My friends and I are pretty tired of Darktide already and are talking about just going back to VT2. I assume that this is not what the Developers would like to hear, so I thought I’d just kinda throw out our general stream of consciousness and thoughts here. At the very least to spark some conversation or at best for Devs to internalize some feedback and improve the game.
There’s not enough to the endgame. The combat is super fun but there’s only so many times we can play the same maps over and over when there’s no other incentive or reason to keep going. It’s just not enough atm.
Shop is RNG. Missions are RNG. Weeklies are unfairly RNG and mix in bad with the random missions/difficulties. Crafting isn’t done - but even if it was…okay, what, we just pump mats in to upgrade our weapons? That’s not particularly enthralling. We don’t like having the loop to be to check the shop to hope that something good is up. Most of the weekly missions are very annoying to do and are not reasonable to achieve with the rest of our lives. VT2 had a nice mix of dailies and weeklies, where none felt unreasonable.
VT2’s longevity had so much to do with all the different classes and how they all played super different. DT has 4…There’s some differences but with how much a slog it is to progress we’re not that interested in going more than 2 characters. With the special abilities being relatively plain (2 charges) and all the class traits being mostly just stat manipulation. It’s not that interesting to us anymore. Plus, with no shared resources across characters, in DT it feels like we’re being punished if we’re choosing to play a different character. The Aquillas are shared across characters but not anything else? This is intentional and just demoralizing. In VT2 we feel we were encouraged to try new careers and builds (15+ of them), here (4) we feel punished.
The maps for the most part look the same. VT2 had so much visual distinction between areas that it was exciting to go see new areas. Here everything is a dank, musty hab (except for Enclavum Baross, that map is excellent) so it’s tedious to just keep doing these. The lack of sub-objectives really hurt here too - the books are okay, but since they’re random locations it sucks to just have to stop to look for them - the Auspex would be cool to search for them. But the books also just offer more XP (literally useless at 30) or more money…not worth the slowdown & risk of grims.
The special events are cool, but the nice ones (fog/lights out) barely last any time and a bunch of my friends still haven’t gotten to try them. Now it’s just “more/less hordes” the whole time and that’s lost its appeal pretty quick. Lack of variety here hurts a lot, plus the RNG nature means that you can miss them very often which…isn’t fun. We work jobs, we can’t be on the game whenever the game decides to put it on for a couple of hours.
Penances aren’t fun. Even as a group of friends we’re not particularly interested in them. The Cosmetics are decent, but for how annoying they can be, they’re not worth it. The idea of the penance points or whatever could be interesting but there’s nothing there.
The Chaos Wastes mode in VT2 was single-handedly the most well received mode in all of VT2. Everyone loved it, everyone said it was the best thing Fatshark ever made. Why…isn’t it here? Why don’t we have something similar right off the bat? My friends and I would kill for a mod where we start in the city’s outskirts as we work our way in using this game mode. It was so incredibly fun, that seeing this game launch without it was actively disappointing. Actually, why are none of the QOL or developments of VT2 here either for that matter? It’s so rough spending so much time in VT2 to see it grow, only to see none of that back here. It killed a lot of our enthusiasm and less than a week later we’re talking about how we just have more fun in VT2.
All this is a pretty cursory view, we’re not developers, but this is how my friends and I are feeling. “The game itself being super fun” just isn’t enough this time unfortunately for us.
Thanks for listening to my ted talk