Havoc mode is incredibly unfun

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
21

It is bad, but not really in any way of balance. I didn’t experience much of it, but the main thing I took away from it is that Fatshark tried to gamify it by adding tiers, rewards, a bunch of achievements, and cosmetics.

The thing is that all of this is stuff that an experienced player looking for the ultimate challenge doesn’t want to care about. Having some bling to say that you did it is nice, but also concerning when you start to see a bunch of plebs trickle into the mode because they want that bling too and expect to be carried without contributing much to the team.

The extra “do it weekly” and end-of-week rewards turn Havoc from a fun test-your-mettle gamemode to an obligatory raid you have to play weekly, and you get an even mix of idiots who don’t know what they’re doing and tryhards just trying to have a good game for once. Nobody wins.

Remove the loot, remove the bling, remove the weekly obligation, then we’ll talk. But until then, I’m not touching Havoc, or Darktide’s achievement system.

22

indeed
It was a big mistake to add rewards and penances. We could see it also in the maelstrom right after the update. A lot of players jumped to this mode cause you would start at havoc 16. Maelstrom has never been so hard at this time.

23

i am “this”

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close to opening a lvl 40 lobby as long as i have it, just to reject

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out of spite…

kind of funny to think as a teenager i never understood the appeal of “falling down”, nowadays i can relate to the poor guy on any weekday.

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24

Example in case

25

I think part of the issue with it is that it’s marketed as being for the most hardcore/skilled players but it divides even those.

I have a pretty big beef with it being considered the current ‘endgame’ when I despise the way it achieves that. Not due to difficulty, just due to how it works. I know I’m not alone. :person_shrugging:

Not to mention some of the stuff that’s been brought up plenty of times like the gross weekly decay system and the entire key order system.

(Also trying to have a ‘hardcore’ endgame while your overall balance is god awful is a big yikes)

26

Nah, it’s just bad bro. The pigeonholing of builds is crap.

Yeah then developers would have to… develop on the game, coming up with new enemy types, different weapons, and so on, to increase the difficulty.

Instead of this unimaginative and low-effort “increase or decrease HP or toughness on players or enemies in a database” sort of thing.

At some point the whole philosophy of adjusting difficulty purely by character or NPC stats (which, to be fair, is almost entirely how it was done for difficulty 1-5) runs into problems where it starts to negatively effect gameplay.

Obviously they can’t just increase the number of dangerous enemies indefinitely either, and they start having to develop on the game with novel content and mechanics.

In 6 months we get instagib gunners with bosshealth and we only have 20 hp and toughness and the entire map is covered in Beast of Nurgle Slime. I guess that won’t be for everyone either. LOL

27

Where did you think you could have seen this?
They made ports to the console, I think this is the exact contrary message they have delivered.

28

I’m referring to Havoc mode.

From their own article about it:

We’ve long seen the comments from players saying they want more of a challenge from Darktide. Players would like to continually challenge themselves and improve their skills. You want to face the horrors of the tide.

Not like this Obese Feesh.

If you’re a player who relishes overcoming obstacles and seeks to measure and improve your abilities, then Havoc has been crafted specifically for you.

Nope. Try again Chubby Piscine. Definitely not crafted for me, and I’m very much a challenge seeker in basically everything I play.

Beyond that it’s just paying attention to sentiment. Players who otherwise played auric maelstrom/HISG seem pretty divided on Havoc, with many doing it begrudgingly for penances/completion’s sake. I’d be very surprised if it’s populated after a couple months.

One of my biggest things with modes like this that I’m very much irritated by is the increasing trend of people (including devs) thinking just slapping more difficulty on means it’s a better challenge, no matter how poorly designed or balanced it is. Simply bloating numbers or making it incredibly punishing so you can die in sub one second in a 40 minute run is not interesting design, nor a healthy long term one. That’s not sustainable for a mode you want people to be repeating, that’s the sort of challenge you do once, even as a more hardcore player. I’m very much of the opinion that attrition is a far better methodology than jumping up damage. I would have rather seen things like reduced medicae charges/less stations rather than just making it possible to be deleted for a half second of inattention or a single mistake.

I’ve said it before to try to emphasize my point in these sorts of discussions: I could make something extremely difficult by giving every enemy a 50% chance to insta kill you every single hit. Would it be harder? Sure. Would it be well designed? Hell no. Obviously hyperbolic, but the underlying point is regarding the fact that it’s easy to make something difficult, it’s much harder (heh) to make something difficult and fairly designed.

Yet more editing: Give players at the absolute top end the tools to make stuff harder if they want, that’s something lacking right now. The balance of the game is far too skewed to make it work as it stands. Custom games/solo lobbies would have achieved this (and I’m not even one of the ones bugging them about solo play constantly), not whatever the design black hole Havoc is. EG: Being able to solo in Back 4 Blood because… it has a solo mode. (Something they added and actually followed through after promising, just saying.) Doing things in Remnant like a minimum level/gear run on hardcore with a hell (difficulty) mod. All of the various L4D2 realism expert true solo stuff I did before true solo was even a term applied to L4D-likes. Etc, etc. I can do these because I can control my experience, something sorely lacking in Darktide. (And very much a contributor to not playing it nearly as much as I’d like to, on top of the… other issues)

/ramble

tl;dr: Instant deaths/one shots suck. Nobody likes them. Give us the tools to tailor our experience if we want to increase the challenge.

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29

Ok, apologies, I think you were talking about darktide itself.

I could play this… but I don’t see any interest in spending time on something I don’t enjoy. 10 years ago, I would have tried, tried again, until I would have completed it.
But, actually, I just watch the fact I don’t take pleasure and the game mode has even dissuaded me to play darktide.
Don’t ask me why… but I don’t feel the mood to play the game, surely cause if it is the end game, it has nothing to offer to me. So, I feel it is totally pointless to continue playing it. Nothing has changed, they have just introduced Havoc, the end game mode. But, if you cannot enjoy the end game mode, why would you keep playing it?
I don’t think I will stop the game… but Havoc is clearly a bad move in my opinion.

This… but also if you put rewards to fuel the game mode with unprepared players, this begin to just be annoying… especially with the demote system.
Definitively, I love playing with randoms. But here they have forced non licensed drivers to enter a porsche 911 and learn to drive on this vehicle. That’s dumb and stupid.

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30

Don’t play it then.
It’s not for everyone, and it’s definitely a chore with randoms.

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31

I’m in the same boat.

I’ve played Darktide for maybe 6 hours since Havoc came out - and haven’t touched it in over a week despite being on break and playing other games. Currently in one of the longer DT droughts I’ve been in.

Havoc having rewards associated with it (penances, etc.) creates a motivation to play for sure. But then the frustration of actually playing it, waiting for lobbies, of the way the ranking goes, and the near-requirement of running certain builds, just undercuts any motivation to play Havoc. And for DT more generally, new content hanging out there “un-played” adds a further layer of frustration.

Yes, I could just go back to playing Auric Damnation, but then there’s this little bug in my brain saying “you could be using this time instead grinding Havoc missions.” It ends up detracting from the enjoyment of playing non-Havoc, and so… now I’m just not playing DT like I was despite a new update being recently out.

Definitely feels like weaves all over again in this regard (i.e. frustrations with the new game mode ends up hurting engagement with the game overall).

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32

You’re not missing much there either honestly. Aurics when I played them were pretty much consistently miserable due to the split in the playerbase combined with them moving the bar so now people who weren’t ready/doing aurics magically think they’re capable of them because reasons.

I really wanting to come back to Darktide and make it a consistent game I play again after the long break I took but instead I feel more pushed away than ever, honestly.

Oh well. Plenty of good (and some not so good, but at least fun with friends) games out there.
Unrelated Dying Light 2 shenanigans for a palette cleanser after all of the dumped criticism:

33

:scream: “rejected” :scream:

quite the horror indeed when i check the effort to even find a group compared with the playtime i get out of it.

usually i was uploading 2 videos a day for my channel and had no problem getting content together.
the whole appeal was getting there despite randoms.
now i hardly get material for one upload a week and even then when i look at other games i think “why bother”

and it pisses me off to no end cause i know i miss out on an option to keep sharp and improve myself.

likewise, NO, premades are not an option for various reasons.

so up until now it was my own threshold that kept me from solo clutching every match, now its people playing it safe in fear of demotion…

on the upside i find time to paint my mcfarlane figures at least, so there´s that.

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34

I kinda friggin hated havoc the first times i tried it, and while there are still things that feels off about the mode i have started to enjoy it.

Granted, i normally play as a duo and two randoms from party finder, and having just one other player you know can handle himself does make it a bit more enjoyable.

35

I dealt with that stuff when I was teenager. I’m not even ‘old’ but I feel like a grumpy old man when people long for ye olden days of needing to hunt down groups and whatnot, ignoring that the modern gaming culture is very different from things like early Everquest/WoW/whatever days where making a group could be an experience in and of itself.

Nowadays it’s just effectively matchmaking with extra steps the vast majority of the time, now with added ability for people to be little gobshites about arbitrary factors of their choosing. It’s just an extra time barrier for very, very little benefit and potentially significantly more downsides.

Accepting that in the end it really doesn’t matter, whether it’s getting a bit rusty for a few games, missing out on store/cosmetic items, whatever has helped a lot. I still occasionally feel the urge to play things for arbitrary reasons but I just step back and go “Will I have fun though?” and if the answer is “No/Probably not”… I don’t do it. :person_shrugging:

36

a man with his arms outstretched and the word never written in red

skill is life, i perform therefor i AM :smile:

37

It’s marketed to anyone that reaches “end-game”.
When are you in end game? When you hit level 30?
Not that I’m disagreeing, I’m just saying that I think the target audience is far larger than the top 1% that can finish havoc 40.

The way I see it, there’s 3 groups of people.
Those that aren’t good enough for higher levels of havoc.
Those that are good enough and like it.
Those that are good enough but don’t like it.

Most people fall into the first group, that’s a given.

I fall into the 2nd group and it seems to be the smallest group. “Seems to be” because there’s more negative feedback than positive. Then again, people are somewhere between 5 to 10 times more likely to leave negative feedback than positive so there’s that.

My feedback to group 1 would be: “skill issue”. Not sexy, but true.

I fall into group 2 so I wouldn’t know what to say to “myself”. Obviously there’s objectively bad things wrong with havoc. Rank decay and the difference between getting your rank from personal and helping havoc levels, are what come to my mind.

Group 3 I have trouble with because they seem to say similar things to group one so it’d be really easy to also say “skill issue” to a lot of them. Such as:

I’ve said it before, you can make any reasonable build work if you have the skill to compensate. It’s just not realistic to expect people to do that because of deranking being a possibility and that the correct (meta) options counter the difficulty modifiers much better than just being that much better.

It’s a challenge mode. If you could chose any build to consistantly win, it would fail to be a challenge mode.

Let’s be perfectly honest here. The basegame mechanics and numbers are just too forgiving to build a challenge mode on top of.

There are several ways to make a game harder. Coming up with new enemies is several times more difficult and costly than to just make the numbers and mechanics less forgiving. Then there are technical constraints to consider too.

I heavily doubt havoc would be similarly difficult if you had the same mechanics and stats but different enemies. What would those enemies have to be to make the game significantly harder but not have inflated stats thenselves or not be bullsh!t to play against? I don’t see that happening.

Yea, havoc does achieve most of it’s difficulty by doing artificiall difficulty things.
Then again, so does the rest of the game and their previous games.
Depending on what difficulty you play on, enemies have different HP values and reaction times but behave the same mechanically. Why do we now pretend like their version of a challenge mode was going to be different?

Obviously, don’t let me tell you what to be disappointed by. It just comes across to me like saying “man, this sucks, I didn’t win a bet 1/100000 against my odds!”

Yeah, that’s not fun, makes sense. Just, what exactly did you expect?

38

only thing right now is one class (ogryn) is totally ruled out by the combination of hamfisted implementation combined with scared lobbies in fear of demotion.

a challenge is one only if you can participate in and take it on your terms, fail or success.
but offering 4 “options” and turning 1 invalid by default isnt a “challenge” its a preset.

i mean i get it sort of, if i chose mates for a gunfight i dont pick the one with a knife.
but then i dont call it a “free for all” either.

39

Even if ogryn or you are good enough to compete and win, that doesn’t matter when nobody wants to join or accept you because they disagree.

It’s the same thing thing I said above.
People don’t feel like increasing the risk if the consequence is having their time wasted.

I feel like ogryn could stay the same and if we couldn’t derank, I’d start picking ogryns cuz why not?

Ofc, ogryn could be a lot better and with the right tools, the problem of him “not being allowed to participate” would go away too :slight_smile:

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40

The number of people looking to climb after auric damnation is a small portion of the playerbase overall, and they’ve made it clear it’s meant to be a stepping stone, between needing to complete auric missions/auric maelstrom skipping you ahead, to direct statements such as "Due to the vast amount of permutations in the mode, there will not be any matchmaking in this game mode. Also the difficulty is so significant that you will want to tailor the group more specifically than a matchmaking service could do effectively. "

Not really sure how else you can take that. (Along with other statements along similar lines)

Like… calling it the new end game.

" * New Game Mode - Havoc: Think you’ve mastered the threat over Tertium? Think again. Havoc is a new end-game experience that will test the resolve of the most seasoned operative. Be ready to face daunting challenges and earn new cosmetic rewards."

This is on top of the design all heavily pushing you towards constantly playing/climbing overall. (EG: No option to lock your key order assignment level)

You could likely complete most things with ‘the skill to compensate’ even if using white quality weapons and whatnot. That’s not the thing people have problems with. Falling back on that as a defense of the design is poor form. I’ve completed a ton of things with challenge runs and whatnot, and while I might think balance changes one way or the other might need to be a thing, that doesn’t mean issues don’t arise just because you can clear it. Lord knows I got real salty with some of them while dealing with some broken stuff during true solos. Including Darktide.

Again: This is not what is being said when people have issues with it. (Other than people being foolish, but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone that says ‘any old slapped together thing should work.’)

There is a vast difference between “any build” and “generally viable builds with good fundamental planning that are superceded due to Havoc’s design and otherwise poor balancing for the overall game.”

Beyond that, there’s also a difference between creating a unique build to handle specific challenges (EG: Doing a ‘Use speed’ and ‘Move speed’ build when I solo’d B4B for act 1 of the game, changing to more aggressive stuff for soloing act 3, for example) and the entire balance of the mode seemingly being designed around specific things such as VoC/Chorus. The closest you kinda get to mixing things up is Beacon of Purity.

A big start would be reining in the player power level, as that’s a huge aspect of the design issues with Havoc, as said.

That’s part of it, but Vermintide mixes up even the wandering enemies and hordes by implementing more mixed enemy times that can affect your flow and gameplay and require adaptation. I generally don’t experience the same feeling of “Ah crap, shield rats/rotbloods are mixed in” in Darktide, forcing me to flip to dealing with them in some manner (EG: flipping from hacking away to breaking their shield/guard).

It’s also a notable enemy type missing from Darktide, which is weird since they lifted almost every melee enemy from Vermintide already.