I played Vermintide 2 a lot, but I’m new to Darktide. I watched gameplay videos before, so I knew some things, but never played before.
I started writing this after about 20 hours and finished after 60 hours.
-I like the character builder, it suits this type of game well.
-I like that the options offer a random (?) story choice. Are my story choices readable somewhere later? I didn’t find it.
-There is no Nordic type of blond hair.
-The eye colors are too light. Okay, the light blue eye gets so bright and shiny, it’s cool by itself.
-It’s quite good the player can completely change his main ability with a talent.
-I found it weird the base class abilities aren’t shown in the menu.
-The advancement with that many possibilities is overwhelming. It seems it’s very time consuming to create a good build. I imagine some research has shown that players prefer complex builds, but I’m not part of that club, that’s for sure. At least the guys who make build guides have another viewer now.
-The definitions in the game are just as obscure as in Vermintide. That’s a big minus. (Finesse, Impact, Rending, Brittleness, Strength, etc.)
-Nothing in the mastery menu explains what that menu is for. More precisely, what mastery is for. Even jtclive’s video was unclear to a new player. I thought I get all the bonuses, but I don’t think so. After a while I read somewhere that I unlock properties for the weapon upgrade system. Somewhere. Probably. (I wrote this earlier, around 20-30 hours. After 60 hours, I know now.)
-The unlocked mastery properties window cover the description of some properties. I mean the “news feed”.
-I don’t understand why people lack a story. This setup doesn’t require any. We fight the chaos heretics.
-Too bad the game is so dark, I probably won’t play it as much as Vermintide. The samey maps don’t help either.
-If players don’t reach a destination in time, an icon should appear after a while. It’s not very interesting to have 4 players searching for a long time. Those who went the wrong way will be left behind. I have 60 hours in the game, and still have no idea where to find anything. I only recognize the visibly different areas.
For sure two things
1 - there’s a lot of depth
2 - FatShark decided to outsource the explanations to their “network” of Influencers/YouTubers rather than put it in game
There are great online guides. The splash screen at game start should always have a carousel tab linking to these imho.
PS Took me about 3 months to work out everything in Planetside1, so … it’s not the worst!
It’s natural for a game with some depth. That depth contributes to the gameplay variety and longevity. Learning the game is part of the fun. You can skip that step by doing some reading and watching few videos.
Definitions are terrible yes and from what I remember some game designers at Fatshark think that’s “good”. Players disagree, which is the reason why we have stuff like detailed class and game mechanics guides, and very popular mods like:
If you don’t see any enemy group where you are going, you are most likely going the wrong way. And if the only enemies you see are single hounds, trappers and pox bursters, you are definitely going the wrong way.
