Level Selection and Freedom of Choice

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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Your wish is my command. Here’s a dedicated thread.

What do we want?

The ability to choose exactly which level we want to play, at the difficulty we desire, with the modifiers we want.

When do we want it?

I’LL KARKING CUT YOU ASAP, naturally. I’m actually starting to lose interest in this game because there’s nothing particularly interesting to play whenever I boot it up sometimes.

Why do we want it?

Some folk just like playing certain levels the most. Other folk want to grind out certain modifiers or achievements. Still others are looking for the hardest of hard challenges constantly.

Concerns:

Wouldn’t that create more server load, since Darktide uses dedicated servers and not P2P?
Not at all! In fact, you can already load up mission data that isn’t actively on the board and run it on an official server using the Many More Try mod. However, this mod only works for missions that have been on the board in the past 24 hours, so if you wanted to play I-II-V-E-G Enclavum Baross and it wasn’t on the board, tough luck boyo. This is part of the problem that we want to remove.

More server load may indeed happen since there will likely be fewer backfills from just picking the same missions over and over on the board, but I expect this to be slight and manageable. Plus, quickplay exists, so you’ll get backfills regardless from people who just want to play the game.

Doesn’t that mean there’d be fewer players filling in your games, since they’re spread out over a wider variety of servers?
Yes, but this is a sacrifice I’m willing to make. Plus, quickplay exists (again). I’ve had games fill quite quickly when playing Vermintide 2, even if I’m playing a map that I think nobody in their right mind would queue for specifically, so there’s clearly quite a few people using it in that game.

What about Scriptures and Grimoires?
This is something I’m not entirely sure about, but I do think they still have a place within the game for those who want a little extra imperibux. Suggestions welcome.

Other FAQs will go in this section as I see them posted in this thread.

Specifics

Overall
Players should have the freedom to choose which level they want to play, on whatever difficulty they want to play, with whatever modifiers they want to play, lore-friendliness be damned. Stuff’s happening everywhere in Tertium all the time anyways, so it’s lore-friendly too, if you care about that for some reason.

Quickplay should be changed to allow players to choose whether they want to queue into missions with no, standard, or maelstrom modifiers. If you want to keep it chill, you can only choose to queue into missions with no mods; if you want some challenge, you can choose to queue into both missions with standard modifiers and missions with maelstrom modifiers.

Modifiers
Standard and Maelstrom modifiers should be in separate categories. I say we also gut the high/low-intensity modifiers, since they effectively raise/lower a difficulty level and wouldn’t really make sense if we’re choosing exactly what we want. Have a sixth, “Auric” difficulty instead for us masochists. Everything else is fine; hunting grounds, fog, blackout, you name it. A random button would be nice, of course.

Maelstrom Modifiers
Although standard modifiers should perhaps be selected via exclusive radio button, we should be free to mix-and-match Maelstrom modifiers, since that’s what they do anyways. The current Maelstrom mod combos we see now could be used as suggestions, but also allow the insane to turn them all on if they wish.

If a mission has maelstrom modifiers active, it should be counted as a separate category for the purposes of quickplay and lobby browsing. For each active modifier, increase the reward of the mission, though it’s not like people playing Maelstroms are particularly interested in the rewards in the first place.

Obligatory poll:

How much randomness do you want in your mission selection? Votes are anonymous.
  • No randomness whatsoever, I want impunity over what missions and modifiers I play
  • Some randomness is okay, such as not being able to play a few missions or modifiers
  • I’d like a lot of randomness so I don’t get choice paralysis too easily
  • Fully random, let the random number omnissiah decide if I live or die
0 voters
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I think there was more to this post I wanted to write but in the haze of sleep deprivation I’ve forgotten. Perhaps someone else could remember for me.

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Thank you Cobalt :pray:

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You can have a bit more of an immersive meta-narrative of the war going on in Atoma communicated through missions if there a little more internal consistency with the setting.

For instance, assuming the ability to choose mission and difficulty, the conditions would affect all missions in that location and the conditions would be the thing that cycles on a timer. You can still seperate them between normal and Auric. That way you still have the spontaneity of RNG in the map selection without significantly curtailling player choice.

And as a compliment to it, allow condition selection in a private lobby.

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Fully agreed.

A lot of people I’ve played with would come back to the game if we had the option to select a map, the type and the amount of maelstrom modifiers we want.

This would also make people try to clear busted games with pretty much every modifier enabled, which makes for great content to upload and watch. And in case some FS people don’t understand: FREE PR.

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Thank you all for joining and sharing your opinions here :pray: I appreciate y’all

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I do like the current system.

And based on that point:

I am not willing to make such sacrifices :person_shrugging:

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Let us play only monstrous maelstroms without mods please.

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Personally, I only quickplay. I don’t really care for what mission I end up in since I enjoy them all. Though I will pick a maelstrom 5 over quickplay if it’s there when I’m not feeling like Auric that day.
So, to me, ending up in somebodies’ unholy mess of homebrew modifiers might be really fun.

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I hate how even when I load up ManyMoreTry I can’t find what I want more times than not. There are days where there just isn’t monstrous, or if there is, it’s lights out or pox gas and those aren’t as fun as just regular monstrous.

I hate how when I open the auric mission board, there’s actually a decent chance that there won’t be a single Hi Intensity Shock Troop Gauntlet to make up for the lack of Monstrous on the board.

I hate how I get a good day to play a good, long session of the game and I’m forced to play the same exact map over and over with the same modifiers cause the mission board just so happened to roll practically the same selection.

I hate how I stare at Maelstrom, excited to see SOMETHING different from another mutants/dogs/poxburster wave spam that I just played 3 runs of, only to see that exact same modifier AGAIN and on a longer map.

I can go on and on. This is a problem and has made me close the game and go off to play something else countless times. I love this game. I love how it plays, how it feels, and I love when the game actually tries to challenge me. When I can’t get that? When all my options are just either boring or frustrating, why should I bother playing? I sigh and close the game so many times it’s getting tiring.

Finally the locks are gone, I can make what I want! But then I realize I can’t even take my new fun toys to test them out in the hardest possible difficulties in this game, and that is what’s truly soul crushing. All the effort put into making this game more interesting and fun, such as talent trees, crafting reworks, a wide variety of weapons and abilities, and I can’t even use all of that in the ways I want to. I can’t make the best loadout for monstrous and actually use it cause monstrous isn’t playable!

This was a very long winded rant. This entire issue makes me so unhappy and tired with the game. I hope this reaches someone somewhere in Fatshark.

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Tbh for me personally this is a low issue - I don’t care about maps unless I’m specifically chasing Auric completion penances (btw Rolling Steel on Auric is nuts). But I can definitely see why people want it. I’m not sure if this is a Grudge (since map selection was never a promised feature iirc) but it’s definitely a QoL issue

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I would say it’s totally a grudge because of the unmitigated RNG. There’s no observable protection from the same map reappearing when it rotates off. There are systems where you are reliant on the RNG giving the correct combinations of difficulty/secondaries/conditions/mission. It’s less galling for people who have played long enough that they had enough hours hitting the mission RNG to complete things, but it’s still a sore point for people who wants to play something the game won’t let them with no way to control it. Heck, just the existence of a site that lists the current missions external to the game should be enough to make it a grudge with how unfriendly the the mission select and adjacent systems are.

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Logging on and having nothing interesting to play was not an issue in Vermintide 1 or 2, yet here we are two years after the launch of Darktide having this same debate. The Auric board only exists as a bandaid fix to the days when you would log on and there would only be base Damnation or low intensity on the board. Then they added Maelstrom, which has actually fun modifiers, but they never show up. Seeing the extra barrel Maelstrom roll multiple times in a row is just awful.

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It’s a grudge just like the regression of basic QoL features are when coming from VT 1/2. We complained about weapon/item RNG all the same. This is no different. I only log on to check for maelstrom games with fun modifiers. If the modifiers I want to play aren’t on, or it’s on a map I’ve recently played a lot I log off.

This is the opposite of player agency, something they promised to improve.

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Either that or just give us a modded realm so we can choose our own missions ourselves and mod our own difficulty’s in to actually give us a challenge its that simple really.

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Isn’t it silly that so many of us have stopped playing this game we love simply because we load it up, see there are no missions hard enough to be worth our time, and close the game again.

Showing engagement here since apparently this forum is the only place where feedback counts as feedback despite the overall culture being thoroughly unenjoyable to me.

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Here’s the site so you can check what the missions are whenever.

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Thanks I know you’re trying to help but I won’t use that.

It’s not my job to keep tabs on a map calendar and plan my time accordingly. The fact that tracker exists is proof of the issue. We should be able to select what we want, when we want.

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i´m all for it.

the maps themselves aren´t the issue for me, i haven´t completed many penances for the appropriate maps because they werent in the auric maelstrom pool for weeks on end by the time i was playing.

never picked a lower setting to bore myself through lesser enjoyment for the sake of completion.

it´s all about the “how” for me, not the “where”.
maps in their design all got a sweet spot where i feel “at home” in the 40k universe.

but it´s a difference between YAY I II V E G / hab dreyko and oof, not another hunting grounds,barrels,mutants / hab dreyko.

so personally a lot would be changed for the better if i could just chose between the modifier of my liking.

had days where i just quit cause for the second time we cleared a DI IV IX G on a map and still the timer was above 10 minutes.

instead of a third round i rather opted for different game for the next hour or so.

plus the randomness right now could mean on days off and weekends i wouldn´t see a single C I VI or I II V E G and end up with 20 or more matches that were semi-satisfying instead.

see:

it isnt a good thing to play all weekend and haven´t had a proper I II V E G or J I II F to show for.

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Logging in after work and having no fun maps/modifiers is the worst feeling.

I bet there are people who had the same feeling and didn’t stick with the game during the years. We probably won’t be hearing from them here sadly.

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