I certainly don’t want things auto unlocked, I think people are jumping to conclusions. I think leveling should take long enough to get introduced to the games concepts. A max level player should be relied on to had seen a scripture, a grimoire, experience a boss fight, know how to revive team mate’s, understand what sound a poxwalker makes, etc… This things don’t take 30 hours. At 15 hours playtime you have completed roughly 30+ missions and the tutorial. That seems sufficient.
In regard to your “dropping character and rotating” point… Wouldn’t this approach to character selection, or chase for something fresh, be even further I proved if you could actually unlock a coue talents? As it stands you would have to play a character for 15 hours to even have a clue if you will like what the talents do or not, unfortunately for you, most of the games classes don’t even come to fruition, and can’t be adequately judged, until you have the max level talent.
Honestly I’m no fan of grind at all but I powered to level 30 sharpshooter in like a few days, I’m not sure the problem is rate of progression.
The problem is that the point at which you get the more fun toys or weapons happens too late, I got a bolter and power sword and then within a small number of games I was level 30. At which point don’t get me wrong the game is still fun, but there’s not really much overarching motivation because there’s not end-game content in the game yet, outside of playing max difficulty.
The rewards and crafting and all that stuff aren’t there yet to provide the post-30 progression and deep personalisation of your character and gear / tactics.
Having played the vermintides for 400 hours I can assure you that “games like this” don’t reach their true fun potential until your talent tree is unlocked and you can start playing with builds, earning good weapon rolls, testing out all the weapons and the effects your talent tree has on those decisions, etc…
The other experienced tide players will tell you, this games “end game” is the actual game. Leveling is the tutorial. The tutorial shouldn’t be 30 hours long.
Na, I don’t agree. For a game designed to be enjoyed long-term (live service) versus a one-weekend one-shot wonder, the pacing of progression feels fine.
I have played VT2 for thousands of hours. My progression has stopped a long time ago.
For a “live service”, it failed
They have similar, if not worst systems in DT, but with endpoints as well.
Live services don’t have the same “endpoints” as the tide games.
The game is meant to last years, not be completed within the pre-order beta window.
Once it releases, there will be a lot of other systems to engage with to provide a sense of progress as the developer keeps on working on post level 30 content.
I think thats unfair, cosmetics arent in yet, so there might be colour unlocks to fill out the empty levels, or gun attachments, which could mean something every match.
@Keln We just disagree. I don’t think they’re being stingy, and they absolutely haven’t failed as a live service. The DT systems aren’t worse. Be patient and see how things develop after release.
I’m so sick of grind barrier to entry in these games, and they’re all like this! Vermintide, Darktide, DRG, EDF, B4B, KF2, Gunfire kinda…
Fatshark is on record admitting they designed Vermintide 2 expecting players to put in only 80-100 hours. If that’s still true of Darktide, most of that is going to be spent on leveling and the item shop gacha. If they just had a big campaign, and then gave me new stuff every story checkpoint, that would go such a long way in allowing my friends to just jump into the experience, and let me get to the interesting difficulties so much faster.
It would even kinda make more sense than the system we have in place - you’ve achieved enough in the narrative for your superiors to provide more munitions, and a higher rank(which could be what unlocks the next set of talents, for example).
This will never happen, of course, but it’s hard not to feel like trying to fix what they have isn’t going to go over well when it’s fundamentally built on poor intentions.
I dont think it should be shortened, my time and experience shouldnt be faster just because you cannot play as vigorously, end game rewards are really good too apart from that little cuboid crafting material you get
Frankly, I disagree.
Why do you have to hit lvl 30 in 3 hours? Does the game locks you out any maps?
You can play the same maps with your buddies.
It’s true that you get more weapons and feats later on, but it does not really change the gameplay.
I’m at 29 hours with Zealot Preacher and just got to level 30. I feel like the class is half-baked, but I don’t want to spend another 29-30 hours leveling another class that might also be half-baked. I still haven’t found more than 3 halfway decent weapons on Zealot and I feel limited to just using those until I find more which takes about 10 hours or so. No Orange or Red stuff yet. Pretty much everyone agrees the fun part is when you have a bunch of viable weapons to choose from and access to all your career talents. Things get so stale when you have to play 10 hours or so just to find one cool new weapon that might be almost as good as your current one just to shake things up.
Leveling is only a minor grind compared to the grind for viable new weapons. That’s the worst part by far. I want to try out other things, but I don’t want to take a massive hit to my character’s power level. It takes roughly 8-10 hours of game time for me to find a decent weapon or to have the marks to buy one. The shop is almost always trash. It’s about once every 5 or 6 missions I get an item and the last three were lower power than my current weapon and grey common-tier stuff. That’s just kinda silly.
I just often quit Darktide to go play Vermintide 2 since I have 19 careers to choose from with roughly 40-50 Veteran-tier red items each and access to all their talents with a mod that allows me to sort through the 200 or so different builds I’ve made for them. It feels fresh while Darktide is already getting so stale. I thought Vermintide 2’s grind for veteran-tier weapons was bad. 15-20% chance of a Veteran tier item after a win on Legend difficulty with grimoires and books sounds extremely generous compared to Darktide’s slog.
But that’s exactly what they are? In VT you straight up can’t survive at anything above Veteran until you’re at least level 5 and unlock the THP talents. Granted, level 5 is quick to achieve, but you are literally locked off from a core game mechanic until you grind enough games. Not only are you locked away from a core mechanic that literally lets you survive levels, you have to go through that FIVE times. That is by any definition, grinding for levels.
Hell, arguably the games only really start becoming fun once you unlock your character’s full kit and can start venturing into Legend and Cata (though I understand most people don’t go past Champion). I remember trying to play Legend very early on in my VT2 career since I was finding Champion ridiculously easy, but with certain careers it’s comically difficult until you unlock some key talents.
At least VT2 had the benefit of you unlocking different careers and thus completely new gameplay every 8 levels (or whatever it was) to kinda keep you going until you reach 35, but in Darktide you’re just stuck with the same exact underperforming character who can’t use their full kit for another 20+ hours.
I’ve put in thousands of hours into VT2, but that’s only because the game really unlocks its full potential once you’re done with grinding levels and get to go into Legend+. The level grind seems a lot worse in Darktide from what I’ve seen so far, maybe because of a lack of classes or maps or whatever, but I can’t see myself putting 120 hours into Haz3 just so I can finally play Haz4+ as any character I feel like at the moment.
Leveling isn’t a grind in this game. Maybe leveling in a Korean MMO could be considered a real grind, but certainly not Darktide. If you’re thinking about joining a match and feeling bad because you think it’s grindy, that might be a signal it’s time to take a break.
It’s more that I know I would be having tons more fun if I could A) play in a difficulty I actually find fun and B) could actually use my character to its fullest extent.
A situation that happened to me in Darktide the other day was that I had gotten my Psyker to level 30, finally, and could finally step into Haz4+ without basically trolling my team. It was great, I had fun for a number of games.
So then, I decide to hop onto the Veteran who I’ve only gotten up to around level 16 or so. After a decent number of Haz4 games, I suddenly found myself playing an obviously gimped version of a different character. I could no longer play the Haz4 games for the simple fact that I just don’t have the tools unlocked to be able to do so consistently, but the problem with Haz3 is that the difficulty scale between 3 and 4 is a mountain apart. Haz3 is just way too easy for me, but Haz4 is too hard on Veteran simply because I lack the same resources that my Psyker has due to 30 hours of grinding I did beforehand.
I then think of my level 5 Ogryn and non-existant Zealot and all motivation to keep playing dissapears from me, since I’d rather I just be able to actually play these characters, rather than sit there and grind them out for 30 hours each
Agreed, I am very much in the “Why is this taking so long” camp personally, however. I stumbled on this video and it explains very well why I dislike long max levelups when paired with the loot systems. https://youtu.be/FaClrfADiRk