Hi, Tron Javolta here. I’d like to start off with “credentials”, in that I have spent 1735 hours on Vermintide 2 and 150 hours playing Darktide. I also played briefly in the closed beta. I played mostly Sharpshooter and Ogryn during the beta. I played mostly on 1 and 3 difficulty, as that is what the game was designed to motivate me to do (more on that later). Without further ado, let’s get started.
First, the overwhelming positives: Jesper Kyd has once again outdone himself with an amazing soundtrack. Also I’d like to compliment Fatshark on listening to feedback from the closed beta and increasing the sound a special makes when it spawns, even though the special sounds are more subtle than in VT2. For the most part, the sound feedback on weapons is realistic; if I hit something with a weapon that appears weighty, it has more of a thud etc etc. So kudos there.
Unfortunately…everything else is middling.
The missions: I realize that FS may have been exclusively testing certain missions on certain days throughout the beta. I hope that’s the case, as surely it is obvious that no one cares for the randomized selection of current available missions. If I want to play a certain mission or mission type at a certain difficulty, I should be able to do so. Especially if we are incentivized to pursue certain missions because of the weekly currency. I am touching on this point briefly because I do feel like it was intentionally stress testing each level and aiming to discover problems aimed at certain levels. I just hope that the freedom for choice becomes more available on release, and will be disappointed if that’s not the case.
Then let’s talk EXP: You may have noticed I skipped difficulty 2. There’s no reason to play that difficulty, unless you want practice on Ogryn enemies. Here’s why:
EXP for a level 1 mission completion: 1700
EXP for a level 2 mission completion: 1800
EXP for a level 3 mission completion: 2650
One could argue going for grims or scriptures on lv 2’s, but there’s honestly no reason to do so at this stage of the game. Not many people have the book locations memorized or even available to look up during a game. Not only that, but if you don’t come out of a mission with ALL 3 SCRIPTURES, it WILL NOT count for the weekly reward task.
Why am I not bothering to mention 4’s or 5’s? Quite frankly, too low of a level requirement to enter 4’s and 5’s. Nothing made me want to stop queing for 4’s faster than seeing lv 10’s queing for it. May as well go for 3’s, because I know I can carry people to the finish line on 3’s. Recommendation: Gate 4’s to 20+, gate 5’s to 25+.
The Zealot: I prefaced this topic mentioning I mostly played Ogryn/SS. That does not mean that I wanted to necessarily main those classes the most: in fact, I was most excited by the Zealot exiting the closed beta. Unfortunately, IMO, there is no reason to bring a Zealot in any high level party in this current iteration of the game. Here’s my reasoning:
-Coherency does not support the playstyle of a melee dps character on higher level difficulties diving the backlines; it makes far more sense to run 2 Ogryns, a SS, and a Psyker and have the Ogryns peel for the latter two. But Tron, why does coherency matter? Because…
-The changes to toughness and melee attacks “bleeding through” has absolutely crippled the Zealot. There will be times that you will trade as the Zealot, that’s to be expected, you are primarily in melee with enemies. Not only that, but your class mechanic encourages you to be at a lower hp, encouraging a riskier playstyle. Nothing is more tilting, however, than to be at near-full toughness and go down to a melee hit because you had low health as a Zealot. This essentially neuters the class, and as a side tangent–I was really looking forward to this class after so many ways of passive group healing have been added to VT2, basically outdating the Saltzpyre Zealot. So to have it killed outright before launch is abysmal.
-Nerfs to talents and abilities for the Zealot: The lv 5 talent nerf for toughness regen, the nerf from 100% to 50% toughness regain through the special, it all adds up to the toughness of the character being stripped away pretty quickly.
-Grenade underwhelming: Long delay on activation, stun doesn’t seem to last very long, objectively worse than just having an Ogryn stagger everything with charge on a shorter CD, and requires having grenades stocked. Plus, the class is built to chew through hordes fast in its best setup, and you know what’s better than stunning the horde? Killing the horde.
I feel like on higher difficulties, one may make Flamer Zealot work, but let’s be honest: Is that the main reason anyone chooses to play Zealot?
The other classes: SS feels fine but is heavily reliant on getting to lv 30 and otherwise feels like a generic shooty boy, Ogryn is by far the winner of the beta for receiving mostly buffs and having decent weapons and utility as a stagger bruiser, Psyker I will refrain from commenting on because I honestly barely touched the class after seeing the radical changes FS rolled out after the closed beta. Also, I can’t begin to express the disappointment of only four classes at launch, when there were 15 classes in VT2. This is what makes weeklies feel so mundane and terrible: like, if I had weeklies like DT does to complete on individual characters ie Kruber Bardin etc, I could complete the melee ones on Slayer and the ranged ones on OE. But we’ll get into that.
And now we have to talk about the ugly:
Progression: I’ve mentioned it earlier in the topic, but there’s no reason to play above 3 unless achievement hunting atm. Reason being mostly on the weekly rewards; Frankly, they’re too bloody long to complete on individual characters. Shared across accounts, not so bad, but 15 missions at an average of AT LEAST 20 minutes each mission is five hours, just to get ONE 15 mission task completed on ONE character. This does not include losses or disconnects of course, so the meta seems to be to grind out level 1’s as fast as possible to finish the chores. Yup. Chores. That’s what it ends up feeling like. Suggestion? Keep them individually for characters but cut them down. 15 missions to 5. 750 scab kills with melee on a SS? 150 sounds more reasonable. That, or rebalance the rewards so that it’s not so rough missing out on a completion for the week. That extra thousand means a lot.
Tron, why are you harping so much on these weekly tokens: Because they are THE most reliable way to get upgrades at the moment. The shop is a terrible design; having to check every hour to see if there’s anything potentially worthwhile to buy is crap. Bring back VT2’s crafting system. Also, make upgrading at that station actually buff the damage stat. Easy.
Miscellaneous: I didn’t think someone could outdo Dark Souls 3, but congrats FS, you have taken the throne for worst designed dogs in history. I can’t even tell if the health of the dogs is a problem anymore, because I just pray that my Psyker somehow lucked out on getting a brain blast channeled on the dog before it teleports back to the other side of the map.
Poxbursters should not be able to spawn from a nearby enemy spawner when players are within a certain yardage.
Bombers and Trappers should not be able to RUN BACK IN to aforementioned spawn doors once they expend their ammo. You know what globadiers did after they threw their globes? They kept wandering around after doing a little cheer. Having them run back into a no kill zone is lame. Just unfun.
Exploding barrels: This one is particular for Ogryns. Ogryns are…how heavy? 500-600 lb est? Do you think Ogryns get knocked away at the same velocity as the rest of the cast? Why in the world are most of my deaths on an Ogryn to getting knocked out of bounds because of an exploded barrel?
Recommended fix: increase Ogryn’s mass or effect of gravity or code barrel vs Ogryn model to only be sent a small distance.
Conclusion: I hate to say this, but I feel like Darktide is pulling a Total War Warhammer 3; barely a step out of early access. If this were a $60 game, I would say save your money. $40 is more acceptable, but what really gets me is just looking back at how many times in the past years I’ve played VT2, and wondered “Will this get another BBB, when’s Sienna’s fourth class coming out, when’s the bloody PVP mode dropping”, etc. Part of me wishes the time that went into the development of this game just went into making VT2 better. More classes, make 100 wins on champ hats available from CW clears, etc. But maybe that’s just my bias as a bigger fantasy fan than 40k.
So yeah. I have high hopes from some of the listening FS has done so far, and you know, for the most part TWW3 is in a good place now, after a year of being out…so we’ll see how this next year trends for DT I guess.