Overall Feedback on the general concept & suggestions

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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Hi everybody.
If this feels like it should belong to general discussion rather than gameplay feedback, the admins are welcome to shift it over there. Anyway, here it goes.

I generally like Darktide a lot. The visuals are nice, the mission design interesting, the dialogue is plain awesome at times (<3 Hadron) . Somehow you managed to take the general L4D formula of 4 randos running around and adapt it to a setting that mostly revolves about giant, planet-wide battles of whole armies exterminating the crap out of one another. In 400 hours of game time I had less than a handfull of bugs, so it’s basically very solid, good job.

However, there is only so much four in 40k-terms basically naked humans can and should be able to achieve. On Damnation and especially on Auric, things just get out of hand. I don’t know how it’s calculated engine-wise, but either the enemies get too much armor/HP or the weapons get too wimpy, but suddenly the damage starts to be insufficient, enemies become just too spongy. It’s okay to have a higher proportion of specialists or additional mutators (smoke, houds, whatever), but when the enemies start to feel spongy, it sucks in any game, and Darktide is no exception.

Your next step is Havoc mode - as far as I understood it, that’s just “more auric, with more nasty, more mutators and additional debuffs on the players”. Gee, thanks, exactly what’s needed to make the enemies more spongy, the gameplay less fluid and the scenarios even more unrealistic. As far as I understood it, we’re playing random rejects, not a team of eldar Solitaires, Grey Knights and crisis suit pilots.
I fully understand that cranking up the difficulty, maybe adding another mutator or three is easier than actual new content (maps, missions, etc) but might I suggest a bit more of the later is even more engaging than a whole lot of the former.

Other than that, as I said, 40k is about big battles. It would be really cool if you add a couple missions where there is a large battle going on and you have to stem the tide or achieve some other objective or maybe even have to have several teams working in tandem to do so. A bit more epic, a bit less killteam, if you like.

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XBox release seemed to coincide with huge reduction in enemy numbers and increase in elites.

Not making a direct causational link. Just noting a coincidence.

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Who’s saying that havoc is going to be the only thing coming soon ?

Like we don’t even know if Havoc is part of Grim Protocol.

Might be that there will be a new map like how the last few updates (or more if it’s like the TC one).

Not just that, Kill Team is still a big component of the setting, and small teams fighting hoardes isn’t rare.

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Also, Inquisitorial Strike teams from Dark Heresy - fighting hordes of enemies is not usual, but also not unheard of.

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Enemies gettin’ spongy … well I feel, that the game got easier most of the time and enemies aren’t that tough, for most of them there is enough one-shot-options even for crushers.
But well I started with Ogryn who didn’t kill sh*t after release :smiley:

And I disagree, WH40K is not only about large scale battles, the scenario evolved arround them, but also away from them.

There’s a system for small teams skirmishes (the allready mentioned “Kill Team”). A lot of novels and short stories are about small teams doing small side missions to turn the tide as just one epic battle after another wouldn’t be a very interesting read… it would just be about how often you can describe tank clashes again.
Look at the cineastic approach in Warhammer-TV no real big scale battles there either … they would just become boring in story telling, perhabs they’d have a visual grandeur … but that would be it.

BUT: getting missions where the teams actions are embedded into bigger scale battles would be nice yes. To a very small extend we have that allready as you can see fighting in the far distance on other bridges and stuff …

But this is basicly Underhive(-Urban-)warfare, companys marching in line are just no option …

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Agree about bullet sponges.

E.g. I detest enemies that take more than 1 bullet to the head or 10 bullets to an unprotected torso.

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This is the first time I’ve seen someone call enemies bullet spongy ever since player power shot through the roof with the talent tree patch. I don’t agree at all, even Damnation crushers and bulwarks are made of paper. Auric doesn’t change their hits to kill, by the way.

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You’re talking about the most extreme case in a very specific meta build though, presumably with a revolver. Crushers are not ‘paper’ to 95% of the guns. Lasguns might as well be water pistols and lasguns are a big chunk of the armoury.

It can take 2-3 direct hits to kill a lowly gunner with an Ogryn rumbler (including explosions oc). Enemies are definitely quite spongy at higher difficulties.

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no I’m not, I’m talking almost every weapon. With very few exceptions of VERY cleave focused weapons like the heavy sword (which can kill 5 ragers in one hit instead), most of them kill crushers exttremely fast. Even the knife takes like 3 hits to kill a crusher and it’s extremely fast. You have multiple ogryn weapon archetypes which can literally oneshot every enemy in the game minus bosses, and some don’t even need to use the thrust blessing to do it. The ones that don’t oneshot will kill them with like 2 or 3 quick heavies instead

Rumbler is a cool example because the rumbler actually oneshots reapers. It oneshots gunners too, if the grenade bounces right. If you have a specific build that includes blaze away it will kill whole gunner patrols in like 3 shots.

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Yeah I don’t know about that. If the enemies got downed as easy as you’re describing then literally no one would ever die as the game would be child’s play.

You make it sound like the enemies are made from birthday cake and this is clearly not the case.

You use knife as an example and, despite my never having seen a crusher die from 3 tickles of a knife, that is peak meta and exactly what I mentioned to avoid in the example.

Also “3 quick heavies”? There’s no such thing as a quick heavy especially on an Ogryn. If something takes 3 heavy swings from an Ogryn to be killed then that is 100% not an easy or quick death. That’s actually pretty hardy. I use a karsolas with thrust and it takes quite a while to get through a pack of crushers. Yes I can 1 shot with the special but you first need to perform the pull then you only get to hit 1 target each time. Takes an age to load that attack.

Are you making these statements based off 1-on-1 interactions in the meatgrinder or something with builds solely designed to do 1 shots on 1 type of enemy whilst being bad at other things or other enemies? If so, that’s not a good testbed. Enemies are generally always in crowds so damage is often dispersed/shared.

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Non sequitur really. The enemies do actually really die that easily, you can confirm all the things I said yourself and I can prove them if you challenge me. Them dying that fast doesn’t mean they don’t kill people who don’t pay enough attention, still.

Nah the bully club mk1 heavies come out super quick. Shovel too. Both kill crushers in 3 hits. Some of the fastest kill time on crushers in the game.
Let’s put what you’re saying into perspective: You think 2 or 3 quick heavies is too slow to kill a crusher. So that only leaves us with 1. You want every weapon to oneshot crushers? That would be absurd, 2-3 is fine, depending on weapon even more is fine too. Not every weapon has to competently remove crushers since you get two weapon choices. This is for example all ignoring that ogryns can have can opener or shattering impact on his ranged wep choice which also does great work on crushers. You now realize that the crusher not being an instakill for every wep adds complexity to the game, which is a good thing.

So you can stagger a crusher out of his attack and oneshot him and somehow it’s not enough because killing 10 crushers needs you to do it 10 times? What is your proposed better way of handling this? You want the attack to kill the 10 crushers at once? Only then do you not consider it HP spongey anymore?

Like at this point I’m just confused, is your argument that killing many tough enemies can take time with single target weapons now? No longer a HP sponge issue but a “many enemies show so there’s a ton of effective HP” issue? Well first of all it’s a horde game, if you consider this a problem what would you do to change it? Would you want the karsolas to kill 5 crushers in one overhead? What would your team be doing during that time?

We’ve also been speaking about Ogryn weapons (I brought some examples since you brought him up) which are relatively balanced, but there is tons of stuff in the game that absolutely trivializes gangs of tough elites. Bolter will just kill everything on a magdump, plasma does too, flamers get brittleness blessings now. Kraks for example will literally clean up 3 to however many stacked fat elites there are with one batch of grenades with ease. I do not see how anything in this game is perceived as HP sponges. It reads to me like someone didn’t empower his weapon or has weird perks/blessings on them.

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For Clarification.
Loadout, skills, equipment etc. should support your playstyle, and enable skill-based gameplay.
If you have to follow the meta and have that one class with that one weapon and that specific skilltree to effectively play a high difficulty setting, you are officially doing it wrong (@gamedevs).

It is annoying when enemies eat up ranged shots, but it gets completely craptastic when even melee becomes a problem. A non-melee-centric build for non-ogryns has a good chance of requiring 3-5+ solid hits with a sword to kill a regular Dreg or Scab, never mind specialists or bullwarks.
Actually, I do agree that the later are less of a problem. With plasma or a grenadier build on the team, they get slaughtered, but godemperor help the poor psyker stuck in melee with say a heavy sword against 2 ragers.

Best example for this is the flamer. The Fanatic has pretty much no skills to effectively buff the damage output of the weapon and as it stands, it’s completely useless against anything worse than the zombies, starting with Heresy setting.
It’s a flamethrower, for Vulkan’s sake. It should feel like the cleansing flame of holy wrath, not like a squirtgun loaded with dish soap. If you need to ballance it, limit the ammo available, but let it kill stuff. The primary fire mode is useless and secondary has a ton of wind-up time to deliver less damage output than a level 5 veteran with his first unimproved lasgun.

As for the “but killteam” replies - yes. 40k also has small-scale stuff and as i mentioned, Fatshark did pretty well in that regard. Still, 40k is the setting of superlatives. Stardestroyers from other settings barely pass as escort ships in 40k. Destruction of a planet is a tragedy in starwars and “tuesday” in 40k. I can get “sneak about with 3 mates” in any other setting. I don’t get “fight a continent-wide war with tanks the size of barns, mechs the size of office buildings and enemies in their billions” in other settings.

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I never said that though. I think it’s a good amount. I do think most enemies are slightly too spongy at the top tier though. I’d rather they did a bit more damage and took a bit less damage to kill.

I’m disputing your statement that all enemies are all super easy to kill all the time using any weapon by anyone (and specifically that you used “3 heavy Ogryn swings” as an example of something not being a hp sponge). The game is designed in a way to leave you vulnerable/weak to at least 2 types of enemies or armour at any time. The game doesn’t allow you to be perfect against all enemy and armour types at any 1 time.

My tank of an Ogryn still takes at least 2-3 heavy swings of my pickaxe to kill 1 single rager.

The game is a horde game with an almost never ending stream of enemies. You’re not meant to have some sort of ‘Chivalry’ 1-on-1 battles that last minutes.

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Fortunately Darktide is not a lot like this. On all classes you could literally randomly distribute points and randomly pick weapons with random blessings and with very few exceptions of very blessing/talent dependant weapons and a couple of combinations that share a major weakness (e.g. shredder autopistol and catachan sword without any rending talents), you’d do just fine on damnation and/or damnation. Some blessings cover very obvious weaknesses, like brutal momentum on combat axes. I agree it’s bad design as it basically taxes one blessing slot, but I disagree that it’s a big issue in terms of how the game feels to play. You just end up getting brutal momentum. It’s obvious that you should do it if you test out the wep and know what BM does. It’s not much of a minmax thing.

What is “a sword”? Name a weapon in particular. Also, be more specific about the enemy type. What’s a regular dreg or scab? Do you mean the dreg/scab bruisers who wear flak armor on their head/body respectively? Also, on which class?

Completely untrue. The flamer kills every enemy in the game other than a crusher or boss in one magazine or less, period.

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Re: Obligatory Minmaxing
I don’t mind selecting one perk that is ostensibly better or one blessing. But some weapons are just straight up trash or worse than alternatives.

Re: Swords
Catachan Knives. Power Swords, Chainswords, Force Swords (not powered up), Heavy Sword. If you don’t go for a dedicated melee build and only have the weapon for backup, you end up in situations where you need 4-6 normal hits on a regular Dreg/Scab (not zombies or cultists, the “soldier” type guys without specialist weapons). Starting in Heresy btw, never mind Damnation.

Re: Flamethrower
It takes about 3-4 seconds to get the flamer out and to set it on alternative mode, 30 seconds to magdump and another 3-4 seconds to reload.
Bullwarks will survive the magdump and in the same 40 seconds, a veteran will go through 3-4 magazines far outperforming the zealot unless the fight is against a zombie horde only.

Speaking of magdump and ballance:
Yes, magdumping into an enemy ought to kill it. But if you magdump each time you run into a minor obstacle (couple specialists, 1-2 bullwarks, whatevs) you will run out of ammo about 3 minutes into the mission. So no, “you can kill it by magdump” is not a sign of the enemies being too wimpy. It’s an emergency response when precision fire is not possible for some reason and you quickly need to get some threat off your arse. A ripper gun or bolter has what? 6? 7? magazines total. That’s barely enough for two firefights on Heresy if you just pull the trigger and let rip.

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I’m counting 2 seconds to get it out and ready to shoot, which you can cover yourself for with a push and a dodge. Takes 6 seconds of flaming to kill any enemy in the game with half the mag, including maulers.

Nah they die in like 20 ammo spent. Takes something like 8 seconds. All tested on damnation btw.

This’ll depend on the scenario. You’re hypothetically killing an infinite amount of horde enemies, maulers, ragers, bulwarks, reapers, shooters, gunners all in one mag. This ties into your second point:

But they often don’t come alone. The flamer explicitly is a weapon designed to counteract enemy numbers, and it works great at that. It’s terribly inefficient for killing just one elite, but it kills 50 elites at the exact same speed and ammo used (maybe al ittle bit more when sweeping over a crowd). That’s the niche of the weapon and it works GREAT for that. It also suppresses a ton of enemies. Basically, deploying a flamer is a free screenclear. Obviously that has more value the more stuff is on screen. It works as intended and it’s a great niche.
The bolter works differently, it doesn’t pen elites as well (but still a lot) and instead does a ton of damage fast instead. It’s arguably overtuned on the veteran so he gets to be a bit OP with it. Doesn’t mean the flamer is any worse though. We were comparing to HP numbers and calling the enemies spongy, not comparing to other peoples weps.

Zealot throwing knives, which are the obvious nobrainer pick to go with the flamer to cover its obvious special killing weakness, kill every special but mutants in one hit. Multiple zealot weapons are capable of killing every single special in one hit. If you’re using a flamer to deal with single specials you’re just using the weapon wrong.
For other classes, the same logic applies to different extents. If you’re a wep magdumping a single bulwark and then complaining you’re out of ammo, well, you know why. You could kill that thing in like 3 melee hits with most weapons. Quick and easy.

I’m out of time right now but rest assured I’ll be back here in a couple hours and prove you wrong. None of those weaposn take 4-6 hits to kill those enemies.

Again, I really think you’re using a flamer with 30 in the burn stat or something. That’s giving the benefit of the doubt and assuming you aren’t just lying about your experiences. None of what you’re saying is real for a maxed out weapon.

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Here you go, the proof you’re wrong tested on damnation Dreg Bruisers (generally the toughest type of melee enemy for swords, since they have a flak armored head and are pretty beefy)

Tested with grey weapons and 0 talents. So whichever build, perks or blessings you run it’ll do vastly more damage than this. This is the absolute baseline. All on damnation, so highest HP values in the game. Picked marks at random, it probably hardly matters much with these weapons

Click to expand in case it’s not clear:

Chainsword MK IV. 3 hits. Second hit leaves the bruiser at like 1% HP so with talents or a perk or blessing you would easily kill these guys in two attacks.

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MK III Knife, two push attacks to the head will do him in. Can probably oneshot him with a heavy or special attack followup with talents on, and most certainly oneshots with certain blessings and talents

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Heavy Sword VII, 2 hits, almost 1 shot. all the heavy swords come really close to oneshotting it so with talents and blessings perks this seems guaranteed

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Power Sword MK VI, twoshots uncharged. Charged up it oneshots. A charged up light sweep will get one of them to 1% so you can imagine what happens if you put brutal momentum on this weapon.

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Deimos Force Sword, 2 hits with lights but can oneshot it with a heavy, probably both heavies with talents

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The Illsi cleave combo will also nearly oneshot them unpowered. Again, with talents and stuff this is surely a oneshot

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Overall I enjoyed doing this because I was curious if I was completely wrong and weapons just suck baseline without the right blessings and talents, but turns out they don’t and you’re simply wrong. Enemies in Darktide aren’t HP sponges.
The most likely explanation that you perceive it this way would be that you’re trying to kill these enemies with the wrong attacks. You’ll notice I didn’t try killing a bruiser by spamming unpowered Illsi lights, that would ACTUALLY take 6 hits because it’s a horrible way to deal with those enemies. Luckily, the weapons all have varied movesets that mean you never have to be doing that.

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I don’t know what you were trying there, when i do this, I get the following results on Damnation as a Psyker with a heavy sword:

Scab Bruiser: 8-10 light hits, depending on criticals, 3 heavy hits without critical
Scab Mauler: 13 heavy attacks
Scab Shooter: 5 critical light hits (head)
Scab Shotgunner: Not killed by 2 heavy strikes against head
Scab Rager: Survives 4 heavy strikes against head.
Dreg Stalker: 5 light hits
Dreg Bruiser: Survives heavy crit attack against head, requires at least one second attack to be killed.

Considering there is always a ton of chaff running around, charging up for a heavy strike is not always the best thing, esp. since they tend to be heavy single target attacks.
Considering that the game is build around fighting hordes, it’s pretty annoying if you have to hit completely unarmored targets 5+ times to down them.

So yeah. I stand by what I say. Enemies get WAY. TOO. SPONGY.

Call me a filthy casual, but I find it unappealing to try to line up 5 melee heavy critical hits to kill one Rager, while 4 of his mates have fun slicing me to ribbons.

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Interesting. At this point it’s clear you’re just making stuff up or using a sword with sub 40% in relevant stats. I’ll refer back to the post with proof.

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I support @Murderer.
I really do not get, where you get your experience from, but I play only Damnation (and due to my preference to the Auric Board at least High Int - which only effects the number and types of enemies, not their toughness/hardyness).
I play all classes, but it’s still fair to say I main Ogryn.

Using the right tool for the right situation, and I’m not talking about “meta builds” (friends of mine tend to say I run a lot of “meme builds”), makes any given enemy no real problem to deal with. It’s situations, skills, mistakes and the like that get you killed, not “spongy” enemies.
But as @Murderer said if you do not use your movesets and attack patterns according to the needs of the given situation and just keep light swinging or magdumping … well, that’s just sh*tty gameplay, which is not to say that there aren’t weapons out there exactly designed for that lights swinging/magdumping …