I’ve done a little defending of DT, and I still love the game. But it’s silly not to admit there are problems and some of them are serious. The biggest issue for me is the Mission selection and Special Conditions.
At first I enjoyed the Mission selection. It feels like there’s multiple groups working on seperate missions and there’s always work to be done. It felt alive and more like being assigned a task as part of a bigger machine. But several hundred missions later and I really wish I had more control over mission selection. There have been times where I go to the mission terminal and there’s nothing I’m interested in. Maybe I’m in the mood for a Heresy mission, but the only one available is my least favorite mission. Or I want to run a quick warmup on Uprising, and all the missions have scriptures or Grims that I don’t need. (I’ll come back to the books) Sometimes I want to select the mission I want to play, at the difficulty I want to play at. And unfortunately the current system doesn’t allow me to and I log off uninterested.
Which leads me to books and Special Conditions. A great Idea with terrible implementation. I loved the books from Vermintide 2 and was happy to see them in Darktide. They feel like they belong in the game. Not like this though. Sire Melk aint getting books from me cuz I pay to switch them out EVERYTIME. With no set spawn in each level the books randomly appear. I can run the same mission 3 times and find them in different places each time. And that’s great for level exploration. If you need the books for weeklies or you’re trying to squeeze a few more Dockets from the mission. In general though they slow down mission runs and are a hassle for weeklies. They would have been better as an extra that were thrown in for fun than an objective affecting the actual mission run. Why aren’t there more “Secondary Objectives” as well? Seems like there’s thousands of miles of Hive to utilize, there could be all sorts of things to do along the way through a mission. Why is it so limited to just the book collecting? This is 40K, not a Librarian convention. And Special conditions need to rotate much, much more. I’ve seen Low intensity/High intensity every day. With the Hounds going for days now. They should rotate consistently. Since launch I’ve only had one mission with Ventilation Purge. And even the Power Outtage seems to have disappeared. I love the Special conditions, and how they make a mission feel completely different. Can we get some variety in the active conditions though? Days and days of the same one just seems boring after a while. You could set up the Special Conditions so that on the list of missions each mission randomly has a Condition applied. And then we can choose that mission and ramp up the difficulty if we wanted. So If I want to play a certain mission which has Power Outtage, then I could choose the difficulty and really make the mission more fun for that particular run.
I think the ability to select the missions we want to play, on the difficulties we want to play on would be a wonderful change. I think a lot of players have seen enough of the same missions repeated and the option to change it up and play what we want could go a long way in easing some tensions. The RNG nature of the unfinished crafting might not be so bad if we could ignore all that by playing the missions we enjoy, when we want to play them. I guess I’m not saying anything new. Over the Christmas break I got tired of seeing the Hounds and pretty much only the Hounds. And there were a few times when I logged off and came back later simply because I couldn’t play the mission I was in the mood to play. Anyway, food for thought FatShark.
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