TLDR: In the following I will explain that the neglect of Immersion in combination with FOMO game design destroyed my motivation to play my once favourite game in spite of undisputed improvements and will suggest client hosted missions with free choice and SP option as the easy way to improve a little.
First of all - there are different things players want from a video game, among them challenge and immersion. What aspect is most important to one person obviously differs but for me it is mainly immersion. I want to be sucked into the Grim Dark future of 40k and feel like an inquistorial henchman facing the horrors of Chaos. That is far more important to me then a mastering mechanics to the maximum and proving lightning reflexes and peak hand eye coordination.
I play Darktide since launch and the game has seen many improvements since then. Next to cool new missions and weapons the skill trees and the breaking of the locks were very welcome upgrades.
However on the combat side I noticed that Darktide lost a lot of immersion for me. And that is mainly due to spawn behaviour. To keep up the challenge the increased player power had to be balanced by enlarging the hordes. In the early days being in melee with one rager or facing one crusher felt terrifying - specials and elites felt special and elite - they were menacing. Every encounter felt impactfull. Now I kill 5-10 of them in a matter of seconds. I feel nothing when they arrive - they are a mechanical challenge that only becomes relevant if it is combined with several other challenges.
The denser hordes also mean that you are next to always in melee. There are always some melee trash spawning somewhere behind you. And as you cannot concentrate of fire fights ranged enemies (whose numbers also increased) had to be nerfed into meaninglessness because otherwise the it would be to frustrating when you are shot at while you are in endless melee combat. I remember when ranged fire fights were an important part of the game experience. When it felt like a relevant contribution as a vet to find a good shooting position and thin out a hostile lasgun squad while Ogryns and Zealots closed in to finish the threat. When there were actually situations where I as a zealot also had to engage in a fire fight in peperation of my assault and where I had to actually work with the map and work my way from cover to cover to successfully close in for the eviscerator to eviscerate. Now regardless of class and build I just slide into any ranged enemy melee them to death. Occasionally one can rip out a revolver to snipe a sniper or trapper and that’s it whith valuable ranged contribution. Don’t get me wrong - there are still powerfull ranged builds and weapons. But to me it always feels as if was wasting potential and would be better contributing to the team effort if I was playing a melee build with snapshot capability.
And while one could argue that if challenge was less relevant lower difficulties would feature less dense hordes and can easily be played range only so I shouldn’t have any problems - threat is a vital part of immersion. If the argueably lower numbers of “elites” are even easier dipatched then on the higher difficulties nothing is gained. If ranged combat means standing in the open and just killing everything because you can easily facetank the few incoming shots nothing is gained as well.
And while I personally would be happy with a complete rebalance that lowers the enemy numbers but makes ranged firefight relevant and elites threatening again - I’m aware that other players exactly want this frantic chaos of unlimited enemy numbers and there are especially many vermintide veterans who see the shift to mainly melee combat as and improvement. So I’m not expecting anything like this to happen.
Maybe the spawn behavior in non auric missions could be adjusted to be less annoying and on the non auric mission board heresy and damnation missions could be listed with low intesity more often to offer experiences with less dense hordes - but that would also not solve the problem of the lower numbers of elites dying so fast that they offer little threat.
There is a mod that allows client hosted any mission and modifier as single player missions - combined with another mod you can even use your spare characters as bots. So when you have full control over the loadout of the team you can create a low intesity damnation mission and limit the armour piercing capabilities of your team to make at least crushers relevant again - great! While not optimal combat in such a setup actually feels much more immersive to me than anything currently available in random play.
BUT…
There kicks in the FOMO game design. Outside the mission anything in darktide is designed arround grind. Grinding penances, grindings ressources, grinding experience. This means although I could have more fun playing Solo, it feels like a waste of time because I could have also played MP and gain progression intead. This has worsened for me with the addition of Havoc as the by far coolest earnable cosmetics are locked behind a mode that is zero fun to play for me. As now even the regular MP missions (that are still far more fun to me then havoc) feel like a waste of time as I could also be grinding the black Mobian cosmetics…
So as I’ve given up the hope that DT’s MP will in any forseeable future be changed in a way that experience will improve for players like me - there is actually a way that would motivate me again:
Adding the possibility to host clientside missions with complete free choice of map, difficulty and modifier - and any free space in your party is filled with a spare character of the host as bot. And all that officially without the need for mods and thus also with progression
Thus nothing is taken away from others - noone who likes it loses the absurdely dense hordes, fatshark doesn’t have to put up with extreme server traffic due to the additional solo missions and players like me can try to squint out as much immersion from this game as possible.
The addition of clientside missions also improves the experience of those with bad unreliable internet connection.
I know that by now it is pretty clear Fatshark has zero interest in fullfilling their promise of a solo mode - but I still had to vent my frustration.
