Keep cosmetics as cosmetic only, I don’t want to be forced to hear a meta cosmetic discourse in another games
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In these discussions:
People not knowing how to differentiate between the various types of depth and not understanding the difference between valuing various aspects differently.
There’s a lot of different kinds of it, narrative/lore, strategic, meta knowledge (EG: Knowing the max spawn count of things), mechanic skill, etc.
Until you guys figure out how which one you’re even attempting to discuss we’re going to keep getting dissertations every other post as you flit around each other having conversations with the air.
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I don’t work for Fat Shark.
Why would you even ask? After all the points I’ve made here seem ironclad:
- I’ve clearly defined depth,
- I’ve provided a lengthy list of specific types of skill in DT (proving it has depth),
- And so it’s understandable why you might throw in the towel at that point, because you really can’t argue that it isn’t deep after that list of things is presented.
You might dislike the game for other reasons, but it isn’t depth. It’s things like unfinished crafting, or crashes, or whatever else you might dislike.
You might point to deeper games, but all depth is depth, and just because a game isn’t the deepest ever invented that doesn’t make it shallow: the difference in skill between good and bad players is what determines depth, and you only have to play a few matches in Darktide to know there are tons of bad players out there!
The distance between bad, good, great, and the best in the game is quite large. And that distance is game depth.
Does that player have an identical chance to succeed without dying compared with a 2000+ hour player who’s mastered the skills I mentioned (and the many I didn’t mention)?
Because again, depth measures the difference in skill between bad, good, and expert players. DT has a sizable difference between the players dodging every hit (even the ranged attacks while they’re in the middle of an open area) and the players that deep firing their ranged weapon even after the “melee attack incoming” sound, even after they’ve been hit several times, and then finally realize an enemy is hitting them.
If what you care about in games isn’t depth, that’s fine. But if we’re discussing the depth of Darktide, all of these skills (and the others I didn’t mention) matter. They all determine how well a player is going to do.
I still think y’all just not syncing up on the definition of “depth”. Axehilt’s using a game theoretic notion of depth where every decision – including the essentially automatic “decisions” like how I ought to aim my sword slices, which poxwalker I should target first, whether to slide left or right, whether to dodge or dodge slide – gets accounted for. There’s no exact optimal strategy if you take all that stuff into account so it’s “deep” in that sense (and so are most combat-focused games). Everyone else is using a notion of depth which is essentially, “is this game persistently interesting and challenging?”
Personally, I find this game and coop shooters in general to be deepest (in both sense of the word) when I’m on voice chat with my friends playing as a group, and less so when playing with randos. I do think Darktide has a best-in-class combat system, and the combined melee/ranged aspect of it makes it more tactically interesting than most shooters. (Imo that’s why DT’s launch has been such a shambles – buncha nerds at FS spent too long fine tuning every last nut and bolt of their car’s shiny new engine and forgot that they need to add doors and seats to the thing before they can sell it to people.)
like i said
And like i also said, DT has not much to learn about that tbh.
The “meta” builds are easily found out, because some feats are really not good and you will know that by leveling already.
Some Builds are maybe interesting with premade groups, full Psyker Soulblaze Squad, but tbh there isn’t much.
Dodge Sliding or finding the pattern for a weapon isn’t hard to find out and learn and even breakpoints is something you will know after a couple of hours maybe and not even needed to beat Damnation.
Compared to the learning curve of said Chivalry 2 you can spend endless hours to get better awarness and skills slashing, blocking, feinting, dodging, crouching it’s really easy to learn and PvE only versus mindless enemies and not PvP versus real players.
And i dont say it’s bad, its ok for a pve action game with fun combat.
Rieven, buddy, the OP wasn’t even talking about game depth! That’s now not obvious this topic is: people don’t even fully understand what they’re talking about and how Darktide has depth.
What don’t I understand? Do the factors I’ve listed which account for Darktide’s depth exist? (Dodging, pushing, aiming, builds, etc)
They do exist.
Well that’s depth.
There’s a difference between bad players and good players. That gap is depth. It’s wider in Darktide than a lot of other games!
Are you out there true-duo’ing Damnation with a buddy who picked up the game yesterday? No of course not, you couldn’t even do that if you wanted to because that buddy wouldn’t be good enough at all the skills to make it work.
So it feels like you still don’t quite understand depth either, and the worst part is you seem unwilling to even listen to the points to learn what it is.
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i reccomend everyone play Mortal online 2 and do some PvE. When you can make a build and beat Risars solo and tell me how long you need to find a build and how long it took you without reading or asking in the forums we talk again.
In MO2 i struggled even at the very first tutorial Graveyard and until i knew how to build something to farm Risar Camps and was able to solo it it took some real time and effort and there is one build that makes it really easy, because of kiting, but to do it in melee every Tide Game Veteran will cry blood, believe, this game in comparison is a cakewalk even on damnation.
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Difficulty does not equate to depth.
There are some tricky but very simple games out there.
Its not just dark tide over the years games are getting more and more simple and easy. Sure they look a lot better graphics and visuals have come a long way but depth and replayability not so much.
Think of master of orion2 for instance that game had depth.
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Did you read the small list of ~10 concrete types of skill that exist in Dartktide? Because that barely scratched the surface of what depth is in Darktide. Depth is literally every type of skill that creates a gap between good and bad players. Clearly there are very bad and very good players in Darktide, and the breadth between them is pretty far.
You can imagine a player with perfect aim, perfect slide-tech, who dodges every hit, lands every melee strike on a weak point (or non-weakpoint if that mathematically results in a better outcome). Well every single type of skill the game rewards is part of its depth.
And again, to be clear I’m not saying that just because Darktide has this very long list of things proving its depth that no other game is deeper. Many deeper games exist. But Darktide is pretty high up on the charts; the gap between newbie and expert here is large!
One of your examples was POE skilltree. Well that knowledge is a form of depth, but it’s one of the shallower types of depth because it’s fixed: it can easily be copied from one player to another, and that means that part of the game doesn’t remain as interesting for as long as it might.
By contrast another person mentioned Slay the Spire, and that’s deeper because you can’t just copy/paste someone the correct card order – every person’s run is dynamic and so the knowledge required to do well at the game involves knowing when it’s right to take a certain card (or whether to take a card at all). The best StS players are way beyond my ability, and can consistently do runs of much higher difficulty than I can. And it’s not due to them being lucky, it’s that they have a deeper knowledge of the game and so they’re able to know the consequences of decisions in a way I don’t understand. That gap between us is StS’s depth. (And I only mentioned card selection, but your map path and playing cards during battle are all skills too.)
Of note is that StS doesn’t involve twitch skill which tends to be a very easy source of game depth because it’s so dynamic (if you delay aiming for just half a second you literally have to move your mouse to a slightly different position to headshot that guy, just as one concrete example of the non-stop flow of decisions constantly coming out of these sorts of games). I’m not saying StS should involve twitch skill, just contrasting major categories of skill that games have against each other (another was calling it mechanical vs. build depth, and that’s roughly similar too).
So I think your mistake is assuming only strategic choices are depth, when it’s a lot more than that (and even some of the strategic choices you mentioned are a slightly shallower form of depth than normal because they’re easily transferred). Strategic choices are at their deepest when they’re a dynamic reaction to the situation and there are a bunch of competing factors at hand (which is true of Stellaris so presumably even more true in Distant Worlds).
Darktide being limited by PVE is also sort of built in to my calling it deep. Since it’s deep for a PVE game, and you’ll notice so far I haven’t disagreed with people who’ve brought up genuinely deeper PVP games – those games are deeper than Darktide is (and will probably ever be). That doesn’t make Darktide shallow. That doesn’t mean there isn’t much depth.
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Ras, what you’re talking about is kind of my point above, to elucidate as a more general comment at this topic because this is getting painful to read:
Build depth is not the same as mechanical depth. They’re two distinct entities. A game could have immense build depth while having next to zero mechanical depth. A perfect example? Card games. They have literally zero mechanical depth while being entirely focused on strategy, deck building, and meta knowledge. Then you have other variations such as an RTS requiring a different form of mechanical skill (Micro vs macro) along with meta knowledge and strategy.
Conversely there’s something such as Left 4 Dead. Left 4 Dead doesn’t have builds, yet it still has depth in its gameplay via meta knowledge such as spawn positions, internalizing timers for hordes/specials (I do this in Darktide a lot too, I generally will comment to a friend when we’re near a medicae but all fine on health if we’re due for a horde for example), etc. This on top of mechanical depth and skill such as being able to deadstop hunters consistently, cut smoker tongues, consistently headshot, knowing when to shove, etc. You can also get more involved strategically but it’s generally not necessary and nowhere near as deep as a more focused strategy game.
A game can have combinations of all of these and the overall depth of the game might be more than the sum of its parts. To use the L4D example again, the game is generally simple on the surface level, but to truly master it you have to be good at all of its moving parts. You might be capable of doing decent or even well without being good at a particular portion (EG: I had a psyker the other day in a match who was pretty good mechanically but he had all the strategic and positioning sense of a rock. He mostly did fine until he stumbled onto a bad situation that could have been avoided if he had been playing more intelligently.) but that doesn’t mean you’ve mastered the game.
Does Darktide have depth to it? Yes. Arguably pretty much every game out there has depth in some form unless it’s some cheap bloatware. There will always be people eking out every inch of ground they can get to truly master something. You can break it down further but a general question of “Does this game have depth?” is abstract as hell and pretty useless to ask. Does Darktide have narrative depth? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. No. Does it have depth lore wise? Yes. There’s the entire 40k universe to draw from. Does it have mechanical depth? Yes, there’s melee combat to master, general aiming to learn, knowing when to shove, etc. Does it have meta depth? Yes, there’s timers to internalize, spawn points to learn, breakpoints for your specific setup to learn. Etc, etc, etc. There’s a factor of degrees to it but ultimately this whole discussion is pretty silly as a general question.
I’m tired of typing and told myself I wouldn’t get drawn into this.
drops mic, trips, falls, awkwardly shuffles off stage
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Depth is difficulty of learning, and so yeah I agree that’s different from difficulty.
For example most players could last 60 seconds in Geometry Wars 2. So if that was the “difficulty” (last 60 sec) then almost everyone could pass it.
Well really amazing GW2 players would have a dramatically higher score after those 60 seconds than bad players. And that’s depth. It’s the skill gap between bad and good players, and something that is mostly improved with a lot of time invested into the game.
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Absolutely bodied OP into the earth’s crust with this.
Mechanical and build depth is definitely two distinct entities, and Darktide certainly has Mechanical depth.
That’s it, that’s the thread.
The end.
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I’m so glad that there are so many people passionate about this game. Which is why I still have some hope that it’ll survive the current rough patch that it’s in.
Let’s review some of them
- There are 6 levels composed of 3 different feats. Their spoken in plain English. I fail to see how complex this is. While levelling my Psyker, every time I acquired a new feat level, it was pretty obvious which ones worked well with others. Same for the Vet and the Ogryn. Sure, you can tailor feats to playstyles, but in my opinion I don’t find Darktide’s implementation of Feats to be very deep. I’ll point to Aliens Fireteam Elite again, as their character system has much more to it than this does.
- Ogryn feats were broken until patch 1.0.22 and I didn’t even realize this. It did not impact my gameplay at all.
- I can’t emphasize enough how plainly written they are. Did people really struggle to figure this out?
I think this is more a consequence of poorly optimized weapons and a bad RNG system instead of gameplay depth.
- Blessings have been buggy and broken since the beginning. And they are pretty much in the “nice to have” category. Checking the in-depth information for the base stats is good enough
- My Ogryn was fine with blues all around even heading into Heresy. Why? Because a majority of the Blessings on my weapons at that point had minimal impact. For Vets–Power Cycler? Great! Don’t have it, wish I did, but doesn’t impact my play. Gloryhunter? Will that 8% from one elite really help my toughness out that much? Infernus? On a Recon VId great! On a Helbore or Recon VIIa?, most likely whatever I kill will die from direct damage before even gaining a burn stack. Is that depth? I guess so, but none of those blessings are required to beat Heresy. No blessings are required to beat Heresy.
- The concept of Weapon Synergy should be pretty apparent if one plays for a while. I don’t know about everyone else, but every time a new weapon became available for my character at a certain level, I would test it out in the Psykhanium and on a mission to see how I liked it. Figuring out which weapons pair together isn’t rocket science
Is this true? Sure I’ve played FPS’ before. But I don’t think this game re-invented the wheel so much that it requires re-learning how to aim.
I’m dead serious, what exactly do people need to learn about this aiming system? Did anyone besides me not have issues with pointing a gun and shooting? Even the Psyker Staves weren’t complex enough for me to take hours figuring them out.
Sounds were a dead give-away that most melee weapons were ineffective against Carapace armor. Moreover, once you hit lvl 30 the Psykhanium has a majority of the enemies. It’s simple enough to enter and test out how weapons hit. Actual missions will help one figure out enemy masses. This is not very complex. I think FatShark tried to make this more complex, given all the rending and cleave mechanics, but they failed at it because—at least in my experience—those factors don’t mean anything beyond DPS.
- I very rarely use push. And unfortunately, with server-side hit-reg, pushes didn’t really mean anything against specials, especially before the 1.0.22 patch. Pushes are more reliable now (against pox bursters at least), but it’s not very difficult to get the timing down. Do I need to push Pox Hounds? No. Since Hit-Reg was such a problem early on I’ve learned to either stagger them or avoid them.
- Maybe it’s because I played Vermintide or Souls games, but this dodge game isn’t very complex. One horde is enough for me to figure out the timing of my swings and the impact of my dodge limit.
Yeah, this takes a few matches. Get in a few High-Intensity matches, or have the Game Manager AI be mad at you and you learn this real quick.
I’m pretty sure basic gaming instincts will kick in for this. Fire? Bad. Stay in front of Mutant? Bad. Stay in front of bullets? Bad.
Absolutely not necessary. I’ve beaten Heresy and Damnation without ever sliding. There has never been a situation where I’ve said “Oh man, I wish I really slid right then and there.” I’ve never gone down because I didn’t slide.
All that being said, those skills aren’t very deep and don’t require a whole lot of time to understand. The only gap I see between “good” players and “bad” players is more from play philosophy as opposed to actual skill. And the majority of those “bad” players were ones that ran off away from the group, and were unable to manage themselves away from the group.
There is very little strategy to this game. I’ve been on missions helping Zealots with the 20-min penance, and that didn’t require much strategy at all. This game is most fun when played with some sort of strategy as a team. But I don’t see much depth in that. This game has such little complexity that PUGs are perfectly viable for Heresy+.
So again, I see how this game has very much depth. It doesn’t take long to learn the basic mechanics. And testing weapons in the Psykhanium and then trying them out on missions is so simple. And It didn’t take me hours on end to figure out how to beat Heresy+.
As a matter of fact, I’d venture to say that this game has very little depth since it was beatable in a state when many of the feats and blessings were broken, and in spite of server-side hit reg.
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Sigh. Making me pick up the mic again.
You’re making a ton of intellectually dishonest criticisms of the game using prior experience that directly translates over from other games as a way to disregard any mechanical complexity of the game and it’s pretty obnoxious, not gonna lie. You’re also conflating basic competency with mastery, which are two totally different things.
Maybe it’s because I played Vermintide or Souls games
So you’ve played the direct predecessor of which the game uses its primary combat system for its own combat? There’s a pretty decent learning curve just for the core combat, I’m very doubtful you jumped into Vermintide and were immediately confident with your ability to take on most things.
I genuinely can’t be bothered to go point by point as it’s a waste until you acknowledge that you’re doing the aforementioned.
And now for my own arrogant disclaimer: Keep in mind I’m approaching this as somebody who has been playing the L4D style games since the originals, doing the hardest difficulties possible and then some. I was one of the earliest to do realism expert solo runs, including custom campaigns for funsies. I also tend to learn games extremely quickly on the whole compared to most people. I’ve done similar runs in Vermintide (Though I never recorded them), I was the first to do any soloing in B4B (I don’t know if other people have since then? I got sick of the game getting progressively easier over time), I absolutely love coop games in general along with making games harder for personal challenge.
Darktide I got comfortable enough with very quickly and have been doing even damnation on lower characters, doing just fine (Barring the servers being awful). All of this overall point to reach: Despite all of this I’m not going to say Darktide has no depth to it. There’s still little optimizations to be made, there’s still times I don’t properly prioritize targets, there’s times I mistime dodges, there’s times I whiff easy shots, etc. The difference between mentalities is improvement from it. I’m my own biggest critic when I look at videos of myself, even in the solo videos/looking at gameplay of myself I get very annoyed when I see something that seems obvious or stupid in retrospect. Learning from it and improving is both a measure of the fact that there’s more to learn and more depth (God I’m getting sick of that stupid word) to the game.
Diving deeper into things is a way of improvement, whether it be learning the hard cap on enemies and keeping track of how many are on the field, mentally timing out the horde, learning some nuance to a weapon I didn’t know before/that might not be immediately evident, learning a surprising interaction of blessings/abilities/feats, figuring out some weapon synergy, getting better at maintaining headshots while continuing combos, mixing in various melee weapon chains, etc, etc, etc. This isn’t even touching on various entire playstyles which in and of itself changes things up, even with the same people running the same weapons. You’re also likely taking things for granted that you don’t even register as they’ve become engrained into your basic skill repertoire, such as the aforementioned aiming/shooting in tandem with swapping weapons on the fly to manage different threats.
Do I think Darktide needs another difficulty? Yes, probably. Do I think the game is shallow? No. If your only criteria is that you don’t have to be absolutely perfect at the game, then sure, it’s shallow. You can also beat Dark Souls with DK bongos. Pretty much no game has depth by that logic. To use another example: I’ve been playing a lot of Hi-Fi Rush (And it’s great by the way, I find myself intentionally just using more basic attacks because fighting to the beat is just that satisfying; technically minor spoilers character wise), initially the combat seemed pretty simple but to actually master it takes a lot more learning. You could certainly clear the game fairly easily just by directly fighting, but to actually play it very well is another matter entirely.
You’re also directly contradicting yourself in your final two paragraphs. I assume you accidentally a word so I’m not going to harp on it too much. And once again I’ve typed way too much rambling.
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So if they leave the game as it is you would be happy playing through the same 4 or 5 levels over and over again practicing your slides?
Wouldn’t you get bored doing that?
You realise that your memorising the maps and spawns and just listening to audio ques that’s it… and the map pool is tiny.
If there where multiple different ways to complete a mission or traverse a map and much larger choice of skills and weapons then maybe you could choose a different way to go that I would describe as strategy.
Dark tide maps are fairly linear you just travel along clearing mobs of heretics and dealing with the waves or random in capacitators now and then.
Not enough different builds and not enough of a difference between the way builds and loadouts play. No choice of which route to take to objective no different ways to accomplish objective. Very limited map pool limited heretic types.
I’m not bashing the game I enjoy it even with its faults but I wouldn’t call it a strategic or deep game. Just my opinion.
I literally said none of that.
In terms of core gameplay Darktide isn’t simple or shallow and there’s tons of ways to optimize.
Darktide is a colossal disappointment in terms of map variety, enemy additions (Or overall lackthereof) compared to Vermintide, the feats are largely boring on the whole, etc. Please don’t throw up big 'ole strawmen using things I never said. I could type more but why? Read my previous posts and don’t try to attach your preconceived notions of my opinion of the game to it as my entire point was completely detached from how good or bad the game is.
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Yeah, I just thought maybe they might get the idea after emphasizing that I don’t disagree with the general statements regarding Darktide needing overall improvements but that isn’t relevant to the overall discussion depth wise. It’s one thing if you disagree on the points I’m actually making but that wasn’t even remotely being addressed. I gave up on them after the “Your clearly not normal” comment, everything after that was just me talking in general.
EDIT: The fact that you guys flagged my posts versus the dude literally insulting me is depressing. I genuinely lose hope for this community more and more.
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I’m arguing that basic competence is enough to play this game, and everything that was proposed to me–that supposedly indicates skill–is pretty much fluff.
I went point by by completely honestly. And I did jump into VT1 quite easily. I’m also by all means an average gamer. Learning to dodge isn’t complicated. Neither is aiming and swapping weapons.
I think we can both think each other’s points are obnoxious. So at least there’s that.
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I record myself too. Mainly to document bugs so they’re easier to report. Much easier to show the issue then trying to explain it with text…
EDIT: Changed ‘catch bugs’ to ‘document bugs’ in case it wasn’t clear.
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