He is right in the specific part you quote, though. The game is very forgiving, when it comes to min-maxing. At least compared to what’s out there on the market.
Even on the hardest difficulty, the strongest point for or against a victory is a team’s teamplay. The devs aptly even named the ability “cohesion auras”. It’s quite on the nose.
You can go into T5 Auric Damnation and make mediocre builds work. You get punished in other genres so much more for that.
redundant to my point
I was still editing my post. Dang it.
As for the Lore part, you are correct. The Lore never fully matches the games and it can’t. The Write-ups of the ruinious powers is exemplaric for this.
If you go by Lore, Nurgle is the walking pox-herpes-ridden Gollum of infection.
Total War Warhammer? -10% health regen / replenishment.
This game? Get a tiny cut to your max health, but only on the occasion and if you play really badly.
There’s grinding and there’s grinding. Grind can be fun (or at least not feel bad) if it’s designed well and it can feel like an absolute slog if it isn’t.
To me, the blessing unlock process is the slog kind of grind.
What the game really needed here was a apt tracker system for what isn’t unlocked yet in terms of Blessings (they tried this with Hadron’s hidden unlocks).
And a covert “grace” system would have helped, too.
Most games doing RNG have a covert system under the hood, counting repeated “failures” and then increase the chance of the drop you want.
DarkSouls for instance has this in all their games. If you kill 100 baldur knights, you will wind up with a Baldur’s Knight Armor Piece, no matter what. Because every time no item drops, the chance is increased by 1%.
Darktide could work in a similiar way. It could read out, what Blessings you haven’t unlocked for your weapon yet. Whenever you craft or get an item drop of the weapon type, it could increase the chance for a Blessing not yet unlocked.
Actual gacha games are more friendy with the pity and bad luck protection systems they have than what DT and VT2 have.
Fatshark’s idea of bad luck protection (in VT2) is stopping RNG from giving you trait A and Trait B consecutively, but doing nothing to stop RNG giving you trait B and trait A immediately or being given trait A and trait B every other roll.
There’s nothing to do with min-maxing. I’m not talking about being able to get perfect rolls. We need some kind of RNG and equipment progression to keep the loot chasing alive, but it should not be MMO scaled. This game has multiple characters with multiple builds each. When you need 20k hours to get what you want from ONE WEAPON, something is not right. How many will simply not bother trying new builds because of this mobile-ish mess?
If this is the direction Fatshark wants to go with their games, I’m more than happy to not buy anything from them. The crafting system is just clear disrespectful design.
I’m not trying. I hardly bother with the loot system. I wanted to try to a weapon for my Ogryn and decided just to play another game. This is even though you don’t need high-end gear to finish runs. It’s just so painful. I was very happy with the new talent trees, but I’ll go play other games for a while and maybe they’ll fix it in a year or two. My backlog is full of good games that I’ve been meaning to play.
I also don’t agree that you need much RNG to keep it alive. We could have more types of crafting materials with some really hard-to-get stuff that doesn’t require grand but finishing something really difficult. At any rate, there are tons of good alternatives to what we have here and it has nothing to do with 40k lore.
No, no they are not. And the “gacha” aspects of Darktide aren’t real Gacha elements to begin with, because you can’t pay real money to them. Everything you can use real money for in Darktide buys you directly chosen cosmetics. That is not gacha.
The game having a random drop loot system ingame within an ingame money currency is not gacha either. It’s a pseudo drop system disguised behind a crafting system.
You use this terminology wrong on purpose and it’s not intellectually honest.
A paid-for loot crate with a random drop chance to get item / hero / ability is gacha.
Spinning some wheel and the wheel spins costing real world money is gacha.
Crafting costing real money with breakable items (as in really break, them being destroyed) is gacha.
Darktide has no gacha. Please stop, you’re making your well-thought out musings less convincing by using this form of populism.
If you read what I wrote, I said gacha games (which have a reputation for being RNG hell) have BETTER pity and bad luck protection systems than Darktide (also an RNG hell where items are concerned). You say Darktide isn’t a gacha game, I say that it has worse systems than gacha games.
Darktide still has parallels to gacha games because you are spending time to get resources to then spin the wheel, it’s that layer of abstraction where it removes itself from being just a drop system and closer to something a gacha game would use, even if you can’t pay money directly to get.
Gacha games also have mechanics where you randomly grind items that have 5+ layers of RNG built into it, like Genshin’s and Star Rail’s relics to pad out retention and player play time, and that’s where a lot of the gacha game feeling in DT come from as well.
I’ll give Fatshark credit in avoiding paid for lootboxes in VT2 and avoiding (as far as we know) the boosts and any paid RNG in DT, but the entire feel of the game still feels like someone wanted to monetise beyond set cosmetics and that feeling isn’t wholy gone.
I’d ditch RNG around blessings entirely, personally. Being RNG means there is no sense of progress. You’re not working toward anything with this system. What we have isn’t progression, it’s opening booster packs and hoping you don’t get a pack full of duplicates again.
Nurgle’s plagues are nerfed atm, so obviously the combination of holy oils and prayers/sated machine spirits would be enough to prevent them from being sick. I still wear rebreather cosmetics because EWWWWW
I can tell you that’s not the case.
Did you ever play Genshin Impact and try to get one very specific character? Then get it’s talents up to shape? You have to redraw the same character (sometimes of a 1% drop chance with a 5 star rarity) to “level them up”.
In essence: You can spend upwards of 4-digits of income to get your favorite character properly geared and leveled, let alone dropped in the first place.
I know you’re hyperboling, but this is exactly why your post lacks punch. You dish out too much and get into the realms of the obscene.
In Darktide you don’t even pay money for anything gameplay related. How could it be worse than a gacha game, when the actual gacha games bleed you dry whereas Darktide just makes you play the game?
Doesn’t make sense to my mind. But okay, I guess I won’t convince you. You seem relatively set in your thought here.
But ordinary RPGs have loot drop systems, too. Such as Borderlands.
To me the shop and the ‘crafting’ in Darktide looks like an abstraction of a loot drop system to me, dressed up in “weapon purchases” to give you the feeling that you get your gear from the Morning Star as their soldier-slave of sorts.
I mean I get this feeling, I do. Trust towards customers has been breached by many Gaming companies a lot, so the feeling that “things could get worse” or “even if they don’t have system X in place now, they could implement it tomorrow” is reasonable I guess.
I just don’t see it happening here, because Fatshark’s track record has been free of such things thus far.
All of my comparisons of DT to gacha games have always been about the RNG, you’re the one that decided to interpret that I’m comparing them as a whole.
I have outlined the parts I feel are worse than gacha games (the multiple layers of RNG and the lack of RNG bad luck/pity systems), and I play gacha games without ever paying for anything in them, so that’s where my frame of reference come from.
The way DT have implemented their itemisation makes me feel I am playing a gacha game, with parts of it that feel worse than actually playing one, which isn’t a feeling I want to have when playing a game I bought up front.
The itemisation feels horrible to me, to quote:
If it’s a loot game, it gives too little loot that matters (and worse can make your loot worthless); if it isn’t a loot game, there’s too much RNG behind it to get something worthwhile.
That’s what you do all the time.
As someone with 900 hours or so in the game, all I can say is focus on the actual gameplay. From time to time buy items with good base stats, occassionally throw your crafting mats at the altar of RNG, to get rid of them, and do NOT expect anything. Itemisation and crafting systems are best to be ignored, just the same way Fatshark game “designers” ignore our feedback about those systems.
Just to be clear here, I’m trying not to escalate anything here. Darktide does not ask for money for actual progression, and this is a good thing. That, however, does not mean that the system it has is good. There are more requirements here.
Time is money, and just making you play the game also has its limits. There should be rhyme and reason to the amount of game time you are asked to put in, and the random nature of Darktide is very similar to these types of games because it’s close to impossible to tell how much time you will be expected to put into anything.
True, but borderlands loot system is absolutely awful with a terrible UI. I would say Darktide is worse as here you have to run around between different vendors whereas Borderlands just has a bad UI to compare gear. But yeah ,both games have the same horrible system where you have dozens (or as many as your inventory is allowed to carry in the case of Borderlands) items of similar type that you have to stop the game for to sit down and compare. It’s boring there, it’s boring in Diablo, and it’s boring here.
I also don’t see it so I don’t worry much about them suddenly adding monetisation. What makes this so strange, and which has been pointed out before by smarter people than me, is that it seems like they have taken all of the horrendous mechanics of a pay-to-win system but then just not added the “pay” part. It seems like they only got half the memo about how to screw your customers.
Someone at FS actually thinks this is fun… I shudder to think what the previous loot system they had in place which they didn’t find fun was… or maybe it was much better… maybe it was one where we just had one gun of each type and could sink hours and hours into upgrading it in a predictable and unobtrusive manner. I can dream.
Oh I agree. I’m not saying the system is good. It’s okayish with some very obvious downsides that aren’t necessary.
Okay, that is a fair point. Time is valuable.
What would help this game tremendously has been suggested by other great posters before, such as a RNG grace system or the idea to remove locks with Diamantine.
I don’t think that’s ever going to go away. It’s the nature of Loot drop RPGs as long as they adhere to a weapon type system. But interesting that this bores you. I find it rather appealing to min-max gear. I guess it comes down to taste.
Well it is true. It would be gacha, if the RNG content had paid elements. But it’s not in there so it’s half a system.
I think it’s because they are prioritizing engagement over P2W income. They wanted to more players this time around, but it seems they’re finding out now that the niche they choose for their games always hovers around a certain level of player numbers.
As for the previous system? I imagine, it had those bars for weapon attributes move up or down based on the part you picked. And the parts you can see with the weapon customization mod.
Sort of like Payday 2’s system. That’s my speculation on that front, but I also wonder how things would have turned out without the Blessing stuff. Clearly it was a rethread of VT2 mechanics, just expanded. Not a wholly new system. And just like you I’d love to see what they originally threw out and why.
One theory I have as to why it got thrown out was cosmetics.
They might not have found a way to be able to easily apply the cosmetic changes to every permutation or part of a weapon, but as a consequence we now have skins that changes the visuals so much that one mk of a weapon would look like a completely different mk. At the very least this consequence alludes to the placeholderness or rushed implementation of the current system.
Another factor that points towards how not particularly thought out the current itemisation is is the complete lack of anything resembling a consistent visual guide for weapons, despite some weapons like the lasgun, recon lasgun, headhunters, etc. having similar colours for light, heavy and in-between variants. They admitted when the stubber variants came out that any patterns relating to the colour of the weapon (by default) and the variant it was is purely coincidental.
Funnily enough, the weapon customization mod shows that most parts are compatible with each other and work simultanously when you apply a weapon skin color.
But you’re close I think.
You couldn’t sell ‘unique’ weapon skins with such a system, because you all the parts available.
Instead you could only sell the colors and that has a weird feeling attached to it.