Before the game came out, they kept talking about the “hidden potential” of all the perks on weapons.
But then they go and make it to where you cant actually experiment unless you spend a ton of resources that makes experimenting completely unviable. Which just leads to everyone using the same build because why risk a ton of resources on experimenting when you can just play it safe and get one decent weapon?
They’re probably just not getting out of the comfort zone with those utility Blessings.
We had one patch where Stripped Down was seriously great. It was immediately nerfed next patch again.
Other Blessings are great in concept, but suffer the stacking issue. Fatshark is enarmored with stacks and restrictive conditionals, so you end up picking the option with the most reliability and uptime to circumvent that whole deal.
I’d rather just invest a lot of time and resources boosting the percentage values on my favorite gun to max than playing some demented gambling game.
Remove the damn locks already!
I believe the idea was, probably inspired by their Chinese ‘partners’, to ensure players coming back by stretching the content a bit thin - which is unnecessary if the gameplay is good, but Fatshark has a history of questionable itemization.
I also think one reason was to not have quite perfect items, to force a choice.
Which I’m absolutely on board with - I have no problem with only being able to modify two stats, per se.
The issue for me is that it is possible to get those perfect weapons, if you are just lucky enough and grind enough. If you couldn’t, and you’d have to choose between 2 useful blessings and perks, or a weapon of 370+ rating, that’d be fine. If you could reach perfection, guaranteed, by just playing a lot and getting ever more expensive upgrades for that last point, that would also be fine.
But by making it theoretically possible, but then completely up to chance, they show people the carrot, and then place it in a position that we know most of us won’t ever reach. And when someone finally gets one, it turns into a lemon on the next patch.
Aka, I understand what they did, I can rationalize their reasons, but I believe it falls short of their goals on multiple fronts due to other decisions they also made. Independent of me disagreeing with their choices.
At this point, they should probably have made up their mind about what they want going forward, and if they have, I hope it is palatable and we’ll see it in the next 12 months.
There was literally none, and that was all obfuscated by the extremely malicious itemisation/crafting system with odds heavily stacked against the player. The game literally tells you: dont try to create a weapon with specific stats, perks and blessings. Dont try theorycrafting or try to achieve longevity through different gameplay possibilities. We at Fatshark firmly believe that RNG is what should be the base of the game longevity, not actual gameplay depth and build possibilities.
Things SLIGHTLY improved since with some recent rebalance changes, but there is still plenty of perks and blessings which basically brick your weapon if you are stuck with them.
What is that pic of an animation you keep sharing. It’s hilarious.
It’s AI generated iirc
It’s awesome.
I think you’re number #434 on the list, calling in @brosgw for confirmation
They’re on the list <3
The “hidden potential” from the blog post over a year ago, and before release, was bog standard flowery marketing talk. I mean, here is the proceeding paragraph that pretty clearly lays out what that term was intended to convey (that weapons have more variation than VT2):
For Darktide, we wanted to set a different direction for the items characters will choose to equip. We want each weapon, and curio players find in Darktide to have a distinctive difference of potential within. The foundation we set with Modifiers, Perks, and Blessings changes how each weapon can potentially perform. The combination of these offers an exciting array of variety, and we want players to continue acquiring many variations in pursuit of interesting build diversity.
And that’s exactly how things work in practice. Two totally-efficient weapons of the same type/mark can have completely different uses/feels. Like, I can’t make Trickshooter work for my revolver, but I’ve seen some others pull crazy high numbers with it.
Fatshark continues to smooth away the rough edges (see: Brunt’s mentioned in that blog post, shared wallets, at least a couple of resource drop increases, blessing drop increases, at least 1 resource cost reduction, Requisition weapons generally being mid-to-high quality greys/greens, etc.), and I’m hopeful things will continue to improve because damnit man I’m holding all these cubes for NOTHING.
And I see a ton of build diversity out there since Patch 13. More than ever before in DT. And I see very few people running the builds I run.
Looking forward to creeping on more builds with the new inspect feature.
I just really, really wish you could see a person’s build in the pre game lobby. Because just inspecting a person’s loadout doesn’t give any point of reference for how good it is. However if you see an interesting build before a game starts, and they do well with it, it gives you a some proof that it can be effective and worth some time checking it out yourself.
Read: it gives each weapon a potential to become subpar garbage.
If you want players to experiment with different options you need to:
a) Make sure that most if not all of those options are both viable and balanced - not an easy feat but hey, you’re literally being paid to figure this out
b) Allow players to, well… EXPERIMENT. Not lock potentially interesting combinations behind a series of slot machine gambles.
I literally created an account here to throw my voice about crafting in, but after finding out that there is - hilariously enough - a literal memorial thread for those voices I’ll probably make one myself.
After many months of hype, gitguddening, burnout, conversation in Discord, returning and then becoming completely apathetic towards the game, I’ve arrived at an answer that loosely fits this topic. And it goes something like this -
Everyone who plays DT and is in some way invested, even mildly, has it all wrong. This wasn’t intended to be so engaging… that part of the project, the one where the gameplay is actually solid, was a welcome byproduct of FS’s earlier works. As far as DT was concerned, the players were supposed to come in riding on some hype, level up a character or two, do a few higher difficulty runs, buy some skins from a few shop rotations. Maybe get one or two close-to-usable weapons…
And then move on. About 50-60 hours or so oughta get those purchases in. Maybe get all the penances etc…
New content then drips in eventually - new hype, same old marketing. Same old DT. Maybe get a few community members to test the game… New players come in. Repeat.
The fact that there are people theory-crafting, doing challenge runs and honing their skills in the game to a great degree is a side-show. A strange after-effect of the model. Aberrant behavior.
I cba to look for it now, but I remember some interview with someone from FS, who denoted that the game (VT2, iirc) being so addicting is seen as bizarre and surprising internally, and the team never figured that’d be the case. (If someone has a link handy, I’d appreciate it.)
So… yeah. The perspective of the gamer here is wrong. It’s been wrong for a while, and after nearly a year of forum activity and Discord socializing, this is the feeling I’m left with. We’re looking at it the wrong way, assuming what we care about is, was or has at some point been important.
Wait isn’t this the new functionality? I thought the patch notes mentioned it worked in lobbies, in addition to the Mourningstar they previously mentioned. Honestly haven’t checked myself it!
Balancing (making things interesting/viable) is a work in progress, and they are actively working on it.
Personally, I try new weapons/blessings/builds constantly.
It lets you see their full weapon loadout, which is good, but not their build. For some things, like vet getting grenade replenish and corruption healing on deployables, that’s really annoying.
They said that but they were wrong. In the pre game lobby you can see what weapons people have, including their stats rolls, blessings etc but you can’t view their full talent tree to my knowledge.
Oh dang that’s a bummer! Hopefully that gets buffed.
I completely agree on the first part, but I’m not impressed by the results of the latter. There’s just so much useless bloat on the items. While I understand that some people might really like extra stamina and block efficiency, I’m pretty sure they’d rather get 20% and not 5%.
Why even keep the low-level perks in game at this time? Other than intentionally making itemisation more frustrating that it has any reason to be?
I wish I could do the same, but I really can’t afford it. I can’t even afford to collect all the relevant blessings so far. The tube gods are not kind enough to me. I expect the situation to improve once I run all of the toons exclusively on T5.
INB4 “You don’t need perfect rolls to try a new build” - of course not, and I’m not going for “perfect” at all. But “right perks AND blessings” would be nice. It was trivial to achieve that in VT2 (assuming you spent some time and gathered mats) and it’s a royal PITA in DT. For shame.
