My personal review and opinion on the state of Darktide after 1800h ingame

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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Hello, first off all: english is not my native language, there will be some issues with grammar and spelling, I’m sry for that. I’m a big fan of co-op/horde shooter, spent many hours in games like World War Z, Alien Fireteam Elite, L4D2, Vermintide etc. The last time I checked, I’ve got 1800h+ playtime in Darktide until now , mostly active in playing Auric/Maelstrom missions.

I was really exicited when I saw the Darktide trailer when it came out. And started to play on open beta release. And boy it was fun. Yes, the gameplay is very similiar to Vermintide, but for me the weapons feel much better, I really like the toughness mechanic and the special/elite/disabler, yeah we know them from other games, but I really like the design of those. And I’m a heretic, I don’t know anything about the 40k Universe, so everything about the designs and backstory were completely new to me. I was really fascinated of that and I really like the gameplay loop. But there are some issues.

First off the game didn’t have a great start. Big problems with performance, a little ,fomo"(fear of missing out) problem with the skin store and the crafting system wasn’t fully released yet. But some patches later most ( we will come back later to that) of the biggest problems got fixed. And later the full crafting system got released. So I was cool with that and killed more Heretics in the name of The Emporer. In between some patches were released with new weapons, Demonhost, Chaos Spawn, new maps, Auric and Maelstrom misson etc.

After a break from the game, I returned a little bit before the big patch. I started to mod my game, because there were some things that I personally missed in the game, some quality of life stuff, some info about your teammates like ammo count etc. I don’t want to go too deep into that because I think that really depends on how you play the game and what you may miss.

My personal highlight was the release of the Class Overhaul and The Traitor Curse. The classes got much more varity to them, a few weapons got much better balanced and the maps looked very nice. And don’t let me start on the Karnak Twins Hard Mode fight, it was awesome. But in those patches, there was a little downfall, that began haunting us until now.

Bugs. Patch for patch, it got worse. Here are a few of them(some are problems until today):

  • problems with sound queues (especially Trapper and Pox Burster)
  • Mutants and bosses (especially the chaos spawn) that can throw you out of the map
  • random disconnects or crashes
  • problems with the enemy spawn (no. the Crushers have a sound, they just spawn behind you)
  • Trapper shooting through walls
  • weapon swap doesn’t work (or it works if you hit your keyboard hard and fast enough )
  • problems with shader
  • etc.

Some of these are problems until now. And the patches afterwards mostly fixed them temporarily, and just happen to come back a patch later. And for me, I can’t and will not take that any further. I really, really, like this game. And I’ve supported it until today, bought skins, played every new patch, vibed with the ingame music and posted a friendly review about that game. But now I’ve reached a point, where I don’t feel the vibe of the game anymore. Because it really sucks to play the game, that you love but you always get dissapointed, when a new patch drops, because everytime something breaks. And it really looks like that you, Fatshark, give a damn about opinions, because until your last post about the new crafting system, you didn’t even bother to communicate with your community about the problems with the game in depth. Maybe you should do that more.

For the people that read that wall of a text: thx for your time and I hope you have fun in your games. This here shouldn’t be a conviction for you to don’t play the game. Even I will play the game, but I think far less than usual. Play whatever you have fun with and have a great day.

For the Emperor!
PyroNaticS, over and out.

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The story of many rejects unfortunately. Some reach a point where they can’t take it anymore. Casuals! I joke, good luck buddy, maybe we’ll see you again in the future!

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These 2 have happened frequently to me in the last few days. I never noticed it before, but damn its annoying.

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Yeah. Seems like when nobody have line of sight behind you, they can just spawn behind you and give you a free overhead. What is funny thing too is how the new Pox Bombers spawns. It seems like they have the same spawn rate like the normal fire bomber, what is a big issue on auric/maelstrom, because the cover a very big area with there gas. 3 of them is really deadly in small rooms.

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It’s missing the different kind of trappers you mentioned all the time

here a few
ninja trapper
insta shot trapper

and some other ones which I forgot which exist in the realm of this horrible place.

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Sniping Trapper, Plasma Trapper, Ninja Bomber, Atom Bomber… There is a long list :stuck_out_tongue:

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Weapon swapping issues have definitely increased since the machine god patch dropped.

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Enemies spawning out of thin air right behind the player without making any sound is a bug that dates back to vermintide 1 and was never solved. Very hard to prove or diagnose because it happens so rarely and never leaves any evidence behind unless there just happens to be a second player standing behind the first using screen capture software.

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Weapon swapping not registering and also the career ability not triggering reliably. That gets me more than anything.

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Oh absolutely. I’ve had a lot of people report lag issues, I’d guess they’re all related.

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Yeah, I guess there are some issues from the last patch or problems with the servers. I saw it when i used the revolver. You get hitmarkers from the shots, but they didn’t get the full dmg or even worse, none. But i don’t have any framedrops.

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Yep I get the weapon swap issue. Only noticed it since using the pickaxes. It’s fairly consistent when swapping to ranged from pickaxe using mouse scroll. Have to scroll 2 or 3 times otherwise it goes to a ‘no weapon’ state and then reverts back to the pickaxe.

There is another trapper issue to add too - the trapper who changes direction after the net sound has already played. So you do a successful dodge based off the sound then the trapper tracks with you and fires the net and gets you after you’ve dodged. That is insanely annoying. Like their sound to firing timing can be totally inconsistent.

So, so, so, so so so so many problems with trappers right now. Careful though, you’ll have people screaming sKiLl iSsUe if you dare suggest trappers are broken lol.

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Whilst I agree with a lot of his complaints, I don’t believe this part is true. The game has been slowly improving bug, balance and content wise.

Fatshark tendency to introduce new bugs and occasionally reintroduce old ones is a thing, but overall we continue moving forward.

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I think i said it that on the start until Karnak Twins they hotfixed a lot of problems. But for an example i know for a fact, that the Secrets if the Machine God update had a test server. I don’t drop names here, but some content creators got invited to test the new stuff. And same issues that they had on the test servers, were released on the live servers. That is not improvement. I know, Vermintide 2 wasn’t in a good state either on release and it got much better until now. But that shouldn’t be a standard . Every day, that a game has issues, the player base will constanly dropping. I don’t need to work in the gaming industry for that to know it.

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NDA covered community testing is common knowledge at this point, no need for “secrecy”.
The game is improving relative to its state at the launch.

Issues of consistency, bugs being allowed to push into live, issues with code quality in general (for example the newer force swords for a while had built in Deflector blessing…because I bet they were using the older force sword “class”) are very Fatshark issues and I don’t see those changing any time soon. Some of that stuff is management, some under resourcing and a lot of is just a compromise between what they wish the game looked like and what they can afford to release at a reasonable time frame. Dev is hard, and outside finance, game dev is probably the hardest, and pays nowhere near as much.

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I really like your spirit. But the term , Fatshark issues" doesn’t make me feel better after so many hours :D. Yeah, i will not deny it, there will be people who try there best and work a lot, i can understand that. They are still humans. But we shouldn’t forget, that we are paying for that game, supporting the game through buying stuff on store, playing it. I really wish, the just release no new content, just try to really fix the biggest and longest issues, they can work on. This here is not a , this game sucks, don’t play it post". Its more like a: ,Pls do something, i love that game!".

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I really get it, you are not alone with those ranty posts and passion driven feedback. I have done it all myself. Regarding paying, I think we can both agree we got our moneys worth?

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I wish both players and Fatshark better Tide experiences, both as gamers and developers. I personally couldn’t see myself working in that industry, even in smaller studios.

I’m often heavily critical as a “customer”. I really leave out a lot of spicy comments which initially come to my mind when the game clearly doesn’t work as it should.

I absolutely despise the itemisation and crafting in both Tide franchises and the resistance to change those. I really dislike stuff like lack of player control on the map selection screen. I’m tired of the audio issues and some gameplay consistency issues.

On other hand I’m really grateful for a chance to play easily the best horde coop games on the market DESPITE those flaws. Both games have great mod scenes which improved upon a lot of the basic game deficiencies, especially when it comes to the UI. Stuff which should be added to the base game at this point like dodge counter, detailed UI stats, favourite and search items mods etc.

A lot of us suspect some of those issues like

  • audio cues not playing
  • consistency issues with lets say bursters refusing to get pushed, whatever around corners or often in the open etc, server “rolling” back your dodges

CANNOT be fixed.

Some like audio are likely deep engine issues which push PC hardware and the game code to its limit. Others, like some consistency issues are just network based latency issues in multiplayer games you simply cannot avoid to some degree, especially if you use server authoritative approach to limit cheating.

Lets imagine for a second VT2 and DT never existed. I cannot imagine playing Helldivers 2 for 1000s of hours or any other simplistic horde shooter. Even if Helldivers devs approach to cosmetics, in terms of pricing and being able to earn them in-game is FAR more reasonable than this Tencent flavoured nonsense we get fed here. Sorry, not sorry. It’s called MICRO-transactions for a reason Fatshark.

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@PyroNaticS I wholeheartly agree to all your statements.
But I think my threshhold before “taking a break” seems to be a little higher.
Will miss you though! Give me a shout when you take a break from your break!

I guess I’m too much of a WH40K-Junky to be able let my weapons rest a little …
Let’s see what Space Marine 2 will do with me (even though I’m a true Guardsman and the Poster Boys are no heroes, they are designed to accomplish those half godly feats - we mortals just have our faith, courage and willpower).

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For me the meain reason am stopping for now is undecided balancing.
2 months no update, suddenly nerfed all grenades… 2 months later of 0 comms , nerfed survivalist , 2 month later buffed enemies.

game is becoming Vermintide in 40k, melee and burst damage ranged weaponry, (Bow,Braces of pistols, handgun etc…).

No more enjoy shooting and limited meta classes.

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I not agree with you at this point. For me, Meta don’t really exist in this game. Yeah, some auras, weapons or abiltitys are not great. But when you try to really test things, you can make builds, that most of the player base doesn’t really think of it(and i mean really builds that work, dmg and survival sided). Especially the Veteran and the Zeolot have many weapons the can choose there are really great. For me, the most limited class with only a few builds is the ogryn. Don’t get me wrong, a great class, i love ogryns on my team. But they have a very limited pool they can choose from.