Hi. Here are some suggestions on how to make Darktide more enjoyable to play in various areas from the middle of an encounter in-mission to crafting. As it is right now the game is just bad and the worst-in-class, actively hostile crafting system and total RNG of the game on all levels is not the only factor.
- Ranged enemies
Ranged enemies make the game feel worse to play. As they are now, they do not enrich gameplay freedom and only stifle it. Ranged shootouts are boring and have been done better by dozens, if not hundreds of other shooting games. Going from an aggressive push through the map in Vermintide 2 to playing peek-a-boo 2000’s cover based regenerating health (toughness in this case) shooter while being forced into a braindead 4-man deathball with your teammates due to the game’s mechanics severely punishing any other way of playing is boring and not what I play the series for. I would play a CoD campaign on Veteran if I wanted to take pot shots for 5 minutes every 5 feet during a mission.
Ranged enemies need to be significantly reworked. My proposed changes will make them significantly less of a threat. This is not because they’re “too hard” (they’re very simple to deal with), but because they actively make the game worse to play and are not FUN to deal with.
-The range for enemies to drop their gun and take out their firearm needs to be dramatically increased. Start at 4 times the current distance and adjust from there.
-Ranged trash should enter their melee state IMMEDIATELY upon ANY player entering their state-change distance in a 360 degrees circle around them (not just in their eyesight), EVEN IF the player has their ranged weapon equipped. If they are in the middle of firing, they should stop immediately.
-It should require a GREAT deal of distance for a ranged enemy to swap BACK from melee to their ranged weapon. A suitable distance for this is around 1/2-1/3 of the bridge that is dropped during a mid-level event in the upper city. This allows players to successfully gather a train of ranged mobs stuck in melee chasing them down as they go from one group to the next, to help lock down offensive fire against their team. As it is now, one slide dodge directly away from a ranged unit is enough to get them to take their gun back out. This is ludicrous and feels horrible, and makes ‘locking down’ ranged units a non-factor as it just doesn’t work.
-Ranged trash should not ever fire at a player engaged in melee combat.
-Ranged trash should not ever be able to fire THROUGH their allies.
-Ranged trash gunfire should NOT stagger you EVER, unless their accuracy/range/damage/rate of fire is nerfed significantly to compensate.
-Ranged specialists and elites can ignore these changes outside of the melee state range increase to keep them feeling special and more threatening.
These changes will make ranged trash units much more manageable, predictable, and fun to engage with in melee. Players will be able to proceed through the level without having to sit behind cover for 5 minutes every new room spawn. Has the game become “too easy” after these changes? Buff the frequency of specialists, elites, and melee trash to compensate.
- Crafting
This is simple. Remove the locks, make 380/500 stat pools attainable at any time. (Red 500s can be through special damnation completion currencies to keep a bit of grind/player retention.) Brunt’s armory should give 380s ONLY at level 30. If RNG is a must, the stat distribution can be random, though damage should be maxed in all cases. (Someone correct me if I’m wrong and there’s an instance where damage is a dump stat.) As it is now, “content drops” only serve to dilute the weapon pool and make getting what you actually want harder.
- Mission Board
Too many ‘dead’ options. With most of the game’s playerbase having left the game due to terrible design decisions, you only really have the die hard addicts left who can put up with the game and those who buy the game on sale. As other posters have said, anything below Damnation doesn’t exist for long-term players, and further, for those who have the items they want and play for a challenge, anything lower than high-intensity doesn’t exist. if you want to keep the mission board, perhaps scale back Threat 1/2/3 to one mission each, Threat 4 can have several (3?) for farming, penance, and warm-ups sake, and give Damnation all the slots that were freed up with modifiers and all.
- Latency
You need to make EVERYTHING client-sided. With a ping consistently between 70 and 80 every game, MORE THAN HALF of my hits, pushes, shoves, and dodges DO NOT REGISTER. This is absolutely unacceptable and the dedicated servers used for this game are the worst I’ve ever seen. Multiplayer games from the 1990s were legitimately 10 times better than whatever Fatshark is using here. A player’s success is out of their hands at this point, and so I have trouble taking each mission seriously or even wanting to play when not only is the core game designed to be played as passively and slowly as possible, but even when you perform user inputs perfectly, the server can just decide to say “You lose.” I would legitimately have more fun wiping on true solo hi-intensity damnation if it was client-sided, because then my actions would actually do something instead of direct hits simply not doing anything. My favorite example is dodging, shoving, and attacking a poxhound all in one leap only to get disabled when it works fine every time in the completely client-sided meat grinder.
Again, MAKE EVERYTHING CLIENT-SIDE PRIORITY.
I hope you’ll implement these changes so that Darktide is worth playing. As the dying playerbase that was dipping below the five year old prequel before the content drop shows, people don’t like the product as it is now, nor should they as it just isn’t good. (But with sweeping changes across the entire game it could be.) Best of luck.