The latest communication piece shifted my review to negative specifically because it exposed the underlying unacknowledged issue in their game design approach. I had hoped they would see the metagame problems and address them. Their defense of randomness as a limit on cognitive load in this update makes that seem unlikely.
its not that RNG is inherently bad. The issue is how much of it they’re using in every single aspect of the metagame. There isn’t a single interface in the entire Hub area which isn’t random.
They’re using it to drag out item progression with a random shop and crafting. They’re using it to increase the apparent content by pushing everyone through random map selection. They’re using it in the missions, the rewards, the cash shop.
The problem with such massive over reliance is threefold:
- The randomness stacks in undesirable ways. For instance the random quests ask you to play specific missions, but you can’t select a missions because that is random. You’re randomly asked to do specific things within missions, but that is also random. These random inputs and outputs can be hard blockers on each other. It appears these random systems were designed in isolation from each other, even though their randomness is multiplicative and self referential.
- Player experiences are massively divergent. Some people get a perfect experience immediately while others get terrible outlier experiences which stretch on for days. Fatshark’s designers can shift the median, but can’t guarantee good experiences for all. A lot of the loudest complaints are from people who are having outlier experiences. This also results in fights among the community, who are basically not playing the same game as each other.
- Player skill and time is not respected. It doesn’t matter how well you play, only how long. You’re just constantly rolling dice in the background. If you’re an outlier in player experience you are just unlucky and there is nothing you can do about it. The only way to improve your rewards in a random system is to play for longer so your outcomes shift towards the median.
Most games handle this by putting limits on the randomness. Specifically, if you picture a gaussian distribution chart of a given system’s random results, the outliers are tightened towards the median. Each system’s random distribution chart needs to stacked and the new outliers calculated and accounted for. It appears the Darktide appears to not have very many mathematical limits on outlier situations at all.
Here are a couple of example guard rails which would improve this situation:
- Limit shop randomness outliers. The simplest would be a timed limits on how long each weapon type can be absent from the shop. It should not be possible to get several hours through leveling and still not have seen a class’s signature weapons, yet we see player reports of this happening all the time. This would also address concerns about people sitting in front of the shop for days on end and never seeing the weapon they’re waiting for.
- Allow player influence on quest success. If you don’t trust users with a full mission selection screen, at least let them control some aspect of it so they can opt in secondary objectives or conditions for each mission to fulfil their quests. At a bare minimum, guarantee mission selection screen always has options that match your quests.
- Paying for rerolls. If the only option you’re giving people to improve their outcomes is random rerolls toward the mean, then why not let them spend mission reward currency on rerolls so they can accelerate the process through gameplay? You already do this in Sire Melks, and the same system would work in the shop to increase the hourly reroll speed, and on the map screen to reroll toward your quests.
- Increase baseline reward drip. You could make all of the interfaces even more random if the emperor’s gifts were providing a more curated drop. If you can infer a player’s playstyle and the reward they’re currently seeking based on what they’re buying, this could be factored into an individualised reward curve with slight upgrades to their current gear. You could even let players ‘pray’ for a certain kind of upgrade so you know for sure what they’re after.
- Increased rubber banding. You no doubt have metrics on average player progression rates. This should be all you need to provide better drops for players who are behind the curve.
These are the fundamental design issues that underlie the player complaints you’re seeing. All the communications and content drops in the world are not going to stop the negative feedback until you address the inconsistent reward cycle and lack of player agency in the metagame.