Darktide obviously has its problems. Stuff learned from the Vermintide series has either been forgotten or outright ignored, leading to an understandable amount of frustration on the player-side. But what worries me most is that the game has seemingly been designed with microtransactions in mind from the word go.
It’s clear that you’re being set up to bleed from the wallet. The most egregious of this is the lack of shared currency, items or anything at all between different characters that you create. Though I’ll return to that point shortly.
The custom characters themselves are waving red flags as we walk around the Mourningstar. Let’s ignore how the Mourningstar doesn’t hold up anywhere near the Red Moon Inn or Taal’s Horn Keep as that’s a different topic entirely, and how the social hub isn’t social at all. Anyway, it’s clear these “OCs” only primarily exist as they’re less effort to create than established characters and its preying on the fact people want to dress up their OCs which opens the window for MTX, another reason why the game was also priced lower than most people expected.
I’m a cynical person under the belief that Oska Krall, the Chirurgeon, was not added as a QoL feature for the player base. But a necessity for Fatshark as nobody would buy the MTX if they couldn’t change something about their character to fit them.
But jumping back to how nothing is shared among characters. It’s a real fear of mine, and many others, that the reason for this is extend the grind and sell possible shortcuts later in Darktide’s life be that right after launch or a few months from now, who knows. If I can buy the “weekly currency” in packs, then it explains also why those challenges are borderline too much to just simply outrageous.
If I decide to play a different character than my main, they’re dead in the water. They get nothing. Which makes ignoring them feel awful because I’ll have doubled my grind, possibly tripled, and even quadrupled it if I decided to try and balance all four classes, and I’m going to be real with you Fatshark. I like sleep, and this will only make me despise Darktide.
You have the potential, again, for a extremely fun game here. You’re just walking another tightrope that the community asked you not to get onto, and you’ve drunkenly ran to it screaming “look at me go!” while we all wait to see if you’ll make it to the other side once more or fall flat on your face. I cannot do another four years of watching a Fatshark game flip flop about. Please get it together.