I will attempt to keep it civil, so if someone feels like ranting, please do the same.
Havoc for me is another case of Darktide game system which turns Darktide in a game which just doesn’t want to be played.
I would imagine Havoc is an attempt at improving long term player retention, encourage cooperation and keeping long-term players engaged and playing. For me it fails on all counts.
Gamekeeping:
The ranking system is unnecessarily restrictive and wastes players time. It prevents players from accessing the “good stuff” unless they spend time grinding or grinding back the ranks in game modes they do not want to play. Add to that the counterproductive game mechanics which increase player Havoc rank only if they are the host. I don’t care if my rank will increase next week, I want it now if this is what it takes for me to play something closer I actually want to play. What if the host we played with is not available on the given day or week and we want to continue playing at the given difficulty level? Start respecting our time and money Fatshark and give them what they want, they are customers.
No one cares about ranks. Everyone cares about ability to quickly customise difficulty for a given map. Stop adding silly, restrictive FOMO mechanics: “Oh, no, if you don’t play often enough you lose your rank”. This is third reason I believe you never learnt to respect your playerbase time and by extension their money.
Hello RNG, my old friend:
Now for the elephant in the room. Havoc randomness and lack of player agency in the process of selecting the map, difficulty and difficulty modifiers. I really, really don’t want to write another wall of text on this subject, so shortly.
Fatshark, you were wrong on RNG in itemisation, and it took 2 years to fix that. You are wrong to remove player agency from mission customisation as we had it in Vermintide 2. If anything that player agency should have been expanded on with new modifiers, any “one use only” deed restrictions removed and streamlined to allow for quickplay with randoms who want a challenge. Why? Because you have no idea what makes Tide games difficult.
Havoc difficulty scaling:
Multiple of your difficulty modifiers are not difficult, they are tedious and predicable. Think static specials waves (hounds, mutants, bursters). Others like the whole artificially lowered toughness and ranged unit spam turn the game yet again into a cover shooter, and encourage very narrow class builds. I had multiple cases I got shot from angles I was not watching. At full HP and toughness, I ended up with 20% HP by the time I pressed the dodge button. My reactions aren’t Counter Strike pro-gamer level, but they aren’t terrible. Also not to mention limitations of the game, from visibility to mobs tracking you through walls and shooting through pitch black darkness. Good luck in certain event arenas, you will need it, unless you run a couple really specific builds. Yay, for build variety in gameplay, I suppose?
We are back to cover shooter with no cover mechanics, and abusing dumb AI by pulling ranged mobs from new rooms, and breaking the line of sight “meta”. How is that remotely fun or anything to do with Tide games? Why have you changed multiple values which affect range gameplay balance at the same time? This sounds a bit like a rookie mistake to me when adjusting any complex system?
The No Party Finder:
The party finder system no one asked for is not fit for purpose. Unless we have a full pre-made we end up playing with bots. Friends who want to join us mid Havoc mission cannot join us. I would imagine due to bugs (fixable), and artificial system restrictions (not fixable). Let us play the game the way we want, and not waste time fighting with pointless restrictive bloat.
What Havoc should have been:
Simplicity, streamlined experience, and player agency.
Havoc should have been a new mission select screen with player agency built into it. Where you simply select a map, tick tickboxes next to a long list of different difficulty modifiers (you have a decent idea with Deeds, except them being one use only by design: Heroic Deeds - Vermintide 2 Wiki) which add a difficulty weight value (+1, +5 etc.) and press gather a party.
THEN assuming the party is not a full, a random player should be able to join that game from the Havoc mission screen just by clicking Quickplay. How? By clicking on a Havoc QUICKPLAY button with customisable by the PLAYER preferred difficulty weight value. if their preferred difficulty fits somewhere on that specific custom game settings, they are queued for that mission.
You can add all the fluff around this to your heart content. No silly rank restrictions, or expansive party finders required. No restrictions on friends joining existing games.
Post Scriptum
We had the initially itemisation fiasco, and we are still suffering from the randomised mission selection screen. Then there is the whole communist cosplay cosmetic shop experience, with cosmetic rotations, FOMO bs, and in-game currency. Could you listen to your customers about what they like about your products instead of making a game they don’t want to play?
I really like some of those new difficulty modifiers which make enemies more difficult to kill, force you to move, make you consider different builds than the old comfortable “meta”.