I think the mode is mostly fine, minus hunting grounds being broken sometimes and the dogs sometimes not being able to find you until one point and now suddenly you’re fighting off 5 consecutive waves of dogs. That’s been the only modifier that has been a SLOG with randoms, but it desperately needs more things to actually unlock other than just.. new modifiers, and penances that give you cosmetics after like 50 hrs of playing the game mode.
I have to admit, I’m not massively sold on ‘Expeditions’, though that’s true of ‘Havoc’ and ‘Mortis Trials’ as well. Side modes sitting entirely separate from the core experience have never really sat right with me.
What I want is a cohesive game. ‘The Battle of Tertium’ finally started heading in that direction, and ‘No Man’s Land’ felt like a proper continuation of that campaign, which I really liked. NML even clearly foreshadows Expeditions, so I don’t understand why Expeditions isn’t just the next chapter in that story. Why is it its own isolated mode instead of just a different mission type?
I struggle to see the design intent here. I had the same issue with ‘Winds of Magic’ and ‘Chaos Wastes’ in Vermintide 2; I didn’t buy into those either. I bought these games for their core gameplay and campaign flow, not for parallel progression systems that feel like different genres bolted on. To Expeditions’ credit, at least my existing builds carry over, which already makes it feel less disconnected than those examples.
Maybe Expeditions will grow on me with more time, but right now it feels like effort spent away from strengthening the campaign experience that Darktide was finally starting to build. And with no Solo mode, it just reinforces the feeling that this is a tangent rather than a natural extension of the game I actually want to play.
This is one of the worst part.
And why it’s not even close to even being a pale imitation of chaos wastes.
Letting people use their old meta build kills any potential for the mode, because the enemy number/strength scaling will be based on meta builds as usual and the players get pushed along toward meta builds yet again. If it had a chaos-wastes-like weapon/skill progression then it would have solved multiple problems of base game at once: progression(still has problem), stale meta, accessibility(newer players would have bad builds but have to fight what is scaled based on meta builds…etc.).
Connecting it to rest of the game is easy: your player character gets smuggled out to the wastelands through alice/swagger’s connection probably as prisoners, thus you can’t have your old gear or anything identifying you as someone working for the inquisiton, better weapons and abilities(as wastelander stimms) must be found in field and are confiscated due to tech heresy upon return. Successful extraction with tech fragments unlock/generates resources to further improve one of weapon stats by 20% plus the usual plasteel/diamantine.
This would allow newer players to start at the same point(progression-wise) as experienced players in that mode, and be able to have the full/proper power fantasy experience, while gathering resources for a proper build in main modes, same way chaos wastes can grant chests to let people get more gear they can use for normal mode.
Fatshark could have had an easy W but as usual, fatshark never fails to miss.
Not exactly to expedition’s credit. Quite the opposite, in fact…
oopsie
fatshark being confused as usual
Never gonna beat @harlekein allegations that they don’t know why people play their games.
Having played it a bunch more, I actually enjoy it. Though I do think it needs some changes. Some small things like less common hacking minigames, better variety of things to buy with scrap, new joiners getting the same scrap as everyone else, etc. But it needs some bigger changes like having an actual use for tech remnants, too.
Like, the mode is decently fun for me now that people have a better idea of what they are doing. But I also feel like the mode is more of a novelty that people will eventually move on from. And when there are no people running it, well… I ain’t doing it solo, lol.
Expeditions are just okay and functional (mostly) at this point but it needs more of an objective than picking up tech remnants and scraps.
The exfils are sometimes very messy and janky with the landing of the Valkyrie etc and the amount of nonsense going on at the same time, this is where they should take notes from HD2 as the exfils are much better and smoother. Mix the choas with the screen effects of the mission timer running out and I feel lucky to actually get to the win screen.
Poll options are obviously biased, so I didn’t touch it, but in terms of the game mode itself:
Despite playing the class most punished by wide open spaces, platforming games, and lots of geometry, I enjoy the game mode. The flow is alright, the exploration breaking up the bouts of combat, and the relative lack of enemies jumping out of my back pocket to shank me is a welcome variation on (not replacement for) the gameplay loop of normal missions. I think Expeditions has a lot of potential, but there are several things holding it back.
First, of course, is the staggering performance issues. Frame loss and disconnects are way up, as they always are after a content drop, but it’s surprising to see it go this long without an effective hotfix. This is not an indictment of the content itself, but it IS dampening many peoples’ enjoyment of it.
Second, the mode doesn’t do a great job of making itself accessible. There are a couple of factors to this concern: there’s no way to preview a legend of the auspex symbols in-game; a first-time player could readily mistake the extraction point for a zone transition and the zone transition for a well-defended vault just based on their icons. The second facet of this is that the auspex itself feels clunky and awkward to use, meaning that some players will just ignore it and yolo off into the wastes.
Third concern is the lack of any tangible reward. Your reward for collecting tech scrap is unlocking a new place to collect tech scrap. I’m fine with gating the later nodes behind successful missions, and I don’t think there’s a need for any new mechanical reward, but that leaves cosmetics. Portrait frames and titles are overdone, so we’d be looking at weapon skins, charms, or possibly even a new operative cosmetic slot for visible trinkets that aren’t worn on the back.
“develop new maps”… When they have developed a whole new mode with several different maps…
Hilarious.
Read properly. For the actual game mode people play, not another superfluous new mode that will be a ghost town before long.
I like the idea of a campaign with a safe room for resupply and an extraction event (which btw is a core mechanic in the Left 4 Dead games).
However, the Expedition mode multiplies the main gameplay issue I have with usual games, due to the large areas: people run around in all directions and it’s unclear who is doing what. So usually I wait for someone running somewhere and I just follow.
The next issue is the platforming. There are enough locations where you have to circle around to find the starting platform, then jump jump jump long jump - eh, I fell down and have to repeat. Oh, well, again. I just don’t want to.
Running through the night map and suddenly dangling above an abyss because there is a 1m gap in otherwise even terrain… come on.
And if the game needs one thing less, it’s Auspex minigames. The tree drilling was awful, the balancing on the train I thought was king of awful and now this new thing… the absolute new king of awful. I hate captchas on websites, sometimes I have to solve like 10 of them and then just leave because it annoys me and wastes my time. And now the game basically implemented this. I installed a mod that solves these annoyances for me automatically. Thank god these exist, otherwise I would have stopped playing the maps that use these minigames.
Maps… I’d rather have more normal maps.
Also I don’t like countdowns. I get why it’s there in this mode but… ah, I just don’t want to. The only reason why I play the train map btw: sometimes I just want to play a short mission and it’s hectic anyways, so it doesn’t really matter.
I don’t see the point in unlocking the locations, I don’t see the point in gathering material that does nothing except that unlocking (what if all is unlocked?) and the scraps for buying equipment could be shared for the team - or left out: Left 4 Dead had weapons, ammo, medkits, grenades for everyone and it worked too.
So for me the preferred mode to play is: normal game mode > Mortis > Expeditions > Havoc.
Yeah… I tried some missions as an Ogryn. Maybe I am just not good enough (I know, I know… git gud) but the jumping puzzles felt really, really bad. My big guy couldn’t jump over small boulders lying around or climb up a very low ledge. I didn’t count how many times I fell because I didn’t jump far enough or jumped too early—I don’t know what the problem was. Very frustrating. My guess is an Ogryn can only jump 1m in length and 50 cm in hight. That’s his limit for a strange reason…
I like the new mode,“love” would be an exaggeration.
simple stuff like enemies shooting from past render distance and ogryn jump jank makes it hard to “love”
fix them issues and ask me for a second date fatshark 
Mode is great if you want to experience nonsensical performance issues and true depths of boredom.
That is on the off chance the game actually finds you a match with people in it…
Would be highly enjoyable with Solo Mode and competent bots.
Also might be the only way to save it if all the “can’t find party” threads are true.
They could really just put swagger in all airlocks in normal missions, selling some supplies, exchange weapons, or even buy super grenade for the plasteel/diamantine you got during the run, and that would have been a straight up upgrade over the new trash mode.
Make it more like Killing Floor or RE4. Imagine going into an airlock and Swagger pops out of nowhere(why not, he even gets onto the ship), and say “WOT ARE YA BUYING”
Been a bit hard to find parties for me, at least on Auric. I’m told since there is no greater reward for higher difficulties people are doing easy mode to do the penances and just get it over with.
Ah ha!
Getting back the H40 title keeps many playing Havoc, and getting back the penances could keep people playing Expeditions!
In fact, FS should just take away all progress every few months, if it is truly happy with people only coming back every few months.