I am more worried about whether the hardware of the consoles can handle the number of enemies on the screen. I know in VT2 people “cheated” by throttling their hardware so that the AI director couldn’t have the resources to put more enemies in. Not sure if they had cross play games if PC players would feel the game is more sparse if you get matched with console players.
Console players COULD use mouse and keyboard 
Honestly there is not a SINGLE aspect of the crafting that I like. The RNG is tedious and frustrating, the (free) skins look horrible, I can’t customize the weapon to my preference (in an FPS at that…), the system with the perks and blessings and whatever is somehow both convoluted and extremely limiting,…
Please, PLEASE, rebuild it from the ground up… Copy the Fallout 4 system for all I care, ANYTHING BUT THIS.
the v2 system was working fine after years of being bad, the weaves system was even better.
this system blows, at least remove the locks, and fix the curio reward trait.
As well as more experience and more dockets.
It is going to be huge shock compared to other games. 360 horde from all directions, trying to snap left, right and do 180s for the incoming hit audio cues with a controller. Going to be interesting.
Haha yes I remember that. How if the host of the mission had a high end PC, somehow it would cause alot more elites to spawn compared if their team mate lower end PC hosted instead. Don’t think there was ever a statement on truth about it though.
From which you usually get nothing.
My wife was forced to grind up a new BB cleaver becuase Thrust got un-bugged and its kinda garbage now on MK3 but it was the locked blessing. So she slapped together a giant resource pile of garbage cleavers that don’t do anything she wants. Tried to play a game, but it was all low intensity, so settled for something she wasn’t interested in.
What a riveting gameplay experience.
It’s still a good Blessing and Weapon. Just not bugged to one-hit-wonder-strike Bosses to death.
Compare two predatory F2P games using all the evil tricks from mobile hell including shameless pay to win: Warthunder and world of tanks:
Even in these extremely grindy games you know what you’re grinding for and in the end will have exactly the vehicle in exactly the configuration you wanted…
I think this comparison is interesting. And also very unfair. 
The tank games are designed around not giving you gear you can enjoy. When you start out with a tank, the haptics are terrible. Slugish, slow, power of a wet paper towel. So you need to grind to get the tank to a state where the tank itself doesn’t fell bad. But once you have finished your tank, you are still paired 2/3 of the time against tanks that are 1-2 tiers above you. So there’s a strong incentive to get a tank of the next tier to escape this bad matchups that leave you as cannonfodder in your own game. These games are designed to keep you unhappy to keep you grinding.
Darktide doesn’t. Darktide gives you gear you can enjoy right from the start. Every weapon feels fun to use and impactful (in the lower to mid difficulties). Whatever gear you got, Darktide allows you to go on a power fantasy rampage and enjoy the flow of the game. The only gating is on some options up to level 15 or so, which were imho mostly done to make the game less confusing for new players. But you are not locked out from fun gear by either playtime or difficulty.
The “problems” actually start when people set their eyes on quite specific gear combinations. Often the broken ones. But it’s nothing the game incentivices you to get. Imho quite the opposit. It’s imho nothing people want to get because the game makes it more fun to have. Unlike games with dark patterns do, and which imho actually mainstreamed the farming mindset in the first place. Top gear in Darktide is imho something players want because it’s available, even if it damages the game experience.
To me, players farming for broken gear, and then complaining that the game is too easy when using it, is a somehow odd dynamic.
Btw - it would have been possible to combine both ways if they wanted to, they decided for pure gambling and I hate it.
Imho it’s not that easy to combine different crafting approaches without there being complications in some way.
To consider the three most discussed ones:
Both the “Deterministic grinding” and “Free weapon mod choice” would change the actual powerlevel of Darktide. Introducing them without this being the case would imho be hard. Top weapons would became the new normal, and the low-mid difficulties would have to be rebalanced accordingly to keep them fun. Even with Darktide being a power fantasy, I don’t think I would enjoy “demonhosts only require two hits” as default game mode.
I find the game too easy with absolutely suboptimal gear. I use a chain axe and shotgun.
But this is a bad arguement in the first place. Its not broken if the combination is available. If it is available and trivializes the game it should be nerfed. This is a 40k game. 40kids like myself WILL optimize. The entire hobby of 40k is centered on list optimization to maximize the chance of victory. The only attempt the change that was the Power system which was a stupid system no one evn liked. Optimization is fun. Good design means lots of diversity at the top of the optimization heirarchy. Bad game design/balance means 1 or 2
best
Options and everything else being trash. Which is what we have now. This isn’t fun unless you play Malice which is a total spawnrate snoozefest once you get anywhere approaching good at the game mechanics.
on mallice technicaly you dont need to use most of game mechanics:
its hard to argue with someone who on daily basis does not use half of a game and then says its perfectly balanced [trigger]
my father has a good saying: its like trying to argue about colors with blind person.
Have to sadly agree here.
If you take Malice as a frame for reference and aren’t even playing Heresy, a mode that is easy enough on lvl 30 with legendary gear, you aren’t really even playing the main game. So how could you have an informened opinion about it?
It’s almost as if takig a casuals PoV on balance and progression makes little sense to begin with…
It is absolutely still true on VT2, the stronger the host PC, the higher difficulty, we had one friend with an older PC and we would make him host lol with an overclocked i7 games would be brutal
Just when I thought Skills Based Match Making felt like inflated difficulty. Now we have System Based Match Making.
So then what, people would throttle their own systems?
Yes absolutely, they would turn down the worker threads on the launcher settings or just be playing on a potatoe PC and post vids like “solo FoW cataclysm” and it was hilarious.
They had dedicated servers on their VT2 roadmap but it was never realized.
Dedicated servers sounded great for DT for a more consistent experience. Unfortunately, the servers are not great and I actually prefer the VT2 system mainly due to the agency it comes with for solo play or just picking what map you want
That was in VT2 and the reason is that the game was P2P. So a few functions were probably put in to put a damper on spawns if the Host system was too weak, lest it crashed or the session ended.
Since Darktide is Server hosted, your system has no effect on spawns. You will just lag along worst case when the action happens.
But this is interesting for console and cross play. I am not sure whether modern consoles can handle the number of things going on in Darktide. Maybe they can.
It doesn’t matter, still server hosted.
You can’t overload a host system in a P2P session, though. That would crash the session and end it for everyone, no progress saved.
When everything is server hosted, all the players could crash and the server just keeps running anyway.
But you can cause lag if you want the game to run at a certain resolution and graphical fidelity. Plus number of things on the screen. I am just not sure what they will try and balance and whether the consoles could handle everything at 1080p. High-int shocks troopers? I don’t know.
They will probably add in performance options like many other console games now.
1080 @ 60FPS
4K @ 30FPS
etc
But a horde of hundreds, probably they’ll have to reduce texture quality to render them all. Maybe equivalent to Mid setting on PC.
I wonder how the AI director will be adjusted for controller movement or they’ll leave it as it is for players to do 180, quick turns with a stick against the same enemies as PC.