It’s been brought up before, but was on my mind recently so I thought to throw up a topic about it. The games doing the thing where it’s becoming bloated with modes, with no clear direction happening, various decisions being pushed that make no sense, and a continual growth of separation between the few players that remain that make things just feel more and more split as time goes one. This made even worse with the ‘The Mortis Trials’ adding in yet another area for people to throw their time into and yet even more people not to be in matchmaking or ‘party finder’ for things that need it.
AS such, I figured I’d offer at least a bit of a proposal based on whats been floating around in my head, meant to provide players more direction, make it more clear what’s ‘high level’ and what’s an alternate mode entirely, and try and streamline the ques at least a little bit so everyone can actually go and do the things they want to verses questioning what X thing even is and what the point of it is (played havoc all this week getting the 100 clears in, finally free of it, but one team I joined on the lower end having someone ask ‘is this harder than auric?’ had me like 'yeah…why is this here like this…cause like ‘yes but also no’ XD).
So to get into it:
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Remove Sedation as a Difficulty level. You already have access to Uprising at level 0, and this game is meant to encourage things being ‘difficult but surmountable’, at least that’s what it’s felt like it’s been trying to do as of late. I feel having this ‘lowest tier’ just makes more bloat in the server that could be missions on higher tiers, makes it so players walk in to the game and can very easily get bored right off the bat, and with the power creep of players if you have even just one that isn’t level 0 you flatten 4 enemies that spawn to attack you. If you realllly want to make sure a full team of greenies can function, maybe make a single rotating mission that’s ‘tutorial’ tier that you can click on up until level 5, and then it goes away unless someone else at low level clicks on it. But having a bunch of ‘literally only a new player is playing this’ missions that said new player is in for like 1 to 2 games before leaving at most isn’t really that fantastic (especially since the population for it doesn’t exist anyway).
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Condense Auric and ‘base’ onto the same screen, and with the removal of sedation drop an extra rotating mission on to every tier going up the ladder. Having to ‘tab over’ to auric just makes it that much more confusing for players just starting out, especially with all these other modes, to know ‘what is the top end?’. Someone might click into auric thinking it’s just Damnation but weirder (given that’s effectively how havoc functions now and how Mortis is going to) and then just end up griefing a game as they get absolutely spit roasted by enemy density and strange modifiers. Adding it ‘to the chain’ helps alleviate this issue, and keeps people ‘on the path’ instead of clicking things they shouldn’t and getting bodied.
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To lay it out, this would result in a Difficulty slider going ‘Uprising - Malice - Heresy - Damnation - Auric (Heresy Auric) - Auric Damnation’.
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In accordance with the changes above, make the map ‘shift the nodes displayed’ based on the difficulty level selected. This allows one to see what’s available for exactly what they want to do with no clutter, along with even possibly allowing even MORE missions to be available so that, even if people yet still aren’t allowed to just select what they want, they have an even wider chance at seeing something they are at least interested in. This could even give way to a proper filter system, allowing you to see what missions are available with the modifiers you want, or with secondary objectives you need, etc etc, allowing that much more player agency if it’s desired. Though quickplay is still left big and bright in the upper left to ‘get into the action right away’ for the many that don’t care!
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Bake Special Assignments into the quick play playlist along with having them ‘always available’ at each level they currently exist. There’s currently no reason to have a second screen for special assignments, there’s just the one, it’s basically just a normal mission with normal dialogue and a cutscene (which Dark Communion has now also so it’s not even unique in that regard). Leverage the stuff you make and let people that wanna do it actually have a chance at getting a team.
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To that end, put a ‘Havoc’ clickable button on the ‘Auric Damnation’ side of the difficulty slider, that takes you to the war table menu. Once again, really making it clear that ‘havoc is meant to be a test of your strength’ and not just some weird thing. To that end, remove the first 20 levels of havoc. They only make it even more confusing as to what havoc is supposed to be, as level 1-19 is literally babies first video game, and then 20+ is suddenly actually trying to fight you and you’re like bro what the heck?!?. It’s only supposed to be for the best of the best and even asks you to do a Malestrom before doing it, why bother with the first levels if it’s basically a different flavor of Auric?
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While Malestrom is on the mind, those stay the same, just get smushed together in the center of the display and function as ‘optional weird modifier missions’. Maybe make a few more of those run too since having just the two up is really annoying if you’re going for those penances but both of them are ‘not fun’ for you so you’re just left waiting for the next rotation.
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Also along both of these lines, have ‘mild modifiers’ for havoc trickle down into Auric and Malestrom once they rotate out of the ‘new seasonal model’. Stuff like the mobieon 21’s and even puss hardened skin would be fun to see in lower tiers, where as stuff like ‘the blight spreads’ can be kept in havoc as ‘things to make you build craft around it’. Would make the ‘pipeline’ feel a bit more fluid verses segmented.
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Create ‘Unlock’ penances to various difficulties to at least a bit more firmly weed out the ‘bad players’ from higher rank things, not in a ‘bad way’, but in a ‘you are not ready for this’ way to encourage actual growth from the player base. Main example is after the level system gets you through damnation, being level 30 gives you access to ‘Auric’ (in the chart above). Completing 10 Aurics gets you a penance that unlocks Auric Damnation. Completing 5 of those gives you a penance that gives you the Maelstroms (or maybe completing 5 Damnation’s gets you the normal maelstroms, and then the Auric Dam’s are for the Auric Malestroms). Complete an Auric Maelstrom (like now) gets you access to Havoc. Now a player has a full understanding of the ‘difficulty pipeline’ so to speak at a glance simply by going through the penance structure, while also encouraging a new player to engage with said structure as you can have the buttons when selected be like ‘complete X penance to unlock’, and now they are like ‘the wha?’ and run over to the sister to see what that is and what it means.
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If it isn’t there already, create a button from the mission board that takes you to Mortis Trials, this helps inform the player that THIS game mode is entirely meant to be it’s own separate thing (this can likely be in the place of the special assignments button before), that can be done at one’s leisure verses something ‘late game’.
breaths heavily alright, got it all out I think. Apologies for it being a long one, but there’s a LOT wrong with the current structure of Darktides modes and the surface facing systems that house them. And I just had a lot to say being a ‘front end developer’ by trade so ‘menuing and clear projection of purpose’ is my entire job xD. I feel ALLL of this would help drastically make it more clear for people, while providing a much better ‘base system’ for them to work off of going forward should they continue to want to expand out the different ‘silos’. At least it keeps it all accessible in one view and makes it easy to understand ‘what goes where’, verses now where a new player has no idea what’s hard, what’s not, what they are meant to do, what they aren’t, and what’s a different game mode verses what’s part of the ‘core loop’.
I appreciate anyone that got through all this, and I hope it seems like some solid ideas that are worth considering by literally anybody who has the power to implement them xD.