Hi everyone, I think it’s time for me to write some feedback than just mumbling curses into my beard. So here we go.
What I enjoy most is the strategic coop aspect in the Fatshark games since Vermintide 1. I love how you kinda develop an overlapping safety system with your coop crew, to protect everyone, very much like a phalanx. Of course, you can let go of all strategy for a short time when you play an aggressive melee classes. You go in and trust your reflexes, enjoy the chaos and carnage, but still need one eye on your team.
This feedback reflects the perspective of a veteran player on damnation high shock or maelstrom. With the last few patches, I’m still capable to win most games, but don’t enjoy the hardest difficulty as much as before. Here is why:
With patch #14 Darktide reaches a point where it’s still fun, but the strategic aspects suffers a lot from the recent enemy spam. They feel more like a wall of mindless flesh I have to cut or shoot my way through with brute force or superfast aiming, then outsmarting a serious enemy that tries to win and survive. You have to outrun and wear them down or just out damage the enemy. A repeating example of, what feels bad with this enemy spam is, that the melee mates are forced to push the never ending enemy hordes back. They need to stay in melee, fill up their toughness and proceed forward. While your range classes gets attacked in the back, forced into melee, so you can’t focus on the specialist next to your melee mates anymore. In this situation, either your team are good single fighters or you are all dead. There is no more cooperation in such situations until someone gets downed. But even then, when you are that far away from each other, it’s often better to let him die than to sacrifice the seconds you can’t do damage to the enemy and risk a whole team wipe. My mates and I can win most times, but we are driven away from each other by the game, in a coop game. I think that is a major design flaw that was introduced with the recent patches.
Another aspect then the enemy spam hurting the strategy is how they spawn into the map.
One recent example: two ragers came out of a door next to me and downed me with full toughness and health in one second. So if I don’t have my melee out and look towards this doors direction by accident, I’m just dead with no chance to react. Same with the bursters just explodes next to the door in 0.5 sec, no joke. The whole system with doors is flawed. Next to the unfair disadvantages are the dumb advantages you get from door spawn. I saw so many dump melee door basing, out killing the enemy in them most stupid way possible: by hitting them though a closed door. Hodor would be proud! (GoT ref)
My advice: Remove all doors and trapdoors. Let the enemy spawn outside the players view and advance. Let them jump down or climb up ledges where the player have time to react. But if the player is close to that ledge, let the enemy search for another, safer way to engage the players, so there so second dumb kill grind ends: waterfall or climb bashing.
Just try out a vet sniper build in the highest difficulty and you see what I mean when I say: you don’t have time for strategy. You have to dodge like ninja without seeing the enemy that tries to hit you from behind, just relining on the swoosh sound, because you have to hold your focus fire on the priority targets that tries to disable your teammates in front. I regularly have the situation where one pox walker tires to hit me for almost a minute and I can’t sacrifice the time to turn around and kill him. Why even should I try to kill him, when there could be just another pox walker crawling out of a trapdoor the second I kill that one? They are just everywhere, and a mere pox walker can kill you. The roaming small ones are the vets worst nightmare. Maybe that’s intended, but for me, it ends up in been more stress than fun.
Again: This is out of a perspective of a vet main that plays the highest difficulty. You don’t suffer from that problem that much when you play on lower difficulty or you are playing zelot or ogryn.
Thank you for your attention and for making such a great game. Keep improving it and it will become a masterpiece like Vermintide 2.
EDIT: I forget to mention my vague idea for the enemy spam problem: Half their numbers, but double their HP and the dmg on their weak points. Or work something out with armor in that direction. This is of course just a vague idea, balancing is a math nightmare, I can imagine.
You could still keep the actual enemy spam in a mutator, for those players who enjoy being in the middle of chaos.
