Okay, I’m jumping the gun slightly (by one day). I’ll also try to be more fair.
I LOVE Expeditions
I am enjoying Expeditions
I am just glad we got new content
I don’t have an opinion on Expeditions
I’m not really liking Expeditions
I really dislike Expeditions (but I play them)
I am avoiding Expeditions entirely
0voters
And to follow that up, how has your opinion changed since they first came out?
I like them more than I did initially
I like them the same as I did initially
I like them less than I did initially
0voters
Finally, don’t miss that Fatshark has a poll (it’s kind of hidden) when you go to the character select screen. It lets you rate expeditions, and I think everyone knows what I ranked it. To access the poll press D, it’ll appear in the box in the upper right corner.
EDIT: And yes, I actually like them less than I did initially. I’ve given them a chance, on multiple occasions, but I just end up wishing I’d played a normal game.
Conceptually I find them a good addition and fun to play but they really are lacking in any sort of meaningful reward for the time investment like you unlock new similar areas to unlock new similar areas with a slight modifier. Tech remnants somehow more worthless than melk’s coins
The variety is just lacking for this type of mode there are simply not enough preset parts everything very quickly blends together along with a very pitiful modifiers
I’m really hoping we don’t have Mortis 2.0 on our hands with another abandoned mode that died because it launched bare bones and got left to die and even if you want to play too bad no one else is
Because at that point fatshark need stop being blind to their player count and realise that they don’t have the numbers to facilitate multiple separate modes and just focus on what actually being being predominantly played ie the standard mode.
I like the intensity, especially towards the end. I’ve never had a boring extract, that’s for sure!
However, I’m still worried I won’t be able to see all the maps before player counts drop significantly… and bots really suck in this mode. Make them count for timers please.
I’d probably enjoy it more if it wasn’t the buggiest gamemode ever added but even then it’s kinda shallow. Plus we have the issue of mounting tech debt. Getting shot in the tornado got a fix before getting shot during a Chaos Spawn grab did.
I’m enjoying them and I like them. I still have gripes with it though, and I still think the mode will go the way of Mortis Trials in that barely anyone will play them after a while.
As others have said, the real issue for me is that expeditions will be enjoyable long term for only a small number of people, where content like classes, weapons, campaign maps, etc, is fun for everyone. I would have preferred it if development time was spent on that.
That and collecting tech remnants really needed to have some actual benefits.
The maps are procedurally generated so they should be all different, yet they feel very much the same. There’s a sort of empty soullessness about the maps (and not in a good way).
The recent dev blog on the visual design for Expedition has beautiful concept art that would have given Expedition more visual significance than in its current presentation. Expedition feels like a giant sandbox with random set pieces from a junkyard, not a lost civilization of Mankind.
I was thinking the exact same. The concept art here looks incredible, and makes me imagine really cool setpieces to work our way through, like a wooden heretic fortress suspended in a ravine, and the team has to get through it by navigating haphazard wooden planks (think blighttown in dark souls 1), just for example from the first one.
The one with the minecart could’ve been something akin to the mine mission in VT2, or maybe even involve riding a minecart.
Meanwhile expeditions are just empty dustbowls with a little bit of eyecandy and you get to go into a house and do an auspex puzzle again (they added only one new one so you get to do this one 5 times per mission every mission)
This would’ve been 100000000000% better if it was just regular missions with some effort put into them.
As promised, I’ve given the mode a fair shot now that the hotfixes are live. My apologies for the wall of text, but I felt this deserved a deeper look.
There is a solid concept here with potential for fun, but the current state is lacking and unpolished. I expected to be neutral about it, but seeing the resources and development time invested into this—rather than the core game—I can’t help but feel a certain aversion to it. It feels like a case of squandered time that could have been better spent elsewhere.
The good:
I was actually able to play without crashing every single run, which was my main reason for the initial, very negative, sentiment.
The environment is exceptionally well-made; the visuals nail the 40k aesthetic perfectly.
New Boss. I love the new enemy, though I agree he needs at least a small health buff. I wouldn’t go further than that, however, until we see how he and the hounds affect other modes—especially Havoc.
Sanctuary Items. These are fun to use for the first few sessions, even if mostly recycled from existing ones. (My psyker getting her hands on nukes was entertaining for sure.)
In a premade group with voice comms, there is genuine coordination and fun. The “playing with friends” cheat code still works. Shocking, I know.
I can respect the attempt at a different spin on the formula, even if I ultimately disagree with the result.
Random groups feel more viable now. People are getting used to the mode and learning to communicate their intentions using the in-game tools, reaching the minimum level of cooperation the mode demands.
The Mixed & The Bad
While the tiles look good, they don’t always feel great to play. Getting stuck on terrain is a frequent issue, along with some janky parkour. They also get repetitive quickly; there simply aren’t enough tiles for the number of nodes and POIs.
I play Darktide for the combat. A mode that actively discourages fighting isn’t for me. Currently, the positive feedback loop is tied entirely to risk aversion. To get the most salvage safely, you avoid as many fights as possible and finish POIs quickly to avoid alerting more enemies.
The pacing is not great. I was initially happy to see a return to more paced-out fights (similar to Vermintide), with breathing room between encounters. However, the way the intensity ramps up feels uneven and occasionally ridiculous. This further incentivizes players to avoid combat entirely to stay safe. Meanwhile, the downtime between these spikes is often far too long, except perhaps in the final zone.
No Incentive for Difficulty. Other than the challenge itself, there is no reason to play on higher difficulties. It’s purely more punishing for no extra benefit. You can gather the same resources—likely more, actually—on lower difficulties because you spend less time fighting and more time clearing POIs.
Lack of Reward. Outside of some grind-heavy penances, there is little reward for the effort. Combined with how punishing a loss is, the mode doesn’t feel like it respects the player’s time.
I would like to see the mode improve, and I’ve seen some great community ideas—such as combining aspects of this with Mortis Trials or finding better uses for Tek Remnants. However, I would still prefer to see Fatshark pivot their focus back to the main game: new missions, weapons, maps, and essential QoL/bugfixes.
These are my two biggest issues. And with the timer it also just encourages everyone to split up and is very anti-team play. The strat seems to be to just run stealth characters and be quick and do POIs, and leave. This mode is very harsh for Ogyrn.
I am not sure what I would do here… except maybe change the timer mechanic entirely. Make it so that it’s a “heat” mechanic and changes the number of patrols, and how tough those patrols are. Make it so enemies have to do SOMETHING to trigger “heat”. Not just being alerted to you. They have to shoot a flare, or get on a radio or something.
Then you could reasonably not split up much and do all the POIs but each engagement just adds difficulty. There’s nothing worse than someone being dogged/trapped on the other side of the map, or dead and having to waste all that time saving them and then going back to the POIs you just left. Not sure if it would be too broken is there was a res point at each POI.
I think HD2 isn’t so bad because if someone dies you can call them in right away. In this mode, if you go down… you may be waiting awhile before you get to play again.
As it is, the best way to do this game mode would be to rush malice and split up and just get all the penances… then… really just do auric but stay as a group and just do POIs along the way to the sanctuary I guess.
Yeah, but if you even got the penances, why even go back for auric. Like genuinely what is the true point then. Because you don’t need resources anymore. Penances are also done. You can extract immediately and finish the run in the first zone so run completion feels meaningless. If you are looking for challenging fight, high havoc or auric maelstrom, high in STG will give you better and more of it. It’s definitely something that FS will have to address in the long run, because once penances are done, I expect this mode will be dead.
The Expeditions game mode doesn’t exist, and the new outdoor biome maps were instead implemented as fully developed standalone maps.
All maps received proper difficulty adjustments—areas with too few enemies and weak bosses (like Magistrati Oubliette) were reworked to be more challenging, and the Twins boss now appears across all maps.
Each of the existing four classes (Ogryn, Zealot, Veteran, Psyker) was given one new weapon.
Weapons and enemies were completely rebalanced, OP weapons were nerfed, while around 80% of underperforming weapons were buffed, making almost every weapon viable.
All of this could have been done if the Expeditions mode didn’t exist.
But Fatshark chose to do none of it. It’s honestly just incompetence.
I like the format and the art but the unfairness and the hounds have made me detest it. The hounds modifier is VILE. like, it actually makes me shake with rage. It is such utter f*cking BS to deal with literally non stop waves of too many hounds all jumping on to you from different angles in open areas where reapers and gunners are literally aimbotting you from any distance and a f*cking captain and extra monstrosity join in. It is just SO UNFUN because teammate RNG makes it impossible.
Well just avoid them I hear you say but then I can’t complete the final mission, which I have tried over and over and over again and all it takes is 1 person to flake out and quit and then the 2000000000 packs of dogs on top of monstrosities, captain, infinite reapers and gunners become too much.
It also seems as though the enemies ramp up to a ludicrous spawn rate very quicky. In a vast open map with zero medicaes, it is not fun. You can’t dodge or choose a different path because every single path has tonnes of enemies. There is no option but to fight and that fight is too much with all those hounds that have 360 degree advantage once they reach you and all spread out.
I’ve gone from enjoying it to absolutely hating it because of those hounds.
Captains have no goddamn place in expeditions. It takes years to kill them and no one can heal without medicaes so it’s not even remotely fair.
The last map asks you to do it 5 goddamn times in a row!!!
As you might have been able to tell, I’ve just rage quit yet another failed attempt.
It’s the only bit of the game that makes me genuinely rage quit and not want to play again.
Zero rewards for failure…how is that a good idea? So you die on the 4th or 5th zone…and who isn’t going to rage quit after that? It’s too punishing, especially when most the time I get downed by getting stuck on some tiny insignificant bit of geometry.
I did actually get to the very end the other night and we had a pretty good haul. We were all just about to get in the valkarie and the game crashed to player selection. Mission gone. That made me quit for over an entire day.
Pat yourself on the back you’ve probably made it a lot further than most people especially me.
I joined in saw that there is no ammo which makes a lot of range weapons gameplay pointless. Cool I’ll do mele, tons of gunners. Only 1 other team mate.
I hate parkour, skip objective, mini game but it’s deliberately slow to move the box(punishing fast play), a player respawn point far away, blow up a wall, or king of the hill three times while being trapped through the hill.
Dropped it down from auric to malice to finally find team mates for the mission so I can unlock more stages, everyone immediately splits up to solo objectives. Get even more bored and quit to play havoc.
Idk, I don’t have a strong opinion on it like everyone else seems to. I played it one time, won and I was like - oh, okay. I never felt an urge to try it again lol, maybe that’s part of the problem. I was definitely expecting a mode more like chaos wastes.
