If you start this game as a new player and dont have a friend…the experience your gonna get is one of the worst new player experiances in literally any game i ever ever played.
Reccomended a buddy recently and wow is it bad.
The first two difficulties every other mission you are either screamed at for not being able to match the speed of max level speed runners doing gods know what down this low…contracts maybe? If your not screamed at you are simply left to die. The second you are pounced or grabbed or downed your simply done. Most wont rescue or rez you at all and are likely four rooms ahead already, nor will they get you up when they pass you respawned.
One option is to Malice where its a bit better but…if.your actually new and dont really know how to play your gonna get screamed at there too and accused of tossing.
Other games solve this by letting you make a solo match to learn the game at but fatshark has…for some reason (i think we all know the reason) decided to limit this to a minimum of two players.
I say down and watched my buddy go through this for a few days and it was…painfull.
(I was not playing with him as he was trying the game on my xbox)
This was the experience for a lot of friends of mine as well.
The tutorial doesn’t do much to explain what you are actually doing beyond the bare basics and it feels like the difficulties aren’t at all tuned for easy step ups and instead slams new players as they progress with more and more.
I think limiting it to one faction does more in the lower levels to hurt rather than help, you only get to learn realistically half the roster and how it interacts which leads to sensory overload when they get into malice and run into everything absolutely hammering the player. It also seems like the stats step up isn’t great either since need to learn a lot of new interactions while also dealing with 1 less wound and a lot more damage coming in vs damage going out all combined with more hordes.
The bots even when you get them are super sub par, rather than having at least somewhat reliable and geared AI (Vermintide got this right and i have no idea why Darktide did not implement this) you have 3 bumbling sharpshooters with essentially starer HP and Weapons. It would be nice if they scaled, got different kit, or you could give weapons that you weren’t interested in to your team but instead we get the 3 stooges.
Echoing @brosgw when also having to explain how gearing worked and how it effected your game a lot of friends went “nah im good” and went to play something else.
I would say the new player experience being fairly hostile is another reason why the game’s growth has kinda stagnated.
I cant tell if your joking or not but im ashamed ro say i do actually do this somwtimes rofl. Take as much time as possible while still technically moving forward in the level. Its such a horrible thing to do i know but…
Oh yeah the crafting wall is a big one that i didnt mention your right. As to bots, they are terrible yes…they do however sort of at least let you learn how to play in some respect. They dont teach you respect for other players or respect for pqce which is important in some non a*shole level but between them and the other people new experience id take the bots.
It’s the latest update with the penances. It already existed before (people speedrunning the “finish the 100 repair missions” etc penances) but the update added like 10x more of them so diff 2 and diff 1 speedrunners are now in the majority.
It’s incredibly obnoxious and yet another example of Fatshark not taking any care with their new penances affecting gameplay and matchmaking negatively.
I feel sorry for your friend - yet my father’s and wife’s experience is actually the opposite and both had mainly pleasant interactions with the community.
Could either be (bad) luck or a region/timeline thing.
@Eisenfaust@maratnugmanov When was that though? These new penances definitely changed the playerbase on low difficulties pretty drastically. A friend of mine bought the game post update too and leveling with him was horrible due to this.
Maybe, can’t comment on that much, have all four classes pretty much packed up, didn’t play recently at all, I am waiting for crafting overhaul, couldn’t care less about penances before, don’t care about them after the update too, that’s just a cheap retention mechanism from my point.
