not a problem i suffer from but i think this game has a problem providing enough challenge at the to end, it sort of hits a soft cap where it maxes out the numbers it can throw and then it just runs out of room to escalate without just getting cheesy.
easy one first, loose a player make it a 3 player mission.
Slow the players down, unlikely to a be a popular one but move speed is such a strong stat and we have imo far too much of it and if we were slower there could be room to have a more effective no spawn radius around us.
Add Tiers of specials/elites. to avoid having to crank up health or damage which imo never feels good specials and elites could have tiers improving things like areas armoured or adding abilities (giving bulwarks a small bull rush) or give snipers a cloak field that renders them invisible till they sight in. that sort of thing.
a surefire :“i’d quit the game for good”-one
for i hate slow games with a passion.
darktide’s beauty lies in the smooth movement across the battlefield and its frantic action.
taking this agency away would change the core of what makes darktide darktide.
that i can agree upon, maybe implement a nurgle mutation system where depending how fast you progress additionally buffed enemies with different attributes and more limbs spawn accordingly.
or switch into the realm of nurgle lesser demons that replace the bulwarks/crushers/reapers altogether.
Yeah Ive suggested similar before. Would be such an easy way to add variety and challenge.
Different colour Nurgle goo for different effects.
E.g. green gives corruption in contact. Blue makes them double speed. Red makes them twice as dmg powerful. Gold makes them unstaggerable etc.
Obvs just plucked those out my head but colour coding is the key. See an enemy with a certain colour goo and you’d know it’s buff instantly and act accordingly.
indeed. getting puked on and slowed down is so irritating, now having that for the whole round would be just an invitation to leave.
a good part of a game’s beauty comes from its movement, in which one can express skill.
ifyou’re looking for ways to challenge the player, restrict the amount of health gained from medkits and health stations, and / or make ammo less plentiful so one has to think about how to use it.
as i have said a few times, i’m for less, but indiviually more challenging enemies instead of enemy spam.
if you watch something like that damnation with starting characters run, a few bog standard shooters and maulers suddenly are an obstacle that requires a lot of teamplay:
i think the direction the game took towards steadily increasing player power and then throwing more enemies at them to compensate was not the best choice.
Resource scarcity.
I know havoc has already done this to some extent, but I’d like to see ideas that are pure difficulty increases like “no medicae stations” or ideas that are more nuanced like “no ammo pickups but the team starts with an ammo crate”.
Escalation.
Rather than the intensity be ing largely determined by the sheer whimsy of a rampant A.I. director like it is currently I’d like to see scenarios where the intensity starts low but ramps up as a function of time. Could be a fun change of pace.
This one could be pure aids but… What if dodging cost stamina? A lot of things might have to be rebalanced around this, but it might be interesting.
And the joke option: let eight poxbursters silently emerge from a spawn door 1m behind the team and gracefully swandive them into defeat.
If you increase enemy health pool and their damage output. You already know optimum tactic anyway so you are not changing tactic against them, but you will give more room for error knowing the penalty is greater, but you would play against them the same because they will still follow same movement and attack pattern.
A good AI design is where it uses variation of tactics, but if it will detect your tactics and choose to counter them. i.e. If you are a ranged threat, it won’t go direct but go cover to cover to close the distance or backwards in same fashion if you’re a melee threat. Much like how you would perceive them.
Games tend to just to increase health or damage output of enemies as a quick difficulty increase. A game with good AI is where health/damage does not change but simply gives the AI more variation of tactics to use against you and more ability to counter so it can detect your intentions.
It makes you constantly adjust and not follow same pattern and force to change tactics continously.
Mmmh… Imo they should just move the base difficulty back to where it was before the class overhaul almost 1.5 years ago. That was the point where everything player got buffed so much they had to double+ the spawns just to keep it challenging. Which ofc lead to all manner of problems like soundless specialists & crushes etc.
The game already can’t handle these spawns, for well over a year the main reason I go down at all isn’t bc I made a mistake, but bc the AI cheated with soundless trappers, bursters, dogs or the other things. Even if the cheap spawns have mostly been fixed, you still occasionally get stuff like a line of bursters spawning 1-2m away behind a corner or just out of thin air. I know this isn’t realistic tho. The community would be outraged over any large scale nerfs like that, no matter the reason.
And then there’s the other problem: Darktide has never been super challenging. Havoc is the first mode that actually gives that, but even then it’s only up to a point. Havoc also really confirmed my fears about what would happen too.
Basic pub T5 Auric/Maelstrom is easy enough that good players can clutch & carry with virtually any weapons & builds. And that’s what makes it fun for me! You can personally adjust the difficulty & challenge with what you do. But the harder the game becomes, like in Havoc, the more you’re pigeonholed into very strict meta builds. One of the big main big draws of DT to me is that insane amount of build & gameplay variation. The harder the game, the less room there is for that variation, and the more everything becomes about plasma, duelling swords, VoC etc.
Yet those things have been an issue for over a year too, and still remain unaddressed. With a balancing pace like that, moving DT more strongly into meta would be pure murder to what makes the game great for me.
I’m not sure how much value there is in ever-greater difficulties given that most players will never play Auric and only the tiniest proportion of the playerbase will ever hit Havoc 40. Likewise, I’m not sure messing with core stuff like speed or dropping players from matches if they die is really going to be “fun” for anyone. More resource scarcity I don’t think is a particularly great way to do it either, as mostly this just ends up further reinforcing metabuilds and leaves a lot of fun stuff by the wayside for most players while degrading much of the “shooter” aspect in a game publicly marketed and titled as a shooter in its advertising and promotion materials and sales categories on platforms like Steam.
That said I do think difficulty could be handled differently from how it is now, where the choice appears to have been “just add more bad dudes and more HP”. I think there’s a lot of room for better enemy management and AI. Instead of spawning a bunch of enemies from a single point where they can be focused by players and Cleave/AoE weapons can go to town, have them arrive from several different directions and spread out more. Instead of enemies just rushing directly at you in a straight line, maybe have them duck or dodge or jump behind cover if a player aims at them or tosses a grenade near them. Allow enemies the ability to do things like block or parry if your attacks aren’t properly timed. Have enemies focus on vulnerable players doing things like reloading. None of these are spectacularly difficult, we’ve had behavior like this in many games going back to the late 90’s, though I’m unsure what sort of back-end performance issues that may entail.
yeah i didnt mean to go that far, just were really quite zippy now and there has to be a lot of weight on balancing that if we moved still at a decent speed just slower it would be easier to punish our mistakes , i do think there is room to reduce the speed without it being painful
A good example is left 4 dead and back 4 blood with the specials etc.
Less ammo, health etc are a no go. Thats just a bad bandaid fix. Ammo is at this moment a real problem in some pubs. (Yes I know if you have a good team you swimm in ammo)
Enemys need to be tuned down a lot. If you give more health and more spawns then you create a climate that we are in now, for example Dueling sword, plasma gold toughness etc.
The spawns should be smarter., enemys tuned down and some loadouts should be tuned down.
We have an example of a very comparable game with far slower players, it’s VT2, and it works perfectly fine. No sprinting and it’s not SM2. And even then nobody’s saying it needs to go there, it’s just a speed-relative-to-enemies thing. It’s far too easy in Darktide to just get out of an elite engagement by turning 360° and sprinting away, with the highest mobility weps. Even if there’s 5 crushers, maulers and ragers actively trying to kill you in melee range you get to do it.
There’s other ways to achieve the same effect btw, such as adding actually high mobility enemies that still threaten you even when moving fast. Dogs and mutants are the closest to it but they kinda suck and can’t keep up at all unlike gutter runners, and mutants even keep you safe by throwing you away. Darktide needs like a charging enemy that knocks you on your ass and can catch you while sprinting around.
