Haven’t posted in awhile, just wanted to say in general that I’m happy with the additions and changes made to the game, and have been enjoying it much more as a result. It’s not perfect yet, I’d like to see some balance changes and more missions and weapons etc. (pretty much what everyone else is saying), as well as the Xbox premium currency shennanigans, but overall I’m happy with where the game is.
While the class and overall balance changes (and upcoming ones) are certainly a large part of the game feeling good, for the level I play at I feel the Auric Mission Board is wholly under appreciated for what it offers. Both the absolutely insanity Maelstrom can offer to just more consistent, challenging missions has been amazing (although it might be having people to play and coordinate with increases the quality of matches).
Even changed my review from negative saying, “Only 40k fans should buy this,” to a positive review:
However I still have some major gripes with the FS cash store, and I feel it is very disrespectful towards the players. I was going to write why I felt that way, but realized it was over half of this post so I will save it for another time.
Hopefully FS can keep their momentum up and keep the game from going stale, especially with another Winter Break coming up on the horizon.
I hope everyone here has been having as much fun with Darktide recently as I have.
I can only agree. Especially since the new skilltrees are a thing and the AI director is currently feeaking out, the game is really fun. The intensity you get from dealing with entire Gunner Battalions and Flamer kill squads is something I will miss when it’s fixed.
It also has the nice side effect of toughing up new level 30 players, who got carried through the easier difficulties and thought this game was a walk in the park.
I agree, patch 13 was a massive improvement. The maelstrom/auric changes were also welcome improvements and I also don’t crash all the time anymore. Definitely changes worth celebrating.
I do feel that the skill trees have cast the gear/blessings acquisition issues into a sharper relief though. One can conceive of fun builds but if you don’t have the blessings available for them then it’s back to the rng grind. Fatshark’s willingness to do major overhauls of game systems has left me somewhat optimistic though.
The new changes are pretty decent, but I would like them to fix or change the horde spawn behaviour (where they are noticeably dribbling out in multiple waves after patch 13) and general spawn behaviour where enemies are popping out of thin air in the middle of a room.
Other than that the character customisation is pretty solid outside of some technical issues and honestly baffling balance changes, so we’ll have to see how patch 14 shapes up.
It still feels the same after a few matches for me, empty.
No scoreboard (or sense of accomplishment). Is a breakdown of specials, elites, dmg(even if its a team total) asking for too much?
Every time I check the weeklies, I’m at 0 progress. I cant even bother to read them.
The items after each match are a joke. Before the guaranteed gear after a match my friends and I were getting a lot more gold tier items.
The stability of the game is good, but why is that a metric we have to settle for post launch? I still feel the game needs content, either with story (character development) and maps and enemy factions. I don’t think the 30 second banter between mission directors counts as meaningful development at the start of a mission.
The new dogs attack with 20 or so chaos hounds is fun, I’ll give it up for that.
At this rate is 4 maps a year too much to ask for? I do recall the devs saying how their new map development will allow for more maps faster when they did a deep dive on the subject.
Also what’s a Flash mission? still 0/1 since day 1.
Overall Happy? I would say Overall Settled for less.
I have heard many people talk about this but haven’t noticeably seen it myself so I can’t comment on it.
It’s very bad I agree.
I disagree here. Crafting is still bad but it is manageable and I have been able to make most of the weapons I want. As for the story, while it does suck, I don’t know what people were expecting, and for the type of game Darktide is it doesn’t really matter (this isn’t to defend DT’s awful story, but just saying for me it doesn’t stop the enjoyment of the game). Darktide is giving me pretty much everything I want out of a co op shooter at the moment, and I could happily recommend it to other people.
This is one of those things where I feel my perception of the game might have been permanently altered by mods. I run the scoreboard mods so I get detailed stats of my performance in every game, down to damage, crit percentage and weakspot hit percentage by range and melee. It definitely makes the game feel better and it’s dumb nothing has been added for non modded players yet.
Auric missions will consistently give gold items, but they usually aren’t good. As for Melk, you have to talk to him before playing missions to actually progress his contracts on each character. It is incredibly stupid and never explained anywhere.
I agree with this, except for the story part. Any story will invariably be kind of bad because of stand in characters that have to represent a wide array of character types imo. I would rather have them focus on more in game content than story,
I disagree. The new class system is incredibly fun to experiment and tinker with, and running Auric missions has never been more fun for me. It’s not a perfect game but I love it.
All of my previous complaints were either completely fixed or made serviceable.
The thing I’d like to see Fatshark look at next is dynamic maps.
We all know that Fatshark isn’t capable of pumping out maps at a good speed, so I would like to see randomised pathing introduced to maps they do in future to massively increase replayability and freshness. Like the vent grid in Archivum Sycorax but for a whole map with blocked streets/alleys/doors etc.
I did the same, the gameplay is fun and abundant. Now that ressources are put in common it’s easy to get decent weapons on every caracters as long as you don’t want only the rarest beast. Maelstorm and auric are great and FS reactivity on patch and communication is awesome.
Saw a bunch of Vermintide frens going back to Darktide after the new class rework. Was thinking about doing the same, but then I remembered: crafting is still a giant waste of time. If Fatshark wants me to buy back into this game they need to fix crafting. I ain’t playing this whole lottery crap. Had enough of that in the “Beta”.
Smart choice honestly. I’ve gone back for the class update and while it was fun for a week or two the only thing left (again) is to get a usable version of each gun for auric damnation.
After wasting 5-8k plasteel on averge per weapon in order to unlock the blessings you want for a few times and reading the sweeping balance changes I just stopped right away.
Without the ability to break the locks it’s just a waste of time.
I agree, FS set themselves up with characters that have too many variables to tell a consistent story. What they’re trying to do, from my POV, is have our mission directors take over the “true character” roles. Still this leaves the player feeling rejected, pun intended, and cannon fodder. I feel if they’re going to do this, since they assumed we were a traitor and put us on trial, they could have the directors continue to tell us we’re nothing but scraps, just fodder. There should be some conflict attached to an identity, even if its from within. Right now, the story/missions are borderline fetch quest MMO.(boring!)
I’m truly disappointed they slapped Dan Abnetts name all over this pre-launch. Especially with how well they have built chemistry with the Ubershreik 5 from vtide without him!
I begrudgingly changed my review to positive. It seemed fair because I would now recommend it to friends after the skill tree update… But these issues are glaring (especially the crafting and MTX store), and FS has been reluctant (to put it lightly) to address any of them, which is a shame.
Again while I get this, I think it isn’t a huge deal personally. However as you can see from my review I have put in a good amount of time in DT so that may be where the different perception of crafting comes into play.
While I agreed with you for awhile, even before this patch I was finding very fun and effective builds with vet that weren’t lasgun crit builds. It’s tree isn’t great, but there is a lot more there than people give it credit for.
I guess I get that. Never was something big for me. And as far as things go I think that our missions have the same amount of purpose as the VT 2 ones. Go there, kill people, stop enemy from doing something bad. It’s just that they are not interconnected at all with each other or the leveling story which is the problem for me.
I’ve had problems with player identity in the game from the start. They either should of had us be penal suicide squads, like last chancers, with horrible equipment, low chances of survival, and most narrators hating on us, or just been Inquisitorial Stormtrooper recruits from the start, none of the reject nonsense. This weird half and half theme is weird and doesn’t make sense from almost every way you look at it imo.
There is an extremely vocal contingent of players who insist that scoreboards are the root of all evil and love the fact that they don’t have to look at one at he end of the match. Some even go so far as to demand that FS ban the optional scoreboard mod because they believe that merely having such stats available is the only reason some people act like turds.
FS has taken the path of compromise and lets people install the mod if they wish. Still, an option to view it would probably be nice for the console folks, even if it’s just personal stats.
Why does it feel like you’re trying more to convince yourself than you to me. As a player who started with the first Vermintide and fell in love with the second game so much that I dumped over a thousand hours into it, suffice to say, coming from those games and a fan of Vermintide; I had a very negative experience with Darktide, and that perception isn’t changing anytime soon until Fatshark addresses my paint points that I’ve had with this game; one of which is crafting being a cynical waste of time.
How much do you play pubs? I usually play with a discord of people and the experience of the game is much more positive that way.
This may also be important. I never played VT 1, and while I put about 200ish hours into VT 2 I had no idea what the hell I was doing. I was probably the equivalent of the Malice and Heresy players we make fun of right now. Darktide was the first Tide game I have spend a significant amount of effort and time into learning the game. Since you have the experiences of the better previous crafting systems, the downgrade may grate you more than it grates me.
I think it’s important to note that I do not like the crafting system. It is still probably the worst part of the game for me. I understand why it exists: the dopamine rush of getting a god roll weapon is potent because you had to deal with so much bs to get there. However besides that I have been able to collect a good chunk of weapons I feel are pretty good and work how I want them to, and a couple of god rolls.
I appreciate it, and I hope one day you’re able to enjoy the game as much as I have been.
The “why it’s there,” is fine, the “why is it a soulless waste of time predicated on layers and layers of RNG when their stated goals for the crafting was to be the exact opposite” is one I would like answered. And one I intuit as being a result of a clash of design, troubled management and miscommunication with how piecemeal, patched together with band-aids, below minimum viable product and at odds with itself it came out.
