What first draws me into a game is its aesthetic and thematic feel; gameplay comes next, but you need both to draw me in. Some people want more of one or the other I gravitate toward war-fantasy settings, and Fatshark does a decent job at making Warhammer games fantastic on the surface with amazing music by Jesper Kyd, great sound design, and excellent visual detail.
I’ve been thinking about why I don’t play Darktide much, and I saw a video by Veritasium awhile back covering George A. Miller’s 1956 paper, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,”; he suggests that human working memory can only hold about 5–9 chunks of information at once. In game design, this has real implications: when a game like Darktide overwhelms players with constant enemy spam, stacked modifiers, and overloaded builds, it exceeds that cognitive limit. The experience gets “chunked” into individual tasks which strip away meaningful decision-making.
By contrast, Vermintide 2 respects those limits. It presents fewer, clearer threats and scales difficulty through durability and tactics, not just raw numbers. This keeps the challenge engaging and within the player’s cognitive bandwidth, aligning with Miller’s insight and resulting in deeper, more satisfying gameplay.
One of the reasons I don’t enjoy Darktide as much is that its challenge often relies on bloat; flooding the screen with enemies, piling on modifiers, and stacking layers of visual and mechanical clutter. You’re supposed to feel like you’re progressing; evolving from a lowly reject into something more formidable by level 30, but the sheer absurdity of what you’re up against, especially in Maelstrom 5 or even regular 5s, ends up trivializing that journey. It stops feeling grounded and starts feeling hollow.
Vermintide 2 presents a more coherent and immersive power fantasy: four heroes facing increasingly tough but manageable enemies. In contrast, Darktide leans too heavily on quantity over quality, relying on visual overload, overpowered blessings, and chaotic modifiers that drown out nuance and clarity.
I prefer games with a more grounded, believable feel. The idea of a handful of convicts slaughtering endless waves of enemies across every mission breaks immersion. Maybe someone with deeper lore knowledge can clarify, but even a squad of seasoned Space Marines would likely be overwhelmed in the scenarios Darktide throws at you on higher difficulties.
That said, Darktide fares better in the early game. While the odds are still over-the-top, difficulties 1-4 during the process of leveling a reject to 30 feels more balanced. The aesthetics shine through, and the gameplay isn’t yet buried under layers of numerical and mechanical excess. Customization through blessings and talents is great in theory, but in practice, the system could benefit from restraint. Dialing back the extreme stacking of modifiers and abilities would give the game a more authentic, satisfying identity.
Now ideally, difficulty shouldn’t simply progress by bloating enemy healthbars, damage, and numbers (though Vermintide 2 is more grounded, it still does this); it should make enemies become more dynamic; introducing new enemy types or having existing enemies that use different weapons, attacks, and strengths and weaknesses. Making existing enemies more dynamic higher the difficulty, the more engaging the game becomes. Now I can understand why they might not want to do this in the antiquated Stingray Engine. This would require more work, creativity, animation, and resources, but at the very least, I think many would agree Darktide has lost the grounded feel that Vermintide 2 still has.
