Some people do enjoy the leveling process, but yeah, in general I feel like a lot of the sorts of people who come to the forums don’t really feel like the game starts until they’re level capped.
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I think mainly from how the game is setup currently, it feels like a tutorial that you are going through. Each couple levels or so you not only unlock new weapons/curios, feats, and shops to visit, but the “story” itself progresses as you play the game.
Though with the sudden end being the way it is right now, a lot of people feel cheated thinking there would be another layer of the game that was going to appear.
Similar to how Destiny 2 started off during its launch. A lot of players in the beginning went through the phase of “wait, that’s it?” when the 1st story mode was completed.
Then you got value for money out of both Vermintide 2 and Darktide.
If you were not being entertained then you would have quit well before you hit 270+ hours.
Main reason i stopped playing, was because i’d be getting 59 - 90 + fps on some maps, while 39 - 54 on others… and thanks to current brilliant map selection, i wasnt many times able to skip those poorly optimized. I’ll install again in a year, till then, goodbye and have fun all.
It’d be lies and false promises anyway, it’s happened already.
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I’d be fine with leveling if there was a meaningful feeling of progression over time. There’s… not really. It’s just moments of “Oh boy, now I’m slightly less gimped.” I’m not entirely certain how they could fix it either, without heavily handicapping the player/making it even more leveling focused which is the opposite of what I’d like to see. The only times I really went “Okay this feels a lot better” was when getting the level 30 zealot talent (And that wasn’t really… meaningful, just that I could actually use the ability more frequently which made the class smooth out a lot; the crit one specifically) and sort of kinetic deflection for smoothing out defensive options for psyker. Most others are just very… meh. I never really looked forward to a talent feat unlock like I did things like a free shot on crit for bounty hunter which enabled entirely new playstyles due to it skipping over reloads and whatnot.
Because what would be the point if the game like this were about levelling? You work to unlock stuff and once you are done, you don’t actually get to use the highest feat level because you are done?
And, seriously, levelling in this game because of its RPG structure and time requirement has been becoming exponentially boring for me with the 2nd and 3rd character. If I hadn’t left the ogryn for the end, I wonder if I would finish it for all four classes.
should have added, game not opening to the reasons people arnt playing lol
Just a note since we’re all talking surveys, the full results from the Open Community Survey I ran last week can be seen here:
Got 471 responses.
Quasi-Official Survey Highlights
Here’s some key findings from my re-creation of the official survey:
55.5% are dissatisifed with an additional 26.3% neutral. Meaning satisfied respondents is only 18.2%. Pretty awful.
Top reasons for not wanting to play darktide more in the future:
- (76%) Weekly contracts are boring
- (65%)Less characters/sub-classes than VT2
- (52.4%) Little impact/change for leveling up characters
- (49%) Nothing to do after reaching level 30
Big takeway from this: People generally love the combat, but strongly dislike the progression systems. This is the main issue with the game.
Some top reasons people are dissatisfied with the progression system:
- (96%) The crafting system is complete
- (88%) I have to wait for the store to refresh
- (62%) Stats and properties are unclear how they work and I don’t know how to make competent builds as a result
- (56%) Build strategy is shallow
- (54%) perks, blessings, feats don’t have enough impact
Additional Community Question Highlights
I added some additional details questions, which bear worth looking at:
First is a series of questions about how important different facets of the gameplay are to players (1 = not very important; 4 = very important). I re-ordered these based on results:
#1 is the importance of being able to FLUIDLY customize your builds without having to jump through arduous crafting hoops. Reading through the many written comments, and of course forum comments, this is the #1 issue. A huge reason to play these sorts of games is to tinker around with different characters and builds, and the RNG-heavy design of this game sabotages that at every opportunity.
This is related to the above point in many ways. But it’s the idea of PREDICTABLY (not randomly) working towards a long-term goal. Vermintide 2 gave away nice cosmetic rewards for doing things like completing each mission for a given class on Legend Difficulty, or completing 100+ mission on Champion+ difficulty. These sorts of rewards aren’t contingent on RNG but nonetheless drive engagement and keep players playing. Darktide does a terrible job at this because everything is soo tied to RNG players just give up in frustration. Their time spent feels wasted and futile. There’s no consistent or predictable progression.
#3 is the ability to take on greater challenges and improve your player skills. Here again Darktide often sabotages the player because of the mission selection system - which makes it hard to run certain missions or challenges at a consistent level. Players also want to get their gear in order and have consistency relative to other players in their builds, so that they can get a better sense of how their skill and performance is without it being complicated by random and/or sub-optimal gear.
Obviously new content, especially for a LIVE SERVICE game is important to sustain interest.
I asked a lot of specific questions about individual mechanics and how important making changes to those systems are to respondents.
The results aren’t terrible surprising, but a few key highlights (things getting 300+ very important results)
- (434) Add in the rest of crafting system
- (364) Improve impact and diversity of class feats and builds for a given character
- (362) Have scripts and grimores have a better incentive to be taken outside of the weekly challenge goal
- (358) Have a way for players to buy or craft base items of every type when they want
- (358) Allowing characters to share currencies and materials
- (356) Base the quality of rewards on the difficulty and taken on challenges of the mission
- (345) Be able to directly select the desired difficulty for the random missions in the mission board
- (341) Reduce the grind of weekly challenges
- (329) Have beating monsters provide better post-mission rewards
- (320) Change weekly challenges to be shared across characters
- (312) Improve balance and viability of weapons available to a given class
- (307) Give rewards/tokens/something each time you level up past level 30
- (295) Provide the equivalent of RED items from VT2 as a mission rewards
One other note is on scoreboards. What’s interesting is that a majority of respondents wanted a score board of “some type” (197 very important versus 121 not important), but none of the specific options for doing that (e.g. individual vs full team vs average scores, etc.) scored very highly. The least “controversial” choice is presenting your own stats next to a TEAM AVERAGE for each stat.
This was a nice look at the data. In short, roughly 33% of the players are experiencing a crash once every few missions or more. That is pretty unacceptable to me.
Anyway, see the link for the full results if you want to drill into more details.
10 Likes
thanks for all these interesting infos.
Oh damn. This has some rather good stuff within it. :o
Did you manage to get a reaction from Fatshark in sharing this info with them?
piques*
jus sayn
I’ll give you three guesses…
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It’s really interesting to see how the distributions are exactly what I expected:
All brackets of players, in terms of hours played, have the same opinion about basically all the issues listed being important
And the vast majority agree on all the reasonable IFs:
They would continue to give feedback if the Fatshark developers manage to pro-actively communicate to the community, despite facing harsh criticism.
They would return if a roadmap was released detailing upcoming seasonal items, new gameplay features, and other news about the game within a 3 month time period
They would return if developers manage to make more content for the game and manage to release hotfixes in a timely manner, will you return to play Darktide again as you are seeing progress being made to see what has changed since you last stopped playing
It really just paint a picture of a community that want this game to succeed DESPITE the seemingly lack of interest of the software house that is developing it.
It should also be reminded to any useless white-knight of Fatshark that shut down threads in which people are complaining or giving criticism.
Want to have an example of a game in which the majority of the community was telling who was giving feedback to shut up because the game was as good as it was and that the developers were following the right direction?
Hell is Other: going to be gifted on epic in a few days because it’s DEAD.
3 Likes
Thanks for the link and the summary.
I went to give a look and want to give a round of applause and the prize of “pathetic person” to the guy that manage to select “others” and post this bit in a survey about a game.
I am satisfied with the in-mission combat.
Most issues players whine about can be summed up as “git gud”.
Currently to combat this I make sure all my classes have a tool for horde clearing and to deal with ranged enemies.
This is the reasony why I carry a bolter with my zealot instead of a flamer because even with 3 sharpshooters in the team I get gunners shooting at me because the morons rush into the poxwalker horde I locked down with my thunder hammer to whack at them with their fking combat axes…
The game is hard but never gives you a situation which you cannot solve with the following:
Situational awareness and Threat management… you know… SKILL
You know, the kind of “me, me , me, me” person that everyone loath to have around.
btw do we know anything about the survey they requested via the launcher? That must have had way more than 400 responses 
Please employ this man as head of development and cummunication
I played Vermintide 1 and Vermintide 2. I have more than 1000 hours btw both Vermintides. And fun starts when you get pass 30 where you can fight against a challenge with the build you enjoy. Getting 30 is just a path to reach a goal.
I only got 2 classes to 30 cause I got bored of the no end game and lack of content. I didn’t even reached 100 hours. And I mostly played because my friends got the game. Cause I knew after the last beta and the “beta” prerelease that the game wasn’t in the state promised and it was going to be a mess after a week. And it became so. I stoped playing the first one. And all my friends did the same. And the got 3k hours+ per head in V2.
So don’t tell me something is worth just because is entertaining. Leveling is boring for me. As for a lot of people. I watched movies for more than 2 hours that wasn’t worth. Tons of them. If I could have a refound I would have it. I got more frustration than enjoyment from this game.
I got the same hours playing God Of War and the game is more expensive. And is a way, way better game than this, cause I enjoy all the path.
And to finish, it is not worth because they promised a game and created certain expectations, knowing where comes from Darktide(V1&V2), which they doesn’t reach but they even go backwards. Which is a Scam with all the letters.
I can understand people enjoying if it’s their first time and finding it worth. I dont. And I’m sure there are more people like me. Tons. But probably they don’t even read the forum anymore.
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My time was thoroughly occupied and I’m furious about it.
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You answered your own question. You aren’t one of those here who hit 100+ hours and are completely irrelevant to the point.
You quit the game because you did not find it entertaining and did not put 100+ hours in.
So don’t tell me something is worth just because is entertaining.
If you are choosing to put hundreds and hundreds of hours in, and are paying 40 dollars, then yeah you find it entertaining, and thus value for money.
Sorry, but there is no wiggle room here, people aren’t being made to play the game that many hours.
They are choosing to play the game over and over and over and over and over and over