The shop resetting only once an hour, having no way to manually reset it, having a very small selection for how many weapons there are and on top of that high prices is just bad.
You can maybe afford one weapon per two missions. Lets compare that to Vermintide 2, you would get 2 chests for that and even a commandiation chest. So a whole 9 items (each potential a new weapon) for 2 games.
In Darktide, you get exactly 1 weapon, relics you can multiple of but if you buy one you might not be able to buy a gun.
You can also randomly get a weapon drop after the mission, but they are so rare that in a combined (closed beta and pre-order beta) of about 30 hours I got like 7.
This is just absolutely horrendous. It takes you 40 minutes at least to get one weapon, its simply not great.
It kills ANY kind of experimentation, which for a game where you repeat missions over and over but tackle them with new builds is a death sentence. You just go with the gun and melee that is the most effective to save up money and the grind.
What it also causes is way faster burnout, since you do (nearly) the same exact thing over and over you gonna get tired of it eventually. Since you cant experiment easily, youre stuck with it and just drop the game.
Whats even worse is that apparently, the maximum power is well over 60 hours of grinding. I’ve heard that weapons can go above 500 rating and I am only at around 250, I invested nearly 20 hours into the preorder-beta. So what I am getting at is that I have to play the “hoard money for good guns” style that long?
A game has to be good now and not 100 hours into the game. The grind is way, too, much.
And dont get me started on weekly contracts, they are just as grindy.
500 kills in melee and ranged are seperate contracts? and you can get weird things like killing gunmen in melee or as ogryn with ranged(who lacks a ranged that can achieve that many kills in a reasonable time)?
And thats only the “easy” tier, how about 1000? And what about the 15 or 25 mission wins? Or the get 5/12 grims or scripts? or finish 6 secondary objectives on a specific mission (which is totally RNG)?
At least you can reroll contracts, for gold… which is already limited as is. And it goes up from 0 to 2500 to 5000 to 7500. thats a lot of gold for a reroll.
Now remember that the currency isnt shared, now remember that you need to do that weekly on 4 classes if you want each of their shiny powerful weapons or new skins that arent part of the achievements.
Its, too much.
I can see that in the late game, once youre comfortable on difficulty 5 and earning 13k a mission this will likely not matter anymore to you because you have an abundance of resources. But thats the point, late game. But reaching late game requires me to go through a grindfest that feels not rewarding at all. And that 4 times btw. if I want to play anything but a single class.
And what stops me from just, not playing Darktide? Why shouldnt I just play Vermintide 2 instead or any other game for that matter? Why is it required to grind this much?
There is a reason why its hard to get anyone into V2, because early game its just a grind and its not enjoyable to play (its too easy). But at least the grind isnt too long and there is lots of different weapons you can choose to experiement and keep the fun going.
Weekly and daily quests were also easy to do and at times even could be done in just 3 matches (about maybe 4 hours).
Yet in Darktide it feels like I am being punished for wanting to play how I want to play.
So, after I put out the points why the progression is bad and compared it a bit to Vermintide 2.
How do we fix it?
Either missions need to be more rewarding as in more gold, or prices have to go down. I am for prices have to go down.
Cut them by 80%. Im not crazy, this way you can buy about 2-4 weapons per mission, later the prices of weapons skyrocket anyways, I see guns be at the price of 11k, and its only blue weapons. So just paying roughly 3k allows for more variation and experimentation way earlier.
Give us every available weapon to buy on a different shop-tab
They will be more expensive than the randomly put out ones, but that way you can buy the weapon you want than wait half a day for the RNG gods to bless you with a specific weapon.
This also makes progression more clear, it can give you a goal to work towards. For example you want the machine gun on ogryn and you see “aha! I can get it at level 20!” and then you work on that.
The set weapons will basically instantly restock and have new stats and so on on them.
Depending on level, you unlock different quality shops (level 5 = green, 15 = blue, 20 = purple, 30 = orange). So there will be a tab for grey, green and so on weapons of every gun+melee option. The price for them can be a little less than what the current goldprice is (about 25% less for green and blue and 50% less for purple and orange).
That way you can get a specific gun but its gonna cost more.
Gold, contract-currency, items and whatever else is added in the future, needs to be shared
cross characters.
There is no way around it. Vermintide 2 is easy to regrind because you can craft weapons or open chests to get to a high power, charms, trinkets and necklaces are shared so those you dont have to regrind. The only thing stopping you is the levels. You can hop straight into champion once you got your power 300 gear and have fun. In Darktide you cant do that. So with shared items and currencies, we will make that happen so making a new class wont be too difficult.
(I acknowledge of the fact that you can remake characters over and over to grind the weekly challenges that way. Just let the players that want to do that do that.)
Coming to contract currency
The shop prices have to be reduced by a bit, as right now all you can buy with completing all of them is… two blue weapons. and barely a orange one or a skin. You end up with about 2000-ish currency. Which, when the price is around 1600-2000. is just too much.
Since currencies are shared I wont make this too huge of a reduction, a neat 10-15% in reduction would be nice so you can buy one big weapon or nice skin on one of your characters and have some extra for next time and that adds up.
Now to contracts themselfs
Reduce the grind and let us choose our contracts from a big list, it could similar to Vermintide 2 weeklies but you choose 5 out of 9 randomly selected, and you can choose the difficulty of the contracts.
That way you wont have to spend a mass amount of gold on the contracts.
Since you will likely (if you enjoy the game) play multiple classes, lets make it more rewarding to do it so you go do it by reducing the grindy quests. Keep in mind that you likely do them over 4 classes.
To the grindy contracts themself
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the kill ones (like kill X amount of dreg, regenades), make it require no specific way to kill, so no “only with ranged/melee” and make it teamwide. AKA if anyone kills a dreg I get progression as well, this is a coop game right? why are the contracts telling me to go solo and steal all the kills then? Makes sense to make the contract be a coop thing.
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Monsters, since apparently the boss on the assassination map counts as a monster, are fine. As long as that boss keeps counting for it.
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Solve side objectives on X map, reduce the amount by half. Or straight up remove them until some more varied sideobjectives are added (that are also not as agonizing as the book collecting). Right now it is just agony finding all the scripts and grims in a map when the spawn locations are random each time. In Vermintide 2 they were always in the same 5 spots so it was easy to remember, now you have what seems like 10 locations per map for scripts and 5 locations per map for grims. And with what seems to be 13 maps total at release (or more?). thats way too many locations for anyone to remember.
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Collect (grim/scripture), reduce it by half. finding 12 grims or scripts takes a really long time. Its not as easy as in Vermintide 2 (like said above) so having to find 12 just like in vermintide 2 is a huge time investment. At best you get 2 scripts and 1 grim, so it takes a very long time to complete the base one. Therefore reducing it by half is my solution.
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Win Missions, reduce it by half. 25 missions is a chore to go through (its the medium level value). At the most lucky this is an time investment (20 minutes on average per mission) of 500 minutes, thats 8 hours and 20 minutes. Thats about an entire day of gaming for me (I have about 8 hours to play games). Half is a more reasonable time investment.
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There probably are more contract varieties, but in general, reduce the grindiness of them.
And one thing for the class progression, double the current exp you get.
There is nothing beyond level 30 so make it less grindy to get there. When classes rely so heavily on their talents at times to be effective (ogryn with level 5 talent due to his bad ranged for gunfights) its just “I grind to finally have fun”. Grinding to get to the fun part is never good, as it creates burnout real fast. And this way we get to the fun bit faster.
Psyker is a great example, he is not great early or mid game but with all his talents he is really fun (from what I heard). So if it takes like 30 hours to get to level 30, why should you be locked to such a massive timegate to have fun with the class?
Since fixing the career tree and overall balance of the class is way more difficult, just doubling the exp gain is a bandaid fix so you get to the fun bit faster.
This way the game will be way less grindy and people will have more fun with the game because it wont take hours upon hours to get weapons or level up.
I know you guys made it this grindy to make the player stay longer in the game, thats what all games recently do with battle passes and grindy bs. But let me tell you Fatshark, making a game this grindy will push a lot of people away and reduce the player count faster than you think. I’ve seen some Vermintide 2 veterans say “If the grind keeps going like this I may quit Darktide”, and its been what, 4 days? Someone who played modded difficulties and plays like absurdly hard stuff, is already really tired of the grind DT has. If such a die-hard fan gets pushed away this game this quickly, it has no good future if it stays how it is.
People will continue to be pushed away from it and DT will eventually die faster than V2, V2 had a small playerbase (2-4k on average) over the years from what we can see in steam charts. Every now and then you get spikes with content drops.
We all havent seen how the cosmetic shop is and people wont have kind words for you guys if its abusively priced, trust me. A lot of people saw DT negative the day they saw premium currency, and I myself hope it wont be bad. But at how grindy DT is, I dont have hopes for that anymore, as all the other games that do that are a bs grindfest.
Fatshark, if you want to make money from cosmetics, make the game more enjoyable and inviting to be played than being a grindfest.
People willingly hand over money if they enjoy a game, I know that because I bought all but the latest two cosmetic packs. Solely because V2 was such a joy to me. I thought on buying the 2nd latest one, but since I wasnt enjoying V2 anymore at that point it was pointless to put money in. After a massive content drought and how DT is, I dont think I want to buy them anymore, even when they look nice to me.
Make a fun, enjoyable game, not a grindfest time sink.
As a finishing note.
Thank you for reading through my wall of text, well I hope you did. (I spent about 2 hours writing this out, so excuse me if I made errors along the way).
I am really passionate about Darktide since I am a massive V2 fan, I love DT’s combat (despite it lagging on my pc, its on me to a degree).
I love how many weapons and talent there are, the different missions, the difficulty, the amount of thinking to get around and use cover and whatnot. Darktide is an really fun game to me, yet, the grind is off putting. I wanna play all 4 classes to keep having fun and variety, but the game actively discourages me from trying new things. It wants me to play in one specific way and its, well it is fun for now but I doubt I gonna say the same thing once I got to hour 50. The only way I put 1600 hours into Vermintide 2 was because there were so many builds, from straight up funny-meme to busted beyond comprehension. In Darktide, it doesnt feel like that at all. It feels like it wants me to spend time in the game but doesnt care if I have fun or not. V2 feels more like it cares that I have fun cuz it isnt that grindy and there is plenty of easy-to-access variety.
Anyways that was really it, wish you all a good day.
Edit: Fixed an error and thanks to the error I found out that you can make big text so I made the text as a whole a bit more readable with that. I’m not a common poster on FS-forums (usually report bugs on steam) so didnt know about it.