How to salvage Crafting Plans and appeal to the Playerbase

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
1

Gear customization in its current state has quite a few shortcomings.
Many of the issues have already been addressed multiple times by the community, and most of the shortcomings will not be solved by the planned changes to the crafting system.
In order to salvage the crafting system, Perk and Blessing locks have to be removed at the very least.

Hoping that FatShark are willing to rethink and rework the planned changes, due to the massive dislike for some of the plans, here are my suggestions, which i think would greatly improve player retention while also giving players exactly what they want.

If there is anything wrong with my suggestions, or something that i missed, feel free to quote the section and point it out.

  • I prefer the current plans by FS.
  • I prefer the system described below.
  • I do not like either of the two.
  • I do not care.
0 voters

Summary:

  • no RNG: let us select perks and blessings from a list
  • no planned obsolescence: remove perk/blessing locks and let us upgrade item base stats to 80%
  • reward us for playing the game: let us unlock T4 Perks and Blessings, and upgrade item base stats to 100%

What the itemization system should do and how to do it:
Allow Players to experiment and try out what they want.

  • Remove Perk and Blessing locks. Let us change them all, as often as we want.
  • Make it cheap. Testing out different things with an item, should not be expensive or unnecessarily difficult.

Maximize player agency.

  • Perks and Blessings should be selectable from a list, not randomly rolled. We already played to farm the resources, so let us spend them to get exactly what we want.
    Randomly rolling them, is an annoying waste of time and makes interactions with the system unpleasant.
  • Grant default access to T1-3 Perks and Blessings via item quality:
    Green quality (1 Perk): access to all T1 Perks
    Blue quality (1 Perk, 1 Blessing): access to all T1 Blessings
    Purple quality (2 Perks, 1 Blessing): access to all T2 Perks and Blessings
    Orange quality (2 Perks, 2 Blessings): access to all T3 Perks and Blessings

Everything up to here should be relatively easy to implement, without requiring too much work.
It is mostly based on systems that already exist, or that were planned anyway.
Removing the lock from Perks and Blessings should hopefully just require the removal of a few lines of code.
Allowing to select Perks and Blessings from a list of unlocked options, should be no problem either, because this is what is planned for Blessings anyway.
Changing the pools of available Perks and Blessings to be based on item quality, might also be pretty easy.
Everything that follows, could be done at a later time and released in a separate update.

Make items feel valuable.

  • Do not shower us in a rain of useless items that will be scrapped anyway. Everyone sees through it and it does not feel rewarding at all, once we are done leveling and start investing in quality upgrades.
  • Remove planned obsolescence and make upgrades feel good. Give us the choice to upgrade all the base stats of the items that we already have.
    We spend hours grinding to enhance an item to orange quality, which is fine.
    But it sucks to get a new item that has slightly better base stats than our current one, because upgrading to the new item, makes us to throw all that time and effort out the window and requires us do it all over again.

Keep players engaged with the system and incentivise them via rewards to keep playing the game.
Let us get that perfect weapon through time and effort.

  • After reaching lvl 30, award Inquisition Tokens to players for successfully clearing missions:
    → diff 3 missions: 1 Token
    → diff 4 missions: 3 Tokens
    → diff 5 missions: 5 Tokens
  • Allow players to use these Tokens to upgrade all item basestats to 100%, and to unlock T4 Perks and Blessings:
    → 1 Token to upgrade an item base stat by 5% (up to 80%)
    → 3 Tokens to upgrade an item base stat by 5% (80 - 90%)
    → 5 Tokens to upgrade an item base stat by 5% (90 - 100%)
    → 5 Tokens per unlock for each T4 Perk/Blessing (unlock for all MK of the weapon family)

Fix inconveniences and problems with crafting ressources.

  • Allow all currencies and ressources to be shared across all characters.
    Players should never feel like they should (or should not) play a specific character in order to not waste their time (rewards are wasted when playing a class with already good items; farming with a class with bad items is less fun).
    Players should have easy access to new classes and feel free to play any class they want, whenever they want.
  • Allow players to buy Plasteel and Diamantine by spending Dockets.
    Having access to separate sources for Plasteel and Diamantine, might be the only way to permanently fix any imbalance regarding income and spending between the two ressources.
1 Like
2

I like the proposed changes. The only thing I would change is the perk/blessing cost.

Let us purchase the perk/blessing of choice, for both slots, at the current cost price to reroll for free. So 99/299 diamantine and plasteel respectively or 100/300 for ease. Every time we would want to change it we would have to pay this resource cost. Otherwise resources are just going to keep stacking and won’t get used anymore. The actual costs can be tweaked, but I do think some sort of resource sink would work.

3

You are right. Having something to constantly spend the resources on, is important.
In my suggested system, i would integrate resource cost in all the token related late game upgrades.
I suggested a similar system a few weeks ago in a very long post, but i did not mention the late game resource expenses here, because i wanted to keep the post somewhat short.

For example, a modifier upgrade that costs 1 token (1 token is the reward for diff3), would additionally cost the average amount of plasteel and diamantine, that players get when clearing a diff 3 mission (i would assume that FS can access data like that).
The upgrades that cost 3 tokens (you get 3 tokens from clearing a diff 4 mission) would additionally cost the average resource amount gained from a diff 4 mission).

That way, it would be possible to get a small bit progression right after every successful mission.

And Perk/Blessing unlocks would of course also cost additional resources.
They could be more expensive, since they are one time unlocks per weapon family.

That way, players who mostly stick to diff3, will have a surplus in resources (compared to tokens), which they might need to upgrade more weapons to orange in order to test them out.

Players who mostly play higher difficulties, would have an income of tokens and resources, that is perfectly blanaced for modifier upgrades.

4

All fatshark needs to do is do is go to vermintide 2 and use ctrl c on the crafting system and then use ctrl v on darktide. Instead they decided to make a worse crafting system which locks traits.

5

True. V2 system is better than what we have and better than what they plan.

But i think that my „dream system“ is even better and has more long term progression to offer than the vermintide system.
Additionally, it would also build up on the item system in general, that is already in game, and should theoretically be pretty easy to make.

But in the grand scheme of things, i really do not understand, how it could come to this situation in the first place, where they downgraded from vermintide, when making darktide crafting. Why would they spend hours of work on a system that is obviously worse than what they made years before?