Incredible game. I want to give some fairly tough feedback here, but before I do that, know that my friends and I are really enjoying this title and I think it’s a huge achievement. The ambience is great, the combat feels great (with some notable exceptions, per below), the music utterly slaps, the setpieces are breathtaking, the enemy designs are grotesque and inventive, and the whole thing feels like a love letter to the grandiose satire that is Warhammer 40k.
Some critique:
The game often feels like it’s just happening around you, and you’re holding on for dear life.
This gets worse as the difficulty gets higher. I sort of divide this into three different causes: Enemy design, visual effects, and audio design.
Enemy Design: The hound and mutant rushes often feel like you’re just waiting for someone to get mauled so you can kill the enemy. On difficulty 3, I can see a mutant coming a mile away, unload into it, then it mauls me anyway, and a team member finishes it off while it’s distracted popping my back for me. This happens constantly. Ditto with the hound: Even if you’re perceptive enough and have good enough aim to shoot it on the way in (not easy!), it just mauls you anyway, and then a team member kills it while it’s busy chewing on you. It feels inevitable, like the game has decided you’re going to get mauled and that’s just the end of it. Snipers can’t be tagged while in cover, even if you can see their stupid heads. Sometimes you avoid the laser and just get shot anyway (it’s actually sort of comical when you see the laser at one angle and the contrail from the shot going another). I can shoot the trapper point blank in the chest with a combat shotgun and it just casually hits me with a net anyway. And so on.
Visual Effects: The amount of flinch, aim suppression, stagger, snaring, rooting and incapacitating of the player characters is oppressive on higher difficulties. I realize this is a complex issue and I don’t mean to be reductive about it here, but there has got to be a less miserable way to punish players for mistakes. Especially because it often feels like these things happen to you even if you didn’t make a mistake. During firefights, you can be crouched behind cover, move to a new vantage point (like they show you in the tutorial!) and the moment you peek your stupid, blood-filled noggin out to take a peek shot, your client becomes a hellscape of screen effects and vertigo-inducing camera shake.
Audio Design: In Vermintide 2, part of what gave you the feeling that you’re progressing and mastering the game is being able to use sound cues to react to changes in the battlefield, often without needing to look in the direction of those sound cues. It’s an incredibly well executed aspect of VT2 and, more importantly, a critically important tool for players. I often feel like I am intentionally deprived of that in Darktide, especially when it comes to the small waves and single poxers the spawn director throws at you during hordes. It feels cheep when I clear an angle, turn to direct my attention somewhere else, and an instant later get hit in the back by SEVERAL zombies who somehow did not make a sound as they ran up on me. It feels cheap.
Other Gameplay Stuff
The combat shotgun’s animations and feedback are borderline erotic, but as a weapon of war it gets completely outclassed by the bolter once that becomes available. Some weapons just don’t seem to have a niche, which is a shame because they’re all so cool. I’d love to see a balance pass that elevates some of these classic weapons.
Other Technical Stuff
Particle effects crater my framerate. Will there be settings to turn some of these down?
The goal for mutants and hounds is not to shoot them as they charge at you but to dodge the mutant right as its trying to grab you and for the hound you should block push it as it pounces on you. If you try and kill them before they reach you chances are you will get cced. You want your melee weapon out when you hear those for longer dodges and block push. Once they miss their attacks they are super easy to kill. Trappers are just about dodges when you hear the audio. You can try and kill them beforehand but as soon as you hear that charge up sound stop what your doing and dodge
Those are things that work, but only when they work.
Maybe I’m just a trash gamer, but I’ve often been ground-pounded by the mutant despite getting the dodge timing (what felt like) exactly right. I’m not sure how to improve on that. If dodging is going to be the answer to that part of the combat puzzle, the frames need to be more generous imo.
The hound will often leap at you through crowds of poxers, and in that scenario there’s no way to gauge that push.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard a charge-up sound for the trapper, which I think goes to the audio issues more than anything else. I just don’t think enough information is being relayed to the player in this game, or it’s being drowned out in the mayhem.
You can also side step them. Dogs are very blatant when they’re coming. While there’s a case to be made for them being laggy as crap, that’s a server issue more than anything.
I also don’t know what you mean with the combat shotgun not stumbling enemies, even at a very low rating on malice it stumbles pretty much anything I need it to, even at long ranges. I frequently keep reapers stun locked with it. Similar with trappers. It’s a great quick swap weapon, I frequently will swap to it, fire off a quick shot, then swap back to melee.
I generally actively hunt things down when I hear them, not wait for them. Exception being pox bursters.
Audio in general definitely needs a lot of work though.
I don’t know what to tell you, except that nothing you’re saying here lines up with my experiences playing during this preorder beta. Sidestepping these charging elites just plain does not work sometimes. Sometimes you’re fighting for your life in a horde and can HEAR the dog, but can’t see it, because of the horde. The sound design on these is intended to keep you guessing about where exactly they are until they’re extremely close.
Sometimes I shoot trappers point blank and they just hit me with the net immediately. Don’t know what to tell you there, except that it seems like a conscious decision to make the trappers harder to deal with than just tagging them from range.
Actively hunting down specials during hordes sounds like something I only have the luxury of doing on difficulty 1. The game actively punishes you for straying away from the rest of the party, and on difficulty 2+ running off in search of a hellhound will just straight up get you killed (on purpose!)
If these aren’t your experiences, cool, but the problem here isn’t that I’m doing it wrong. It’s that it seems like I’m doing it right but getting punished by mechanics regardless, which is the whole point of the post. Things don’t seem to be working like they should to allow counterplay.
I agree with much of this - particularly the silent pox walkers. Even during moments of relative calm, where I can hear well, they just seem to be absolute ninjas, and materialise from places I cleared 2 seconds ago, running up in complete silence. (I find this with other basic melee units too actually). The first thing I know about it is the ‘you about to get bonked’ sound cue.
In VT2 I could hear mobs coming, no matter what type, and it never felt like they were appearing right behind me like police from Cyberpunk 2077.
In fact, that’s the new standard comparison I’m going to make.
Mutants, Hounds and Trappers are not the kind of things you should shoot at before you dodge their attacks unless you are absolutely sure your team can kill them on time.
Trapper is low-ish on health and you can possibly get rid of him very fast when hes running around and repositioning , but if he’s standing there setting up his shot, just concentrate on how to dodge the net.
For mutants, try to not to initiate hordes when you hear it so you can face it without any distractions. Stand somewhere where there are no boxes etc. to block your dodge. Ideally, you should have a wall behind you so that the mutant can slam into it and stop. If you don’t think you and your team can kill it while he’s stopped and it was coming for you, assume it is going for you again, so do some damage and move back to prepare for another dodge. Dodging mutants is not that hard if you are not in the middle of the fight, you just need some practice for the timing (dodge as late as possible with a melee weapon if possible).
As for the hounds, just hold block and try to push from block when they jump on you. They are mostly annoying because they jump around and sometimes I have trouble assessing where they are coming from (the hound’s sound is wonky IMO)
HTH
One thing I would have to add on is that the sound queues for specials in Darktide are easily lost in the chaos of battle, but I’ve never had that issue with either one of the Vermintides. I always knew both when and what direction the specials were coming from, even if we had a horde and a monster wailing on the group.
As to the hound and mutant, it feels like I’m trying to dodge an assassin in Vermintide 2 playing with one of my friends across the pond.
Ping. Ping like your life depends on it. Dogs, pox bursters, and mutants are top priority for me to ping to help keep track of where they are at all times for me.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s definitely some issues with the game, I assume moments like this are a desync problem. (Particularly as you get above malice, the servers seem to struggle on heresy+ and even sometimes on malice) That said in ordinary times trappers are very stumble prone and their nets are generally easily dodgeable.
Like I said, I’m not trying to say that there’s not issues. Some of them are pretty major, I definitely get annoyed by the lag dogs or the mutant extendo arms. (You can even see the game breaking horribly as my model keeps flying off to the side as it ‘grabs’ me)
Just that in terms of the intended gameplay there’s counters. (Not that I expect you to watch the whole thing but throughout that run I repeatedly dead stop/shoot dogs out of the air/hack them out of the air) Audio is definitely one of my biggest issues with the game and I’m in full agreement it needs some major fixes/tweaks/what-have-you. I guess I mainly draw issue with the idea of the game happening around you. You definitely have agency. Barring issues like flat out cheating spawns.