I have spoken on this in the past, at great length. But I believe brevity is best so I’m going to be quick. I do not play much darktide any more. Its still the most fun horde shooter, but the content just isn’t there. I would have likely bought many cosmetics, but not for a game I don’t play. Recent announcements say there will not be new content any time soon, just bug fixes and systems reworks.
Not mentioned was THE MISSION BOARD. This demands an MVP rework and yet, nothing. This is my average experience going up to the mission board:
I walk up, see 2 missions of the difficulty I want to play, one is a map I don’t feel like doing, and the other is some modifier I don’t want to play. Then I close the game and commit to doing literally anything else.
Yeah, in my opinion, it should have at the minimum:
At least one of each mission type (Strike, Raid, Intel, Investigate, Repair, Assassinate, Disruption)
Secondaries and conditions can stay randomised but at least one of each type of secondary available.
Ability to choose difficulty.
Ideally:
Just choose what mission and difficulty you want
Conditions and secondaries are tied to Zones (Torrent, Hourglass, Metalfab, Chasm Station, Throneside)
Zones are the thing that rotate in and out, but there should be at least one mission of every type in each zone before you do that.
That way you can have a kind of battle progression similar to Helldivers where things are still on timed rotations, but players feel like they are contributing.
It’s absolutely amazing how lacking in tone, player agency and choice the current mission selection is.
Yeah, there Is no defending the current mission selection system. I had to run a level 1 the other day just because I needed scriptures for the weeklies. Working as intended. Great. Thank you FS.
I always stated that this kind of mission map is for low population games to focus matchmaking so it “works.” And that it didn’t need it due to wh40k being popular and dt having plenty of players.
Ironically fatshark has managed to cull the player population down enough to actually need this kind of thing.
That should be what quickplay is for, but quickplay in DT is literally useless on some difficulties due to the double whammy of there only being one or two maps available at a time and matchmaking being broken anyway and starting a new mission 90% of the time despite there being missions in progress.
There is nowhere near enough people playing the game for this to work.
If anything, it should be more restrictive, but with some changes:
You choose if you want the modifier (on/off/don’t care)
You choose the difficulty
You choose one of 2 options:
Queue for lobby (you start the map from the beginning)
Quickplay (you can be placed in the middle of the game or play from the beginning - whichever comes first
Maps are rotated on something like 30 minutes like now. There are, say, 3 maps available in each rotation, but you don’t choose the map. Bonus points if you can ban, say, one of 3 maps available in the rotation (maybe you played it recently or just don’t like one of the maps in the rotation).
I just want to jump in here and say that while I agree with the general sentiment, I too would love to be able to choose the mission I want at the difficulty I want, however it’s not realistic.
For a game with a player base like that of something like Apex Legends or Call of Duty you can be sure that there will always be players looking for the same match type that you are. Unfortunately with games like Darktide, there’s just not enough players, let alone within a single region, to be able to split the player base between 11 different missions. Just taking the average 2000 players we have right now, split that between 5 regions, you have 400 players per region. Divide that by 11 mission types and you have 36 players per mission type. Now some of those 36 are going to be sitting at the shop, already in a game, and some missions will be more popular than others, so you might not even have that 36 looking for the same game as you. You’ll be queueing into empty lobbies, and rarely finding a full match. That’s without splitting those 36 into 5 different difficulties leaving just 7 players per difficulty level on that mission.
Limiting the missions available is deliberately designed to make sure people find a match with other players. It’s just the best of the bad options available unfortunately.
I think it would be good to let people play solo and select the mission they want though.
A simple and elegant solution that I should have thought of.
Lets assume you’re correct, and it is a reasonable position, the simpler resolution here is to reduce the total number of available missions. Say to 6.
Vermintide 2 has a tiny Populus. It still fills any lobby perfectly fine.
How? Pretty simple. Quickplay grants a tiny bonus on loot. Most people want that bonus. Some people don’t care and just pick a map. Quickplay people fill the maps.
The Darktide system, which is a carbon copy of Payday 2s system before they realized it was garbage and changed it, just makes me alt+f4 most times. I check the maps. See there is either no map with the difficulty I want to play, or a weird modifier I don’t intend to participate in, and quit. Iam not sitting around waiting for a map, nor will I play something that is simply not fun.
VT2s system worked well enough. The only thing they had to change is that Quickplay loves to toss you into maps that the group did wipe on again and again. DTs is not one step back. It is hitting bed rock.
The whole situation is pretty bad. They want to focus on loot, stability, and progression in the coming months. Even if they somehow get that done in a non-fatshark manner, aka one that makes sense for everyone that plays the game, and not only in the head of the designer, we will still sit in front of a mission selection screen and wait for maps to reset. I surely will not play the water purification map again for a whole evening because nothing else did show up for 90 minutes straight.
Difficulty being something you can adjust yourself on the map screen and improving quickplay should be the bare minimun. Later on when this stuff works properly (You can decide maps you want to play etc), you can make the map screen be some sort of random modifier selection screen instead, so you don’t have months of where you only face poxhounds as a modifier only and maybe get to try those light out maps.
I’ve heard deeprock does it some ways like this so maybe copy that system instead?
Unfortunately you also can’t copy DRG 1-to-1 because of the fundamental difference in how their maps work. DRG procedurally generates everything so you can have every mission type in every biome so rotating biomes doesn’t affect mission variety. DT has static missions, you shouldn’t rotate zones because some zones have the only mission of that type (Disruption in Hourglass, Repair in Metalfab, Investigate in Chasm).
