BTW, am I the only one whose first thought was “oh great, another blinding psyker visual effect (VFX)” ?
These VFX are cool AF but are blinding and cause issues, eye strain, headaches and worse. There needs to be a way, in-game by default to at least turn off the light flashes on hit and even cast.
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Pauses purgatus spam
Huh? You say something?
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Darktide has 93 different weapons currently spread among 44 distinct different types with dozens of blessings layered on top that can radically alter playstyle. That’s already a ton of weapons to handle.
Likewise, many of the weapons you’re mentioning aren’t necessarily useful or appropriate. Most every enemy in Darktide would, on tabletop, be T3 W1 with at best a 5+sv, with the most heavily armored dudes sporting 4+ carapace armor, and the scariest things in the game being Spawn and Ogryns that tabletop considers just beefy infantry. There’s no battle tanks, no power armor, no true monsters, nothing for the awesome armor-penetrating ability of a Melta to display itself. What would a faithfully representative Meltagun do in that situation besides be a Plasma gun with half the rate of fire and a fraction of the range? Volkite weapons are ancient Heresy era tech that is practically nonexistent in the 41st millenium even among forces that aren’t scavenging equipment from dead grunt guardsmen the way Grendyl’s warband is.
ME3 meanwhile also tanked that franchise so hard that I stopped pre-ordering videogames entirely as a result, and haven’t bought another Bioware title since (not that Bioware’s put out anything worth buying in the meantime). ME3 is the poster child of developer lies and mismanagement beyond almost any other titles as far as I’m concerned. It had its own controversies from launch by DLC’ing content that was supposed to be included (the Prothean teammate) and then having to put out “free” DLC just so their ending could craft * some* sort of coherency to it.
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Hi,
Could you please let your animator know about these issues
Animations break game mechanics - Warhammer 40,000: Darktide / Bugs - Fatshark Forums
What would a melta do? Lets see… A sustained beam that makes very quick work of armored opponents like Crushers, Scab ragers, Maulers, Bulkwarks, etc but might just not be so hot against a fast moving light or no armored opponents like dreg ragers. Personally I would love a weapon to finally counter the 20+ scab rager/ mauler hordes that isn’t a bolter or plasma gun. Sort of like how Jurgen from the Caine books used his melta against just about everything orc grunts. In fact right there is a pretty good niche for it - something good against heavy armor that isn’t severly handicapped against multiple opponents. Is it a “must take” faithful representation of tabletop? No, just like all 90+ other weapons in Darktide that have nothing in common with their 40k kin aside from a name and being either a melee weapon or a gun.
We don’t need a “40k nerd or gtfo” gatekeeper. We have enough morons gatekeeping as is. We NEED people who actually give enough of a damn about this game to hold the developers feet to the fire every time they pull this “oh we will do that later, pinky promise” bull. We don’t need yet another barrage of excuses and red herrings trying to justify this crud in some silly “it will get better” fantasy.
So if you can’t come up with an actual reason why no actually new weapons have been added after two years despite all the sources, please just be quite.
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I guess my question would be how would that offer something different from the current Bolter/Plasma gun? Both do that exceptionally well already, to the point people complain about them endlessly for exactly this ability, and Meltas have never been well known for dealing with lots of opponents (and typically are very pointedly limited in volume of fire), so would be a weird niche to fill. I could see being a capable anti-Boss weapon (as the PG currently is actually rather poor in that role due to overheating cutting down DPS dramatically against targets it can’t kill in one or two shots), but most missions don’t feature enough Bosses to really justify that on its own (and the Bosses we have aren’t terribly heavily armored either, just bulky).
Jurgen uses his meltagun against everything because its what he carries, not necessarily because its the most ideal weapon. He also ends up fighting things much scarier than what we face in Darktide, and the average Ork grunt is a dramatically stronger opponent than most anything in Darktide short of an Ogryn. Cain and Jurgen end up fighting Great Daemons and all sorts of crazy stuff, but for the Rejects the big bad at the end of the mission is just a renegade Guard captain with a Refractor Field.
Most of the weapons in Darktide are pretty spot-on in terms of how they work relative to 40k lore/tabletop, the weapons generally aren’t radically re-imagined, especially against the enemies we’ve got in game, which overwhelmingly are among the most minor in the 40k universe. Part of the problem however with having 90+ weapons is that it’s hard to balance them all and they duplicate a lot of design space, resulting in lots of balance issues and under-utilization of non-optimal marks/types, see the myriad of Auto/Las guns where we could probably cut the number in game by half or even two-thirds and most people wouldn’t even notice. My concern with a Meltagun is it feels like it’d basically have to be re-imagined to fit the game for its own sake without having an actual niche (unless they want to add Moebian armor, which could be cool), only to fill a role already filled by other weapons, which deflates the cool factor and adds to balance issues, as more stuff doesn’t always automatically mean more fun, it often just results in messy bloat.
Maybe there’s a cool way to implement it, but most of what I’ve seen suggested whenever it comes up just feels like it boils down to reskinning the Plasma Gun.
You’re projecting a whole lot onto my post here…
This is a discussion forum, we’re allowed to discuss things.
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Posting this here too!
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Power sword blessings.
Fatshark has a solid round of picks here. Nice thematic and unique build ones rather than simple ‘GIB POWER UP ON HIT’ types. Thinking I’m gonna run Energy Leakage and Overload to mess with people.
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Still doesn’t give them an excuse for taking two years to add it. The game came out in 2022. It does not take two years to add a weapon with two versions to it. Not when other games add way more weapons, way, way faster.
Darktide has 93 different weapons currently spread among 44 distinct different types with dozens of blessings layered on top that can radically alter playstyle
Most of which are useless, never get used, or require such niche builds to make effective that they’re not practical. Helldivers does weapons better by just having the weapons be weapons, and having them all be equal in power if one guy is using one, vs another guy, and you need to learn how to use the guns rather than rely on a blessing to save you.
The only weapons that really have any real unique “powers” like what these have in Darktide are relic weapons, irreplaceable DAOT weapons, and demon weapons. We’re playing a penal legion.
Likewise, many of the weapons you’re mentioning aren’t necessarily useful or appropriate.
I bet you think that less weapons and less player choice is good.
What would a faithfully representative Meltagun do in that situation besides be a Plasma gun with half the rate of fire and a fraction of the range?
Somehow SM2 thought it was a very good idea to have a melta gun that was able to bypass all armor, didn’t blow up the user, and had a limited number of shots. That’s how you differentiate it from a plasma weapon.
ME3 meanwhile also tanked that franchise so hard that I stopped pre-ordering videogames entirely as a result
I don’t care, ME3 still has an active multiplayer playerbase and I can find full games in a PC lobby with more newer players than I can in Darktide, where I have to wait 10-20m sometimes for an Auric Maelstrom to get four players. Darktide had 108k players at its release. It has less than 18k right now. This has been the only spike where players have actually returned, because they’re starting to get what they want. After two years.
ME3 lasted twelve years, and you can still play its multiplayer. Will Darktide have a playable multiplayer in five years? Seven? Ten? I can barely find matches now.
The game that offers more player choice and more player freedom, including things that everyone loves like weapon customization, character customization, even if it is limited that doesn’t cost $30 per outfit, will be the one that survives the long haul. Darktide had that chance, and then Fatshark just fumbled it so hard they lost the ball altogether until they finally finished talent trees and still ended up massively nerfing the Vet.
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We’re very close to seeing the issue here.
Options and variety are good…up to a point, after which it just becomes bloat. Bloat is bad and causes problems. Hamfisting in weapons just for its own sake can lead to bloat.
Tabletop 40k has had this issue as well, and had to divest itself of tons of stuff just to stay manageable for events. Having rules sources spread not only across dozens of individual faction books, but White Dwarf, Forgeworld, Online Downloads, Horus Heresy books, etc, made it impossible to keep track of everything and ended up with tons of units and weapons that were just micro-variations or just plain superior versions of something that already existed.
SM2 basically took a Meltagun skin and produced an entirely different weapon that functions basically like a plasma shotgun with little relation to how its described or visualized in every other 40k portrayal.
Which is fine in some sense, but we then have to acknowledge that we’re doing something very different, which most of Darktide’s weaponry has not done to this point.
For my part, I’ve never had an issue with queue times in DT (though I also only ever play when I’ve got at least one friend I know online, I don’t play solo, same for Helldivers and DRG and yes even ME3 back in 2012), and from my end, and likewise I just can’t find it in myself to care about ME3. You’re literally the only person I’ve seen in double digits worth of years care about ME3’s multiplayer. Most of my friends bought that game, and the MP couldn’t keep anyone engaged for more than a couple weeks. It was primarily a single player game, one that that ultimately defeated and crapped all over itself in that sense.
From my experience, the MP was a hamfisted add-on that was fun for a bit but I don’t know anyone who’s touched it in over a decade.
Looking at Steamcharts for active players, while not perfectly reflective (e.g. no console players), I’m not sure how much there is to stand on regarding ME3 popularity vs Darktide.
