Chiming in siting a little over 400 hours and i would honestly cite just had badly progression is handled as my main problem with the game and just how badly the system is put together as the reason for not playing more. Every time i log in i want to go in with the intent of having fun but then it’s “oh right, this garbage”.
As far as the gameplay goes it’s really the standout reason to come back despite the disaster of a itemization system. Putting balancing problems with the ogryn aside a lot of stuff feels good to play (when you get the chance to actually use it) and the weapons feel fairly powerful and punchy even for smaller stuff like the auto pistol and las pistol. Moment to moment gameplay is great but there is no other way to describe the various systems around obtaining and upgrading items other than built wrong, built stupid if you will.
For starters locking all your equipment and resources to a single character was probably the biggest misstep they could have made. I don’t know why they thought this was a good idea but it’s resulted in an awkward progression loop where each new character has to start from scratch and has 0 outside help or assistance with gear.
As an added headache this is the crafting mats, malk coins, and credits i have across 4 different characters (because being real playing 1 character for even 50 hours gets really boring) which individually isn’t enough to really do anything of impact but if it was combined i could actually maybe upgrade a weapon or work on a character that needs, say, a proper curio or a new weapon. It’t not like i haven’t already, you know, sunk the time in, i did, the proof is there but because of some roundabout logic i need to do it again and pretend i didn’t just spend a bunch of time doing weeklies, get crafting materials, and collecting credits to MAYBE get an upgrade.
Taking even the extreme of a game like say Warframe progress is really slow at times and you need to farm various places to get resources and random drops but there is a guaranteed path forward for whatever you want to work towards. Progress isn’t often discarded (with various exceptions like sacrifice based systems but that’s an outlier and leads to more build variety) because you can entirely remod weapons whenever you feel like and short of running out of inventory space there is never really a reason to full discard something. I never feel like I wasting my time in a game like Warframe because no matter what im doing im making progressing forward. Previous progress in the form of weapons and Warframes unlocked leads to new progress, new builds, new things to explore.
That’s really the issue with Darktide, that’s the key word, MAYBE. The store is a random roll for type of item, quality, and blessings/perks. Brunts is a random roll on quality but requires you to play the slots. Malks is daily random roll and if you happened to already buy something you wanted then you are SOL for the week. Upgrading itself is heavily randomized and any step of the way you can (and will) ruin an item and need to scrap it.
There is already quite a few 370 plus weapons that rolled bad stats that ive had to scrap which was also after spending 100k or so at brunts. It’s not like there is a strip item of blessings option or unlocked perks / blessings, past a certain point you are just upgrading and trashing weapons at amazing speed trying to fin any progress. It’s lead to me going “yeah i guess ill just settle for this because i really don’t want to go through the time consuming process of getting the same weapon and trying to level it again just to get a more desirable blessing/stat combo.” The system does not reward or respect my time as some items have just randomly fallen into my lap which far outstrip even the ones upgraded from scratch.
On the flip side oh boy these would be fun / interesting for the preacher / vet to pick up and try even at a lower item score but guess what? This isn’t for the preacher / vet, this is on the psyker, who doesn’t have a single staff in sight. That’s the kicker too, it’s not like a shared stash exists, it’s not like even if i see something that would be good for my Vet which doesn’t have a ton of different weapons i can trade that, it’s stuck there. I think the only reason Psyker gets a malk shop is to farm blessings for other characters at this point.
Meanwhile i wouldn’t mind buying any of this to try but because i spent my malk bucks for the week I can’t and because i didn’t have the clarvoince to know “you will have useful items in malks on this character at this time” i don’t have the resources to get anything else!
The reason people are acting like this is a big issue is because other games already figured this out! It’s not like this is the first time a system like this has existed in a game, this has been a common system for literally over a decade at this point! Hell this is Fat Shark’s what, 3rd attempt at making a system like this?
We have gone BACKWARDS when it comes to both usability and respecting player time compared to Vermintide 2.
As a reminder Vermntide 2 had:
-A system that let you craft up whatever you wanted whenever you wanted at a fairly lax crafting cost
-Shared resources and items so you could swap out jewelry if you wanted to before spending time getting gear for each character individually
-Far less randomness in the system of getting items with good base stats (The power of that item will be between [-5 to +10] over/under the combined average of your current gear vs the system we have now where even a 370+ item count be terriable because it dump stats the wrong thing)
-Less random stats to deal with when upgrading / rerolling gear
-The ability to reroll those stats / blessings at any time with no locks.
I’m not even going to bring up red items as they MAY come down to line and it’s clear end game itemization just isn’t done yet (especially since blessings themselves are in a poor state) but i don’t feel like it’s an unreasonable ask for a system that is at least as good as the previous game’s system and not worse than it.