“I want to play X mission on Y difficulty”
In Vermintide 1:
-You open the mission selection menu, choose the map you want, choose the difficulty you want, and off you go
In Vermintide 2:
-You open the mission selection menu, choose the map you want, choose the difficulty you want, and off you go.
In Darktide:
-Well, first the mission you want has to be on the board to begin with. There’s, what, 13 missions or something, only about a dozen or so mission slots on the board, and there can be duplicates/repeats of other missions, so already the RNG rolls aren’t particularly fun.
-Then it has to be on a difficulty you want to play. 5 difficulties spread amongst the ~12 slots, so that’s another roll.
-Hey, maybe you have a weekly or something for a secondary objective for that map and/or in general. That’s another roll just for the mission having any secondary objectives, not even getting into a specific one.
-And who can forget the mission modifiers/alerts/warnings/whatever? If you want to play with/without one, that’s yet another roll you get to deal with. Again, not even getting into getting a specific one.
It seems pretty clear they were trying to ape DRG’s system, but in DRG the difficulty selection at least was independent of everything else and selectable by the players. This system just reminds me of the early days of Payday 2’s Crime.net, before they added the contract broker feature that let you just pick the missions and difficulty you wanted. But this might (might) be even worse because at least Crime.net’s mission blips came and went quickly (every ~10 seconds or so).
This feels like an attempt at an expanded quickplay system (which still has a quickplay option stapled to it), which would be fine if there were still a normal mission selection system, and there were bonuses/incentives for using the quickplay+ system. But there isn’t, so…yeah, not particularly fun to deal with.
Bare minimum: difficulty levels should be separated from the “mission spawns” and selectable by the player, either on the map screen (there’s already something like that for the quickplay button), or after clicking on a mission.