I think we’re digressing from poor communication (wait maybe not!) but:
In terms of story and characters I think, personally:
1.) VT2 had the issue that not more than one person could play a specific class because they’re unique characters with unique voice lines (You can’t have 4 Victor Satlzpyre’s and have mission banter that makes sense).
2.) Darktide solves this with custom characters, you can have 4 Ogyrns… but! I think it runs into another issue in that if all 4 people pick the same class and voice type and gender… you feel like the same thing anyways. 4 male loose cannon veterans don’t sound very interesting.
3.) If we are talking about story, you can’t have much of a story if none of the characters are reoccurring and disposable. The story only exists for that mission, those moments in time. The zealot and psyker’s relationship will never change, they will never be together for longer than that mission. Compared to VT2, Sienna and Saltz, you can watch their characters and relationship change over time. You can have them be more of a character and with more of a personality because you aren’t limited to trying to allow that character to fit the vision and backstory the player has created for them in game and mechanically.
4.) I am in the minority here apparently but I don’t mind at all being treated like a disposable reject and having all my handlers view me with disdain or as disposable. It’s a refreshing change from everyone always looking up to me and asking for my help in their fetch quests.
5.) I would say I prefer VT2 over darktide, but I still think Darktide is better than a lot of other games in the same genre. Most won’t even bother to attempt at creating characters. Darktide has memorable moments with Hadron insulting me, the psyker talking about her beloved, “big man” losing count on the ship, veteran forgetting the call signs. But most of the ones I remember are jokes. I don’t remember or care about the serious stuff. That’s all in VT2.
It’s OK! Every other thread digresses to poor communication and RNG and Jsat’s most horrible crime and so forth. We’re conversating here!
Agreed!
Agreed, partially. I think the player RNG makes this rare and therefore a fun treat. And I feel like I’ve definitely heard at least a couple of funny/interesting interactions from overlapping characters.
I guess I don’t really remember a big shift in the dialogue between characters in VT2 over the 13 levels of the campaign (or was that while leveling up? or over time?). I know the tone and tenor of inter-character dialogue has shifted a little bit in DT, but I don’t know when/why.
It’s different!
Honestly, I don’t believe there’s too much difference between whatever random nonsense my reject is saying and any of the many many convos I’ve fully forgotten from VT/VT2. But, like I said, I guess I need a VT2 refresher!
It is rare, but common enough with some voices being significantly more popular than others (as well as gender and class). Sometimes I want to change it just to avoid the overlap but yeah there are some funny lines for the copies. Siblings.
I think the keep conversations are the most telling, when waiting for the mission to start. Especially with the DLC classes. This is something Darktide lacks entirely (hub voice chats). The DLC maps released afterwards, like with Sophia, add more to the characters than the base campaign. Especially when the demon whispers in their ears about their pasts and what they’re running from.
And I give credit to any writing process that at least goes outside the heroes journey and usual narrative tropes which seem to have a gravitational pull of a black hole allowing no story to escape it.
Lots of games can have great elements, or even be great in and of themselves, but that doesn’t guarantee success. The original DeusEx from 2000 was an avowed original masterpiece of its time, but it was starkly outsold by…Barbie Pet Rescue.
We can see Fatshark’s market success has been far greater with licensed IP games than with their own original titles. I don’t think most people could name a non-GW Fatshark game without referencing Wikipedia. Info and content about their original 4 person multiplayer shooter (albeit a competitive team game not coop) Lead and Gold is practically nonexistent out there. As for other FS original IP titles like War of the Vikings? Krater? Hamilton’s Great Adventure? Absolutely forgotten.
A lot of the 'Tide-series games shortcomings in terms of development, release readiness, and feature shortcomings get carried by the Warhammer IP in ways an original IP would find an order of magnitude more difficult to overcome. With the state of DT’s release, if it weren’t a 40k title, with all its other issues, I don’t think most would have given it a second look. I wouldn’t have.
Honestly, I think I’ve missed out on a lot of this! I truly fell off of VT2 a long while ago.
I think the Mouningstar chatter, like Brahm’s coming to the forefront and Hestia being introduced with new radio comms before she arrived, is meant to take the place of this stuff. But yea, it doesn’t involve the rejects. But it could!
I’d love a smaller area of the ship that operated like the keep, had some reject convos in there.
Even just youtube clips are good. Especially with the new necromancer DLC. The characters talking about their concern for Sienna, why she would do this, if it’s right, or if it’s even her, and if Sophia, her twin sister, has taken over her as a spirit or simply replaced her. Bardin’s daughter and his quest. There’s a lot of unique voice lines. The quiet drink was also fun. Who knew Satlz always wanted to be a steam tank?
The other characters in the hub talking are fine but I don’t think are the same.
But yeah a keep for better voices would be better (there’s a whole thread dedicated to that one).
I don’t particularly hate the narrators, but I am not a fan of player character chatter in general because the writing of the lines detracts from my immersion in my own character, who is a self-insert.
My Quorin profile picture is an AI-generated and photo-edited image of myself.
The lines and the sound of their voices don’t match my imagined personality of Quorin (my own), which is always a problem when creating player-created characters, but in my opinion, if you’re going with custom characters, you either need RPG dialogue where you can pick and steer the narrative where you want it to go (Bioware, Owlcat, Black Isle etc), or you have a silent protagonist.
Of course, everything that I just wrote is my personal view and not an attempt of stating facts.
I would have rather that our characters stayed mute except to call out specials, and that all characters be able to use all of the voices, such as Psyker Savant’s voice actor for Veteran lines, and so on.
This reminds me again how all Darktide characters pale in comparison. The Vermintide 2 cast was so well written and well delivered that you can’t help but feel that their Darktide counterparts are empty shells in comparsion. The custom characters completely killed the uniqueness for me. Since you actually notice how template driven they are due to the duplicates.
Yea no you’re totally right, I’m completely convinced that this writing and these characters cannot be topped. Just the depth of these absolute characters. The hopes, the dreams…what else need be said!?
This is not the issue, at least by itself. Part of the narrative issue, as I will repeat ad nausem, is the game being unable to pick between us being rejects or acolytes
Yeah, adding a +4 to this one. My group and I don’t like the handlers/NPCs whatsoever, and only a relatively small subset of the voice combinations produce entertaining and interesting lines.
The ones that they do have, yeah they’re great, (I’m still ‘the good influence’ psyker to my guardsmen group from that one line!), but there aren’t as many great ones as there were in Vermintide 2, and that’s surely down to the variable of character creation.
Now, I agree - I REALLY like the in-game perspective of it. I use a very similar sort of perspective in my D&D game, steering away from the glittering heroes of high fantasy is just my bag and not nearly done enough in my opinion. I’m just less a fan of it when it’s directed at me, rather than my character, so heavy-handedly.
There’s a difference between doing that in a good and meaningful way, and having completely bland nondescript cutscenes… where ALL OF THEM are nothing more than ‘I don’t trust you, you should go earn some more trust, bro’
This game doesn’t have a story. At all. Not in the slightest. There’s more worldbuilding contained in a starbucks cup left on set for a shoot.
