After over 1000 hours of Vermintide 2 I was really looking forward to Darktide. I have played darktide enough to get to level 30 with all classes.
In short: I think the core gameplay is really good and if you like Vermintide 2 you will like this. But there are so many other little issues it’s death by 1000 cuts.
Issues plaguing (pun intended) Darktide (in my opinion)
There is no resources that carry over between your operatives or characters like in Vermintide 2. If you mained a character like Sienna, but wanted to dip in Kerillian, you could open all the chests to roll for gear on Sienna and melt down things for other characters and craft them on Sienna. You even shared trinkets, charms, and necklaces. In Darktide the only things that carry over seem to be weapon cosmetics and some other operative cosmetics. This really makes it hard for me to even bother playing classes I am less interested in. Especially if new DLC classes are released in the future, if I have to start at level 1, with no crafting resources, no weekly resources, and no ordos, I just don’t know if I will ever purchase anything to have to start from the beginning again.
The hourly store just sucks. But in detail since the “end game” is praying to the omnissiah that you get a weapon/curio with max modifiers (seems to be around 380-400 on the bars alone maybe 510 for weapons, they should really explain this) and at least one max perk you want (since you can only re-roll one perk) on weapons, and more on curios, it incentives you to log in every hour to see if something “good” dropped. This is more infuriating by the fact that, again unlike Vermintide 2, because nothing is shared and the store is different for each operative, me and my friends have to “pause” the action in our night and swap to all our other operatives to see what the store has. And with some of their connections and the loading times of the dedicated servers we can spend ~8 minutes out of each hour just swapping to and from operatives looking at the store, and potentially purchasing something and putting crafting resources into it. Normally after completing a mission together you can see eachother on the mourning star as you’re in the same server, which is cool. Too bad swapping operatives breaks that and you will be doing that a lot.
Unfortunately the long loading times between operatives doesn’t give me hope about shared resources because it does seem like a technical limitation that each operative is siloed away mostly. Not to mention this wastes server resources with people signing in just to check the store refresh and then close the game.
How would I fix this? I understand there being a desire to keep people with some end game content but this is too much. But I would change it to have at least random weapon/curio drops after each mission instead of utterly random whether you get anything at all. I would change the store refresh to happen passively every 24 hours like with the sire melks weekly store. Then, I would add that if you can complete a mission, that refreshes the store for that operative. Although ideally it would refresh for all operatives and you can buy other characters weapons and curios even if they aren’t the one’s you’re playing as (maybe tabs in the store). Even spending Ordo’s to recycle the store would be fine.
Additionally, for the store content I don’t need to see 4 blue tactical axes. I think some control over what gets displayed there. Ideally, since we can’t “craft” greys even of each weapon type like in vermintide I would have the store guarantee at least one instance of each weapon type.
If Fatshark doesn’t like my ideas, completely fine… but at the very least even something as simple as just the stores content and options being available with 24 times the content and refreshing every 24 hours would be better (resetting for operatives how recently levelled up to see gear more relevant to them). Most of my hours in this game are just signing in and waiting at the store.
Again, because things don’t carry over, weeklies are just a complete demand of your time. Want to have enough resources so that you are in a position to buy good end game gear? Better do the weeklies. And some of them are things like complete 25 missions. If you want to do that on all 4 classes that could be 100 missions a week you are doing. At ~22 minutes (assuming you don’t fail at any point either) a run on sedition 3 (to ensure you have a good chance of not failing and wasting time) plus time looking at the store refreshes you’re looking at over 36 hours a week. It’s almost as if the game doesn’t want me playing any other class but one.
Some of the weeklies are just awful. Aside from time some are to complete ALL secondary objectives on a specific map. Which is even more punishing if the map you need just isn’t available since you can’t pick the map, secondary, and difficulty. Is the map there? Oh great, but it’s damnation difficulty with grims. Or sedition 1, which is too easy and isn’t giving me as much experience and resources. And even if the stars align and emperor is willing if one person dies with the grim, or you simply can’t find the other too bad. 1 grim isn’t enough, you need both or all 3 scriptures to have it count. And doing this 6 times on the same map? You’re not having fun.
Weeklies should be shared, should be giving you a lot more or things cost a lot less so players are incentived to play classes that aren’t their favourite.
Speaking of secondaries, I just feel it really brings down the whole experience. It wasn’t bad in Vermintide 2 because per map the tomes and grims were at least always in the same spot so you had the proper “path” to take (which I still think sucks for new players where this pulls at the whole staying together thing) and here since it’s random and people are looking for plastic and diamonds (plasteel and diatimine or whatever it’s called) people are often spread out and looking around every nook and cranny for their weeklies. It stops the action, really makes the missions feel longer and more like a chore. And some players don’t care and rush ahead. And players behind get a pox hound on them and the ones upahead don’t have coherency and die to gunners.
The other issue with grims is they are not PUB friendly. Personally I can handle grims on difficulty 1-4, but that doesn’t mean other players can who are new to the mechanics. Maybe someone thinks they can just barely get through a 3 but with 2 grims that’s almost half your health bar gone to corruption. Not to mention that they dwindle your health over time, making you want to rush through the mission since you’re effectively on a timer now. And the other players have no choice. If 2 people want to pick up grims, and you don’t want them to, too bad. The emperor wants to punish you.
What would I do about this? Probably just remove those secondaries from the game. Or have them locked behind fun challenges or something, grims are guarded by sleeping/dormant daemons, scriptures require blood/health to unlock from a pedestal something. Or at least have them spawn in the same places. Probably have grims not cause your health to constantly drain, or only have it affect the health of the individual carrying the grim so it doesn’t affect characters who don’t want it.
After character creation you can’t change anything about your name, back story, voice, or height. And height affects mechanics of the game like what cover you can hide behind and shoot over. This is especially annoying if you notice everyone who plays zealot seems to like the same voice, or maybe you just want a change. Only option is to delete your operative and start over which is just ludicrous.
Bots need a rework. They should be like how they are in Vermintide 2 where you assign your operative to be bots with a specific build. When private lobbies do eventually come around the bots seem mostly useless. You can’t tell them to pick up med packs, ammo crates, scripts, or grims. They just stare at it. I should be able to tell them things and pick their perks and weapons.
Bots also seem to have ammo and grab it very quickly. I have opened a chest while my ammo was red, and because they were also red they grabbed it first. Should probably prioritize players or not use ammo. Same kind of behaviour with medicae.
For penances this is especially important. Some of them are just awful. Like the psyker, on diff 4 doing all the damage to a monster. Sure, assuming everyone will just stand back and let me. I don’t want to do that to randoms, I don’t even want to do that to my friends. Throne, I don’t want to do it at all. But I will if I have to on private so I am not inconveniencing anyone else. Too bad I can’t order bots to not attack it, or even just disable bots.
Sprinting. I like sprinting in the game, better than swinging my weapons in vermitinde to move faster. However, I think it draining stamina is maybe not as great for design. It was stated in earlier patch notes that dodging was nerfed so as to encourage more varied plays with blocking and pushing. That’s fine and all, but especially if you’re a melee focused class you will be sprinting to your enemies to try and avoid the ranged damage. And when your stamina is out from sprinting you cannot block or push, and dodging pauses stamina regeneration.
What would I do to try and resolve this? Maybe just have sprinting not consume stamina. Or have sprinting have it’s own stamina bar separate from pushing and blocking. Or have different layers to movement. There’s jogging which is what sprint is now (but doesn’t consume stamina) and then a faster sprint that does consume stamina and gives you bonuses to avoiding ranged damage (maybe you also put away weapons that aren’t one handed as well at this point).
There’s no mods being allowed in darktide, which is fine. I can see the issue with that for dedicated servers. But due to that I would like to see: Class loadouts, hit\kill indicators for enemy types (we have this in general but something like circles for specials, triangles for elites, squares for monsters, etc.), and skipping the intro.
There are a lot of balance issues. There are some very obvious metas (Bolter and eviscerator on Zealot, Shock staff on Psyker, Power sword and bolter on veteran, etc.) and these I am sure will be fixed at some point, but how I think is going to be difficult. Some people are going to want the OP stuff. And honestly if bolter/power sword gets nerfed heavily I don’t know if I will even want to play veteran, that was the only combo that made me even like the class. The ogyrn and zealot were fine but just melted by ranged units at higher difficulties. Making me feel like I need to sit back and let the ranged classes do their thing and look for an opening. Assuming as the ogryn you even have cover that can block your hefty form. Not to mention some ranged units push you back if you do try to rush them. Shot gunners, reapers, and heavy machine gunners will just annihilate you if they have the distance and you try to charge in with melee.
Psyker I wanted to be my favourite but honestly at higher difficulties brain blast loses it’s effectiveness. It generates so much peril, takes so long, and stops hitting important break throughs. Dogs, ragers, and flamers start taking two hits to down, mutants and ogyrns like 4 and so on. I think grenade abilities in general need to scale with difficulties better, especially since you can’t buy and craft better ones. The veteran can destroy specials and elites so why did we bring the psyker who has less overall toughness and health than all other classes? Sure I can bring my surge staff and stun lock people, but what if I want to do ANYTHING else as psyker? Doesn’t seem as useful to the team.
I know fatshark mentioned it already but having better matchmaking where the same class isn’t in the strike team is integral. I would love, like in deep rock galactic, to be able to toggle a switch/option saying don’t put me in other games with my class. Or if during mission setup, at least let me switch my character. Oh we already have two psykers with lightning staffs? Can I swap to my veteran? I think this is more tricky due to the loading times and the seeming back end issues of integrating operatives more closely.
The premium cosmetics… I honestly didn’t care that much about. I bought the imperial edition which was ok, if for no other reason than to just have some difference in everyone wearing the usual red items they get from playing. But I do agree with a lot of other people’s concerns who wanted to use it that the timers on availability and the way they chose the bundles do seem likely to increase sales as much as possible.
Footsteps. This was so much better in vermintide 2. I could hear slave rats coming up behind me to hit me or black rats. Here, the specials are easy to hear, but the pox walkers? Silent as the grave. I think more tuning needs to happen with hearing where they are and back stab sounds in general (it would be good to have a tutorial for the back stab sound for new players). Especially if there’s no other combat/sound happening. Some groaning or the din of flesh on metal would be good.
Alternative buttons. It was added in Vermintide 2, it should be here. Let me have more than one button do the same thing.
Those are all the main things I can think of at this point. This is one of the few times I have even put this much effort into reviewing a game, simply because I REALLY like it and want it to succeed, and it breaks my heart to see all these little things that I think can be alleviated if they want it to.