First of let me start of by directly quoting the Darktide crafting devblog’s mission statement
“We have learned a lot from our previous choices and gameplay surrounding crafting offered within the Vermintide series. For Darktide we wanted to take those lessons to expand and improve in such a way that crafting would become a central pillar of player progression, while giving more impact and agency to you, the player in your preferred playstyle.
The nature of randomization and repetitive actions sometimes seen within crafting is something that we are steering to avoid in the crafting system within Darktide. Meaningful choices will be made with strategy and goals behind them, as you set your eyes upon that perfect combination of melee and ranged weapons for your class.”
The whole crafting system detailed in that devblog is in direct opposition to this statement. Almost everything relies on RNG and kills player agency, people can’t try out new things unless RNG allows them and are abandoning the game because of it.
“Consecration”-adds random perks and blessings, since you must lock a perk to reroll another perk in the current system “Refine” system that is implemented you can just destroy a weapon with good stats with this if it adds 2 bad perks
“Earn Blessing”-coupled with “Combine blessings” and " Re-bless" it relies on extreme shop RNG where you need to have a large number of the same blessings and then use up those weapons and blessings making you have to wait until SigmaRNG gives you weapons with the same blessigs again, in 300 hours of playing I’ve seen some lower ranked blessings only once.
The nature of the item shop, Melk’s shop and current crafting is actively killing the game. At this point over 10 friends stopped playing because of this(and the map rotation system but that’s another huge problem). People are unable to try out new weapons unless RNG gives it to them and even then they can have awful rolls on the stats or blessings(like Limbsplitter that just destroys most axes) that the weapon feels bad to use regardless of it’s good moveset or utility, I still haven’t seen the new Zealot weapon and I play Zealot every day.
In the case of Darktide every problem related to the shop and crafting could be fixed by just implementing the same system found in Vermintide 2 Winds of Magic Athanor.
It also fits perfectly with the new currencies/crafting materials and the weapon stats system so players have agency over their weapon and feel a sense of progression when upgrading it step by step, tailoring their weapon to their needs and even making multiple copies with different stats for different builds/uses.
For those that are new to -tide Athanor let you upgrade the weapon power directly, choose the perks and blessings you want and upgrade it by spending materials.
This would allow players to try out new weapons, blessing and perk combinations and experiment, giving a real sense of progression while also massively increasing both player engagement and playtime because people could invest time to grind materials and currency to constantly invest and even play right away with a new weapon they want to try out in higher difficulties instead of just logging in, seeing if it’s in the shop and then logging out when they see it’s not there or it has bad rolls.
The overwhelming amount of weapons and variants means that any kind of lottery system like this actually hurts player retention, instead of promoting it like in some games because people can’t even grind to try to get a new weapon or even a chance at getting a new weapon, they just check the shop and go away which is bleeding the playerbase numbers pretty quickly.
People aren’t experimenting with weapons because they just don’t spawn for them, people aren’t trying out new builds because technically they’ve seen everything the game can offer to them since they couldn’t find some weapons in the shop.
It’s baffling that I’ve played for 300 hours and have gotten only 1(!) Purgatus staff in both shops, a staff that enables a whole build and new way to play psyker
Implementing a system like Athanor would fix almost all loot/shop/RNG related problems the game has, drastically improve player retention, enjoyment, engagement and agency while also fullfilling your own devblog statement of “steering to avoid” the “randomization and repetitive actions” of crafting. Since there’s a large amount of weapons people would play a lot to get the currencies and materials to invest into trying out new weapons instead of just hoping one spawns in the shop
Please Fatshark, save Darktide. You’ve already made a fantastic crafting system in the form of Athanor that simultaneously feels rewarding while also making the players play the game more thus increasing the chances of them buying premium cosmetics, DLCs and in general recommending the game to others