Removing crafting locks is a game-changer! It’s a move towards embracing freedom and enhancing the overall gaming experience. Crafting locks can often feel restrictive, hindering players from fully exploring their creativity and limiting their ability to progress.
Crafting is an integral part of many games, allowing players to personalize their experiences, create unique items, and discover new strategies. By removing crafting locks, developers open up a world of possibilities, granting players the autonomy to experiment and craft to their heart’s content.
This change not only encourages player creativity but also fosters a sense of empowerment. No longer bound by arbitrary restrictions, players can now fully utilize their resources, skills, and imagination to forge items, build structures, and uncover hidden treasures.
Removing crafting locks also promotes inclusivity. It ensures that all players, regardless of their playstyle or experience level, have equal access to the game’s content. Whether you’re a casual player seeking relaxation or a seasoned adventurer hungry for challenges, the freedom to craft without limitations adds depth and enjoyment to the game for everyone.
What is considered a “fun” mechanic. RNG for weapon to be locked with perk/blessing you don’t want and therefore the whole weapon becoming redundant is not fun.
The path to the ideal weapon shouldn’t just be the end result but also make the journey enjoyable towards it.
At very least let us utilise our materials to unlock them freely. At the moment collecting more materials means very little as tend to run T5 missions to get a weapon with combo of 3 things.
High enough stats up to 380
Preferred Perk to re-roll the other
Preferred Blessing to re-roll the other
Chance of getting all 3 above…selling weapon after weapon for hours.
Once a reroll reaches to a point no more materials are required for next rolls, might as well allow to choose it, without needing mod.
I mean I could spend all day buying weapons, craft, lock, sell, etc. But is it daunting spending few mins doing this is equivalent of hours of mission time in terms of materials lost. It’s not difficult, just time consuming like it’s an MMO.
DarkTide is about team work, skill and especially “builds”
Lets think about content creators on YouTube. Same few missions, not enough content. OK lets do different builds, limited and time consuming to achieve. You want diversity to be flexible in order for them to put out videos and generate interest in the game more.
Look at Tom Clancy’s Division 2 from day 1. To this day people are still coming out with unique diversity of builds after 3 years because of less locking and flexible interchange of armor and weapons and it just boils down to…Want to be more tanky, reduced DPS or pure glass cannon, something in between etc. So much variety that there is no meta. It’s just 2 weapon slots, Division 2 has 6 armor slots and 2 weapon slots affecting stats in different ways. Makes people keep coming back for new ideas and new ways to approach missions min/maxing, that’s fun.
#1 is that if the locks were gone to tomorrow, most players would still have a lot of grind to do just to get all the blessings they might want in the first place.
I have about 300 hours in the game. It is a fairly average amount I assume for someone playing the game somewhat regularly. I have maybe 10% of the blessings I want across all of the available weapons. Which is to say I have a ways to go still to being able to instantly build what I want. For a handful of weapons I’ll be able to, but a preponderance of weapons will still take some grind.
#2 is that long term the game does need some better objectives to “grind” for. Vermintide 2 had red weapons/items, which only showed up as a mission chest reward. If you wanted those there was nothing to do other than just playing. So red items, even if it just meant a special weapon skin and a set 380 base rating would still drive people to play.
The other things that’s completely missing in DT to drive engagement is something like Deep Rock Galactic’s seasonal cosmetic tree. There needs to be something that is up for 3 months and provides a bunch of cosmetic rewards, resources, trinkets, etc earned by just playing during that season.
All of this is to say that DARKTIDE ultimately needs more content and better incentives to drive playtime, but the locks absolutely need to go ASAP and removing the locks won’t cause some drastic burnout for most players IMHO.
If the locks were gone it would promote people to try new classes and try new weapons and experiment. Imagine trying to get a 380 weapon for all weapons and playing around with what you like best? Even then getting multiple 380 base weapons for different stat allocations. Right now a lot of players don’t even play other classes or invest in grinding other weapons because the system is so punishing.
Nothing to be said of curios and how rare max blessings are on those things.
Sometimes it’s okay to catch-up,complete all content and take a break for a while. So what if players complete everything? Doesn’t necessarily mean they permanently drop the game. Doesn’t mean they won’t pick up the game to play with friends or find new ones. All I’m saying is, if the game is boring? Taking a break is something that will incentivize FatShark to release more content. If player retention is a concern of thiers, finding ways to keep players coming back is their job, their responsibility. Not ours.
There’s all sorts of games that have good player retention despite being old and not having harmful arbitrary and inflated retention tactics too. But it is important to know players won’t want to dedicate all their free time to a single game and have it feel like a second job.
Given that tomorrow (May 25) is when they will announce what their next big patch will bring, I could see these numbers continuing to drop as people delay playing until the patch lands. If the patch gets pushed back into June (which is my assumption) the counts will probably keep dropping until then.
EDIT: Incidentally, this past week is the new LOWEST overall week / 7-day peak average. The last low week was February 15th week, before the Blessings of the Omnissiah patch that added the rest of the crafting system.
And if the patch doesn’t do that much to address community concerns, whatever “content” it has I feel people will blow through quickly and then start shelving the game even more. If Fatshark pauses patching for a longer string of summer vacations, it’s doing to be very grimdark for a while I fear.
Anyway, this is a bit of a mile stone in my mind that the peak count in a day has dipped so low
