The design is gorgeous, as usual. The design aesthetic is hands down the best part of this map (and game), second only to the combat. Clearly this team is incredibly gifted when it comes to map design, which is a shame considering there are so few of them.
The story: no one cares. I don’t mean this ironically, or even insultingly - the story in this game is offensively mediocre and forgettable. The cast of characters are poorly written self-contained wit boxes that do not amount to anything, none of them have any arc, and they get REAL boring very quick. "“oOoOoOOo I can’t wait to learn what Sister Prine is hiding!” - said 5 people in the Youtube comments while queuing on Uprising.
Then, when you finish the map; you get to fight a World of Warcraft raid boss. “You heard Brunt! KILL HIM!” said Sister Prine, comically, as the boss becomes invincible for the 10th time as you have to fight off maulers, Crushers, annoying balls of Nurglesnot/Pink Goonwave and do the hockey pockey until you die. And much like a Dark Souls 2 boss, the run-back is you have to play the whole map again! That’s what it’s all about!
Please stop making “boss fights”. At least in the Karnak Twins mission the “run-back” to the boss once you inevitably die is relatively short - and that was a chore as well. Having an “invincibility period” doesn’t it make it “more challenging”, it makes it more idiotic, when you can’t shoot in a game about shooting.
Much like Expeditions and Mortis Trials, I’ll play this map for the penances , and then move on and happily forget it ever existed.
I’ll agree on the story being subpar. At best I found brunt coming in to be entertaining, and funny.
But whats wrong with the horde density? I see this complaint constantly. Aren’t you playing on auric? Don’t you play auric for the horde density? Why is it suddenly an issue with the new boss? Why not just play on a lower difficulty if you don’t like the horde density?
The boss isn’t even that hard, it just Creates an arena where you need to pay attention to how the ground molds and move to the cleanest ring. And shoot the projectiles in the air, you can even melee them.
The reason the boss becomes invincible is because everyone just got buffed, zealot especially with martyrdom and Fotf. Do you want this boss to die in 10 seconds like all the other bosses? Whats fun about steam rolling through everything with no actual bite back?
the mission being capped off by a high stakes boss fight is fun. it’s definitely not too hard or punishing, i think people need to drink some milk, it’s not a hard bossfight by any means. some of the vt2 bossfights were way way harder.
on a slightly tangential note, the story is not worth investing in to me at this point since a lot of the dialogue this time around seems ai generated. the way the ragged king speaks specifically is EXTREMELY grok. if you ask grok to create dialogue for an intimidating, quiet type fantasy character those exact sentence structures are 1:1 what it outputs
but then again, at this point a lot of people are starting to write like AI due to the chameleon effect. so maybe it was written by a person, i just know it’s horribly cringe
I’m not colour blind. The choice of colours in the game, saturation, filters, whatever make it hard for me to see where the safe zone is. Except that, a very cool map.
Fatshark makes those colour choice mistakes over and over. Their choice of colours in the game might look atmospheric, but is very poor from gameplay perspective. Everything just blends together, and this is NOT just DLSS / FSR issue.
Yeah the boss fight is very mid but I think the map design itself is pretty neat until the bit before the end. Having a pathway loop back to the start of that path was very surprising. Having the players actually use their eyes to notice a symbol was something very bold. I think both of these statements disappoint me but here we are.
I think the colors would be fine if they didn’t purposefully blend them in. Darktide’s darkness is everywhere but the floor, and no one needs to look at the floor to know where it is, they look at the objects that visibly lift off the floor in a contrast to indicate things, like walls indicating places you can’t walk, or cover indicating you have to go around or vault. bright glowing flames and big clouds of gas to indicate places to not stand in, enemies indicating something to hit.
mmorpgs can put visual indicators on the floor, because it’s 75% of the screen, with the hud being the other 25%, and the hud tells you everything else including timers, boss health, team health, etc. Even so, they still do intense visual indicators, such as big shadowy objects, or bright glowing orbs, to indicate where danger is, places to stand, where not to stand, etc.
Darktide can’t reliably do this because the floor is a very tiny fraction of screen real estate. It’s especially noticeable in the final phase of the boss fight, he teleports back into the air, with players still capable of dealing damage to him (boss healthbar at the top of the screen btw), and then places all of the indicators on the ground and activates them. That’s the type of design that will cause pubs to wipe, especially first attempts.
My personal fix would be a visual wall that separates each zone with a screen filter applied to indicate when you’re in the danger spot, having it intensify when the danger becomes active. Everyone sees the thin dark pink mist, no one can tell what is going on with the bright green floor.
which as a gameplay mechanic are actually a needed toughness refill station that comes to you.
dont know if only few people realize that but without constant enemies to hit some classes toughness refill are non existent and thus would lead to a far sooner health loss.
guess its a byproduct of yellow toughness seen as “normal” for far too long
but when you’re scattered around and not near the yellow pee stream, cheap horde enemies are your lifeline
I did not find the boss particularly hard. I like the mechanics, they’re fine.
Even from VT1, though, when we got our first boss fight in the Stromdorf DLC, I saw that boss fights don’t fit in these games that well. The first handful of bosses in VT2 were pretty meh to start with, though they did up the ante with some of the later bosses (like Nurgloth). They still feel gimmicky to me.
One problem is that they aren’t even really set up. The boss fight I think I enjoyed most in VT2, at least the first couple times I played it, was definitely Rasknitt. You wanted to kill Rasknitt! He was set up from early on. Most DLCs are like “oh no here’s a new boss - oh and you killed him.” Gotta give these things some room to breathe.
It would help if Fatshark hired a writer to do at least some stories to build things up!
For braindead zombies that never read books perhaps. You wanna play mindless games - go for consoles/arcades and all that crap. Or play woke/trash/crap/dei wolverine & queers of war…
It’s hard to care about the story, when a lot of it is actually locked behind mortis trials.
Doesn’t help that you can play trials 10 times and mostly just get repeated voice lines.
Sadly some “new” memories have still not been captured and added to youtube. I tried doing it myself but quickly got burnt out from replaying mortis trials. I’m not the youtube author btw, full disclaimer.
The story: no one cares. I don’t mean this ironically, or even insultingly - the story in this game is offensively mediocre and forgettable. The cast of characters are poorly written self-contained wit boxes that do not amount to anything, none of them have any arc, and they get REAL boring very quick. "“oOoOoOOo I can’t wait to learn what Sister Prine is hiding!” - said 5 people in the Youtube comments while queuing on Uprising.
Honestly it’s not even the case of story being bad or boring (it is but that’s not the point) it’s more that you are never gonna pay attention to it because the game is never designed around it. VT2 had its character put on the forefront, your player characters talk in the hub, narrates the mission background during loading screen, lohner operates the shop, talk to you every time you log in, and when he and olyssa gives you a skype call during a mission, everything goes quiet so you know they are talking, and it helps that missions actually have down time for you to do character stuff, and every maps were designed with the idea of some sections having little to no combat because story dialogue happens here.
In darktide however you’re not even a character, you barely notice other characters exist most of the time, most important ones are the ones you can’t meet, and the ones you can meet just repeat the same 5 lines every time you interact. And not only do missions basically not have any down time due to the constant vomit of enemy spawns, they are fundementally not designed with any type of important story beats in mind, it’s just guys you barely know shouting at you to do the things you are already doing, and when they try to add actual story to it it just doesn’t work at all because their lines are always drown out, or because you never paid attention to the lines before that and missed the context you are never gonna listen to the lines ever because it basically becomes listening to your neighbor having a fight over what to put in a sandwich.
Like I’ve played the Enclavum Baros part of the Campaign for 5 times on 5 different classes, never have I ever knew what cause the noble guy who talks arrogantly who is just introduced at the start of this mission to suddenly start choking and dies of cringe at the middle, because when it happens i am always busy fighting a horde of mauler down that specific alley. And I was even trying to intentionally look for it, but every time i do that mission again I always forget about it five minutes in because it is Enclavum Baros and my brain is doing Enclavum Baros thing instead of listening to the background noise that have a slightly different voice this time, and every time i get to the guy choking part I always went “Oh yeah, that happened I wonder why, guess I have to find out next time”
In DT you immerse yourself bc you’re creating your own character. You’re not forced to play with small & fat & grumpy dwarf. This is the 40K approach - you’re nameless one of billions, yet still you fight to survive.
Dude - you have just proved that you have no idea what you’re talkin about. You have no idea about the story and you claim it is bad lol.
