Havoc can be a lot of things. It seems to me the Devs want it to be the absolute and obvious endgame experience. Here are some of the things I think are important to create a good endgame experience.
Rewards
Offering a serious reward for the players when they progress through a system is essential. There will always be the part of the player base that is fine with progression simply being becoming better at the game to the nth degree but you cannot sustain a large healthy base with only that. The solution for a meaningful reward is usually cosmetics and titles but it needs to include something genuinely valuable. Just give us premium currency at some point each campaign (season). Give people anything, i would suggest in the 5-10 usd range in premium currency. It does not need to be a lot, it simply just needs to be something of meaningful value. Giving something at all levels and then at certain milestones is a great way to create progression. Havoc 40 is not reachable for everyone and thatās ok but there needs to be a reason for people unable to reach that to hop in and play some. Look at helldivers here, if you play the game enough you can get pretty much everything for free; you donāt need to play the hardest difficulty you just need to play. That is an insanely honest way to convince players to keep playing your game - reward them with something you also value and spend resources on.
Here is a simple example of how a reward system could work in a season.
H1-40 = 400 Aquilas (10 Aquilas for each completion)
H20 = 300 Bonus Aquilas
H30 = 200 Bonus Aquilas
H40 = 100 Bonus Aquilas
In total 1000 Aquilas would be rewarded for completing the season or Campaign. More than enough for people to be incentivized to come back to the game play and then leave. Knowing that when they come back theyāll be rewarded again will lead to a healthy player base. You donāt necessarily only want people nonstop playing your game. You want cyclical behaviours from a larger audience; this is proven by the success of many other games that have systems like this.
Progression
The current ranking system that includes deranking etc. is not great, in fact itās really unnecessary and the community has reacted similarly. One of the problems that I think it adds which affects people the most is that failing takes you backward, a game like Darktide should and does have a lot of failing. A progression system needs to be one dimensional, only forward. A good example is the interaction people have with penances which is largely positive i would say.. People see it as a goal, something to work towards and complete, that is a good progression system. The wins should be a huge accomplishment that requires building your character around the conditions and mutators. Deranking diminishes the value of investing into a single win. The maps should be hard enough that you must work out a composition to complete it which is composed of many losses and that final win. That creates progression. Chasing the win and being able to keep and hold onto it for the season is progression. Being able to choose to play previous levels is also essential for people who just want to play the game or help others which adds replayability.
Matchmaking
A Lobby System is the best solution for matchmaking in Darktide. We had it in vermintide and it was the only thing I used for a long time to find games. I think the current Party Finder can and should exist alongside a lobby system as well. A lobby system gives you the most agency over your experience without the downside of needing a full party. A lobby system allows people to create a match and start it knowing that people can join in during the mission. Currently thereās no reason to start a Havoc mission unless you have a dedicated group of 4 going. The issue is that the frequency of strike teams being created is really low when you have to manually do it as a player. If when you finish a mission you stay in the strike team people would more than likely stay in group and queue again if it went well. You would have more lobbies going on and more people joining and leaving the team because there is that flexibility of knowing if you start a mission with 3 youāre not screwed because people have the option to join mid mission because they can find it via a Lobby Browser System. A penalty system might be necessary but just a 5min timeout for joining and leaving too much with whatever conditions are necessary to avoid punishing disconnects. A lobby browser system also allows people to play Havoc at whatever level they want for replayability. They can just queue a lobby and the people can select it and join. I could see it serving a quickplay function but I feel there would need to be more nuance because of the Campagin Track.
Seasons
The devs have stated they are adding campaigns, to me that means seasons. I think this is an excellent idea and that it should be fully used to the greatest extent as itās a great opportunity to leverage lessons learned.
One of the most important lessons that has been exemplified by seasons I would say is how Path of Exile handles them. If iām not mistaken the story goes kinda like this: Kripparrian, a content creator for arpgs suggested to the devs that their seasons should be finite and regular. He made the comparison to his twitch and video growth. As soon as he established a schedule where the audience could always expect content at a specific time of day from him he was rewarded with growth and audience retention.
For video games seasons are usually that, where a player comes to the game, plays out the season, leaves and then comes back when a new season starts. That creates player trust because an expectation is met regularly. A season being reasonable to progress through, contains a reward system and a defined schedule is all you need to execute this concept. Itās really important that there are new seasons regularly. Something like every 1-2 months is perfect.
Here are some thoughts I have about how they could implement a really amazing season system. Letās start with getting our heads into how a battle pass typically works. You play the game, you get exp, you reach some threshold and are rewarded. You keep doing that all the way until the end of what they came up with for rewards. You reach the end and now youāre simply getting prestige type rewards things like titles or a special number next to your name.
Darktide could do something like that, but instead of the battle pass track being exp, its map completes. Havoc 1-40 is the progression track. Each completion is kept through the whole season, the reward is gained and the challenge to reach the next one is apparent. Havoc 1-40 should be static each season. No one should have the map mutators be instanced to them and rolled each time. This is very important because now you are creating a progression system that is fair for everyone. Where you are able to invest time in to complete and that time is respected because you canāt lose track progression. Respecting the playerās time is important to build trust and grow the player base. Plus creators will have the opportunity to make content on strategies for each Havoc Mission. Suddenly you have regular content rolling in creating interest in the game and ultimately more players. People will be able to follow guides on how to complete each Havoc Mission and which builds to use etc. Each season start will be a growth spurt for creators and ultimately interest into the game.
A new season would be a reroll and shuffle of the maps and mutators on the Havoc Missions. New titles and player frames but most importantly a new reward track to incentivize players to engage with the game.
Ultimate Challenge
For the people who Havoc was initially for, the system just simply needs to go past 40 to serve as the prestige part of the ābattle passā or Campaign. The system will be able to pile on more mutators, the key is making sure the mutators can be combined together continually. Rehauling the mutator and conditions system would be essential for this concept of Havoc 40+ where there is no end just more and more mutators being piled on. Thatās important because ultimately I think thatās what the players want, to be challenged and pushed further and further. Maybe a special title at Havoc 100.
Mutator Overhaul
This part is where I had to get a bit creative and by no means is it the best but I think itās simply an option to start with that would work. Suggestions on mutators and how to make it a good difficulty instead of an unfair one are more than welcomed.
There needs to be many more mutators and you should be required to solve for them. Part of the progression component is how you choose to solve for the mutator combination for a particular Havoc Mission. I would start by breaking the mutators into categories for certain aspects of the game and within that will be the actual mutators. For example, a category could be Elites. The mutators within that would be things like attack speed, more health, more armor, more of them or just waves of them. Literally anything that affects just Elites or a type of Elites.
A Havoc mission should be composed of a combination of mutators. The combination is static for the season and increases total options selected as you get into higher Havoc Missions to create a higher difficulty. There needs to be an adequate amount of options to create space for 100 Havoc Missions which is why I think creating categories like āSpecial Mutatorsā or āElite Mutatorsā works. Youāll be able to create missions where thereās waves of Shotgunners for example as well as waves of Weakened Bosses. That should sound familiar, like a maelstrom mission - the point is to create those missions in a Campaign Track that people progress through. There probably already are systems like this but itās really important that the system is flexible so it creates variety in how it throws more and more things at the players past Havoc 40.
Ultimately this is a proposed tool to create maps with. A quick glance might be āitās too easyā or āthatās boringā or many other comments but the most important thing this will create is a knob board for the devs to dial in the difficulty. They can crank it up in one way and not another. For example the attack speed mechanic with the shooters in the current Havoc iteration of Emperors Fading light feels not great but if it were a mutator in this format it would only affect certain types of enemies on some of the missions instead of all of them all of the time.
I would also try to extract and normalize what we have in Auric Damnation and Maelstrom and put them in categories and mutators. So that players can be somewhat familiar with the mutators as they move through the game from the Mission Board to Auric to Maelstrom and finally to Havoc. I reiterate we need to be able to go back and build for those missions to Progress through the Campaign instead of it being random everytime.
The system would select a combination of the mutators in this table to create a Havoc Mission. Each next mission would be another combination but more of them. That would go on until Havoc 40 after which there could be tiers of mutators so that it can scale to 100. Tiers would just be a harder version of the mutator. There should also be themes for certain blocks of missions. Like 15-20 is all Power Supply Interruption. I think this helps the concept of a narrative that we are working for Dukane to complete missions in certain places that are affected by something specific. This being the same for everyone helps that cohesion as well.
Player Boons
-ability recharge faster
-more stims drop
-more ammo drop
-enhanced blitz
Environmental Mutators
-ventilation purge
-power supply interruption
-corruption pores
-the new demonhost thing
-other currently in game map/ environmental affecting mutators.
All Enemy Mutators
-blight spreads
-cranial corruption
(you could add the current mutators into a category like this where it affects all enemies at some rate)
Boss Mutators
-Weakened Bosses Spawn
-A certain type of boss appears more often
-more health
Special Mutators
-waves of dogs
-waves of mutants
-waves of etc
-special have armour
Elites Mutators
-waves of crushers
-all elites have more hp
-all elites do more damage but have less health
-all elites attack faster
Trash Mobs Mutators
-move faster
-attack faster
-cannot be staggered
-have armor
-2x hordes
-endless horde until end
-Mobian 21st is an example of something that could go here
Thanks for getting this far. Iām looking forward to trying the new patch next week. I wanted to get all this off my chest so I can stop thinking about how I would fix it. Tanners and Mr. Es videos definitely helped me get this out. I would love to see a version of Darktide that can support creators like them more than it does.
