for people like us Auric should be anything but the most uneventful walk in the park!
Furthermore some of you are hell bent on absolutely missing this crucial point, and instead of accepting the sad but very real fact, you insist on balancing the difficulty around people with thousands upon thousands of hours!
You offer regression instead of progress, looking to the past to navigate the future instead of looking to the future to navigate it. You can’t unmake and rollback the thousands of hours we invested in getting better at the game and we should stop trying to do that!
I may agree with you @silentbob515 if it wasn’t for the fact that Darktide offers players zero agency in the matter. Auric is the highest difficulty we can play the game and there’s nothing we can do about it. No modded realm, no twitch mode, no select-able modifiers. And I want the game to present a coherent & decent challenge at its highest difficulty at the very least, not the current mess we have where half of the enemy roster’s existence is inconsequential and has to spam 300 specials per game in order to maybe present a threat.
It is the hardest difficulty in the game and there are plenty of other tiers for people who want less of a challenge.
Why on earth should the most challenging difficulty be easy?
Auric is not meant to be for every average player. Hence my point about rewards and how they should be the same across the board. If that happened then you would see a great shift in where people spend their time.
The game should offer something for everyone (which is the whole point of tiered difficulty) but if the absolute top peak is a walk in the park for the 2k+ hour players (ie the most loyal playerbase who likely make up the biggest portion of whale cosmetics purchases) then it’s not offering somethin gfor everyone is it?
i.e. the best testers with the best experience, all chiming in with differing views on the forums, but where most people align on challenge.
Easiest difficulty should be almost impossible to die. Hardest difficulty should be almost impossible to survive. The varying middle should be scaled proportionally between. It’s not a crazy concept.
Eh? You do realise the game has changed more than we have right? You’re acting as if the game has remained exactly the same for the thousands of hours we’ve played. Clearly that is not the case. Power creep has occurred and needs to be rebalanced.
If you want power fantasy then simply drop down a difficulty or 2. Why is that not the most elegent solution??
Biggest issue with the game, let people pick and choose between all existing modifiers and difficulties and host whatever games they want and add a browser with all hosted games.
I recently played through a trenches map on auric as hive scum with heavy sword and zealot as catachan sword as duo, and the game is still plenty challenging. I see your point, but you can’t achieve the difficulty you want without completely nerfing every class and most weapons to the ground. I don’t know what “coherent & decent” challenge means, because in my experience you can absolutely find it in this game, just not every game and not with every loadout
