Mission Selection: Proposal 2

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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I’ve read a large number of comments and threads and contributed a fair few myself on the subject of Mission Selection. I am going to try and propose an idea that would satisfy everyone without straying too far from the current design paradigm. This would make it easier to implement for a quick turn around win for everybody. My goal isn’t everyone’s perfect solution but “good enough”.

First:
Break Intensity off from other modifiers. Intensity is an innovation in the game space. Rather than treating it as a modifier just like any other, lets treat it like what it is - a key gameplay variable. Difficulty decides how hard your enemies hit, how much health they have, how smart they are (potentially) etc. But intensity controls how aggressive the director is and how many things spawn. I propose that this is extremely useful by itself and it needs to be individually managed.

Second:
Add an intensity selection to the Quickplay button alongside the difficulty selection. These are a set of toggles. A user could quickplay into damnation AND damnation hi-int but exclude low-int, for example. This would let me QP into a difficulty and intensity of my choosing even if it happens to be off the board, allowing me to serve as a reinforcement after the mission drops off the board.

Third:
De-randomize intensity. Intensity should always be present in a 1-1-1 ratio on the board.

Fourth:
Mission modifiers are applied normally to the board.

That is the core idea. I believe this can be expanded upon to make it even better but it avoids a lot of complexity. Making Inensity a discrete variable also avoids clogging up the RNG modifiers with irrelevant stuff.

Stretch Idea:
Idea 1: Allow users to ban modifiers in the QP selection.

Idea 2: Only display missions within a selected difficulty and intensity range using the QP interface as the filter.

Idea 3: Expand the mission board such that there is 9 missions within each difficulty, 3 for each intensity. (relies on Idea 2 for UX readabiliy)

Idea 4: Implement a re-try with party button on mission failure AND mission success. Requeues the same map even if only one player agrees. Will backfill via QP.

Alternate Ideas:

Idea 1: Display the randomized mission screen with 6-12 missions as current. Allow users to adjust difficulty and intensity of all missions displayed and select the preferred map. Modifiers are still RNG.

Idea 2: create tabs of a given difficulty and/or intensity and populate them with 6+ identical missions for each difficulty and/or intensity

Crazy Ideas:
Idea 1: Remove modifiers from the map. Have modifiers able to be added mid-mission such that they may be 1 off events (like monstrosity spawns) or run for some time. Such as a sniper wave spawning into a mission randomly. Or having ventilation purge activate for the remainder of a map after the half way point.

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This is actually an idea I think I saw a couple people talk about a while ago that I think is really good. Just have this sht happen randomly, like an event. In middle of a map, oop, power blew out. Next few minutes is lights out. Oops, turns out there was a sniper regiment in this section. They blew the ventilation system to try and trap you. I think I would way prefer these being special events that could happen rather than a condition that’s applied to the whole map and you know and can pick ahead of time.

If anything, because then it would kinda feel justified that it’s random. Instead of it just being random as to when Fatshark decides to have someone manually toggle what conditions are active.

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I wish they took advantage of the zone → mission system framework they kinda have going but peters out in implementation because it’s so half baked.

Similar to DRG the mission select is separated into zones (Throneside, Torrent, Chasm Station, Metalfab 36, Hourglass). Zones are the things that rotate and have conditions applied to them. Secondaries are still randomly assigned to the missions.

The main caveats are:

  • Tries to have as many mission types available at once (Why are 2 mission types, Disruption and Repair, only in one zone respectively?)
  • Small narrative blurbs or updates on when zones change/conditions applied.
  • Maybe even a little update shot on how the zones have shifted since your last visit.
  • High/Low intensity are not in the condition pools, but at least one of each is available on the map.
  • Allow difficulty selection.
  • Really needs a few more missions types per zone.

That way only a small number of maps aren’t available at a time, there’s always conditions up and the world feels that little bit more alive when you can see how the conflict goes back and forth.

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IIRC, an original bit of info that came out a while ago that talked about why there were zones & levels within them, was that it would allow for branching pathways, and characters could open up new paths and stuff depending on your team comp. This being introduced would definitely have broken up the routine a lot and made it way better.

As it stands though now, it’s half baked just like you said. 14 missions definitely don’t feel like it because most of them just feel the same.

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Yeah, and missions were procedurally generated to a degree, Chaos Wastes was essentially a prototype of something they were looking at for Darktide.

It just reminds me of Inquisitor Martyr. Neocore never got their map generation working at all and effectively gave up on it. Maps were still random but they were all pre-built and were just chosen from a bucket of 2-3 maps per tileset.