EDIT(copying this from a comment i’ve left for the sake of extra visibility): some further observations after some more playing: it seems like maybe what’s actually the case here is that the weapon mobility stat has more of an impact (at least at the lower end) because while i don’t remember things being quite like they were now with the early weapons, getting some better weapons and ones with more mobility stat has made me substantially more mobile and it feels pretty much just how it did in the previous beta. i suppose it’s entirely possible that it’s not actually changed and i just got used to the higher mobility, so maybe i just reacted far too soon about this. in any case, there are ways to get that better mobility back at least, so i’m a lot less bothered by this now lol.
original text: As the title says, movement in the current beta of darktide seems to have been slowed down across the board, and now feels very sluggish. Comparing gameplay from the current beta to recordings i have of the last one, it seems to have been pretty heavily slowed across the board. I can guess this may have been done in an effort to slow things down somewhat, but it’s also kind of broken certain aspects of the movement and in general feels much worse to play.
The closed beta had a number of issues, but movement was absolutely NOT one of them. movement in the closed beta was in a really excellent spot, it was fast enough that you could get around and really utilize it your advantage, but you weren’t zooming around the map like crazy or anything. Now however, the movement feels like you’re dragging yourself along, and the slide has become far less useful, and in some cases basically useless. It seems that some classes have slightly faster movement than others, at least with zealot i’ve found that sliding still has some utility (though much less than it did before) but with psyker the slide is so sluggish and slow that it’s basically useless, and seems to in general be worse than just not sliding in most situations.
It’s just is much worse from a gamefeel perspective now, and it’s lost so much of the nuance and utility it previously had. And it doesn’t seem like other aspects of the game have been altered to account for this, meaning a lot of situations (even on the lower difficulties) have now been made much harder to deal with. Groups of gun enemies are now much harder to close the distance to without the use of things like the zealots charge, and that combined with how insanely punishing taking fire from enemies can be means that certain situations have been made much more difficult, and not in an interesting or engaging way, they’ve just become more frustrating.
and to be clear, i don’t think movement is in a really awful place now or anything, it’s still fine and certainly is playable, but it’s really disappointing because the feel of it had been nailed so perfectly in the closed beta, and this is just a huge step backwards compared to that. And movement is one of those things where even minor differences can have pretty huge ramifications for how the gameplay feels, which definitely adds to that.