The reason Rolling Steel sucks

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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The new train mission is, at this point, widely hated by most of the community. Why? Its not because its “too hard”. Auric Maelstrom is harder, easily. No.

Its because its pointlessly frustrating. Its complete BS, in other words. You get a very, very limited amount of time to do a large number of very, very time consuming objectives all the while dealing with very much the standard number of enemies- except they’re all heavily condensed onto a very, very small map.

It’s extremely possible, highly likely, and all around common for missions to fail simply because a single part took too long to complete- making it literally impossible to complete the mission, yet despite this the mission does not end. You’re forced to either leave the mission manually, or suffer for however long it takes the timer run out (or for everyone on the team to die).

There is a very, very, very good reason why every single “timed” sequence in basically every single video game in the last 2 decades uses the format of having each section be individually timed (or having each section ‘add’ extra time to the timer, which is mathematically equivalent to extra time from completed sections carrying over).

Its not because its easier or gives the players more time- in fact you can literally have the total time stay exactly the same; just break it up into smaller chunks. Its because nothing feels worse than the stress and uncertainty of a vague timer bar on an objective you know is going to take a very long and indeterminate amount of time. Adding that stress on top of all the normal, already stressful aspects of the standard game (the extremely high enemy counts, high incoming damage, desperately trying to not get left behind by the team, etc.) just makes the mission completely unenjoyable. It also completely removes all possible cases of the mission being absolutely unbeatable from as early as the very first objective; although it does this by simply automatically failing the team if they take too long on any one objective.

Please, its a simple change. An easy change, and one that will make the mission thousands upon millions of times more bearable to play. Just shorten the timer to like, 4 minutes or 5 minutes or whatever, and have each defused bomb add another 4-5 minute chunk to the timer.

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I’ve played it several times at this point and failed each time right just before the end section.

Honestly my biggest issue is the minigame. It’s not terribly intuitive or easy (at least on PC, this really feels tuned to a controller), and many players just won’t do it, leaving an awkward gap for someone to decide to step forward and take charge (me in most instances), and then they’re bad at it, take too much time, and the mission is lost.

Timed missions work great in HD2 because there’s no order you need to do things in and the team can split up if necessary. The mission also doesn’t hard-stop after the timer, you just lose support abilities. In this mission, you have to do things in order on a very tight timeline and can clearly be too far behind to finish by the time you’re halfway through the mission.

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sorry wrong thread lol.

my opinion the map length is just too short and too linear for me. its the same every match. become repetitive very quick. the new minigame is also too long.

about the time limit I think it is very perfect on auric damnation.

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It’s not widely hated. That’s just you. Train map is chill with me.

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I only played it once so far.
Damnation HISTG.
Was not bad, was not great.

Not sure if it was because of the party (game crashed during end screen, so i didnt look at the scobreboard), but it seemed like there were too few enemies on the map.
The limited time was not an issue at all.
It might become an issue at some point, when i play the map a few more times.

Also, although i immediately got how the minigame works, i find that it takes far too long to complete. There should be other objectives instead, like pulling a few levers, destroying a few things. Something like that.

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Speak for yourself. I love the mission, the only thing i dislike about it is the minigame and that its not a constant move forward bur rather move 1 cart and do smth. besides that, its great.
(oh, i do hate that this mission has gas bombers in it, those specials need to be removed from this mission)

i love that its timed and short.

Its not perfect for sure, and i can see why some would dislike it. but i wouldnt call it a bad mission. I hope they will make more like it in the future with some improvements and no minigames that take someone away from the fun for 60% of the mission. I guess time being cut into chunks would be a QoL improvement.

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Putting a super lengthy minigame about sitting still and tediously tapping the arrow keys on a map people are probably playing because they want to go fast is the strangest idea ever. As you say, most of the playerbase won’t pick up the console – in fact, they already avoided doing the normal, much shorter minigames in maps to clear objectives, and won’t Auspex scan either. I don’t know what convinced Fatshark that pubs would suddenly want to do something that takes them out of the action even more.

The time limit is so obscenely tight that there is no room to decide who is going to play the minigame (By the time you reach any console you’re already behind schedule to keep up with the timer), chances are you’re going to have to gun it to each one and start it immediately while hoping your team is good enough to defend you. And as the sole person playing the minigame you’ll be doing something very tedious and boring instead of playing Darktide for a huge chunk of the map. And if your team loses to the time limit anyways, there go your efforts, it’s time to go tap your arrow keys a bunch again.

People have suggested making the minigame more interesting/skillful and proper play speeding it up (or just a flat out speed increase) which would at least help with the time limit issue, but not solve the inherent problem of the fact that pub players simply will not play the minigame if they can help it and it winds up existing to punish the most helpful players who are willing to take one for the team. It would probably be best if it simply activated a timer to defuse like several other missions even if this wound up making the map easier for obvious reasons.

Also agree with the OP that individual sections should be timed, quickplay right now is filled with being thrown into doomed runs of this map because of course you’d leave if it was obviously too late. Failing after 10 minutes because of something that happened 7 minutes ago isn’t encouraging. And even if a team winds up only a little behind schedule at one point, the timer is tight enough that they’re not going to know if they already doomed themselves until the very end no matter how perfectly they play afterwards due to objectives taking set amounts of time. Stopped to pick up an ally rather than leaving them to die? Whoops, you may have just caused the team to fail during the final destruction sequence by seconds.

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He’s completely right. The map is terrible. I can’t even imagine how this got the greenlight. It’s like someone was really proud of that pointless sideways elevator they made (That looks really bad, like distractingly bad ) And wanted to make a whole level with that ‘tech’.

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I like the idea. First time I played it was a blast. The problem isn’t the mission itself, it’s that people are horrible teammates.

Nobody covers for you, nobody is working to get the objective done, all they see is a bad guy to wave a stick at until it falls down. The existence of time pressure completely screws with their idea of how Darktide is played and they don’t realize this until it’s too late.

The existence of this thread is a signifier that the community is refusing to adapt to a mission that they aren’t used to and blaming it on the developers instead of analyzing their own faults.

Yes, this is a preachy comment, but I’m tired of people thinking this isn’t good. I think Rolling Steel should be more slightly more rewarding in terms of resources, but the difficulty of the mission is fine. Is the minigame bad? Absolutely, and there needs to be more variety than just having one player be indisposed for 30 seconds, while still demanding that players watch each other’s backs (see: Clandestium Gloriana, and the first big event that people wipe on all the time).

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Yes and no. People can be horrible teammates, but in my experience so far (20ish runs?) they’ve mostly been pretty good. The only types of bad player I’ve seen so far are people who never look back to see if the guy at the back has been caught up in a fight and people who run off to pick up batteries without taking stock of the situation first. Which are really the same kind of player, I guess.

Pushing players to watch eachother’s backs is a good thing imo.

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Most frustrating part to me is the frequency that you get punted out of the map when the boss’s shield breaks. I’ve has multiple runs end because someone broke the shield and half the team got flung off an edge.

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de3
de31920×972 85.8 KB

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I’m not a fan of the dps race design of the final event for sure, but then I see no reason to replay that mission. On other hand there are people who genuinely like the CoD’s Shipment map or modern CoD games for that matter :man_shrugging:

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The team is expected to work together towards the objectives but instead folks are dying/running around farming kills/doing anything BUT the objective. If you can’t deal with trash/elites/specials at that level well that’s on you because they can only come from like 2-3 directions.
A good team can beat that mission in like 5-6 minutes.

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So it seems a good amount of players refuse to actually move forward at a reasonable pace and just want to sit in one place and turret until the Emperor himself wakes up from the Throne. Turns out the complaints of speedrunning Zealots are just from people that refuse to move.

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I love it and have won it on all difficulties including HiSTG - once you understand that completing the objectives as fast as possible and getting to the next obj as fast as possible is the best way to give your team enough time for the assassination, use high mobility weapons and don’t get bogged down in melee, use ranged, use your abilities it’s awesome, fun, and can be done quick for gaining XP or mastery.

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I’m conflicted with that map.
In one hand I love the design, the mission, TRAIN !!! and all. Playing with friends or people who communicate/organize a bit is great, short but intense !
On the other hand playing with randoms not playing the objective and simply understanding they need to move forward is a living nightmare !
Also on a personal note ; I bloody hate timer in videogames. There is nothing more who give me anxiety than a timer, even clutching half the map in Auric maelstrom looks like a walk in the park for me.

So Fatshark if you read this i’m ok with this exception to the rules but make it the only one and try to do more regular map on new area or existing ones like Carnival or Omega-12. Hope the Playstation version of the game won’t slow you down too much …

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first off, it doesn´t suck.

design is top notch and the boxcars reasonably “paced”.

like the twins people got problems adapting to new conditions, the more they vary from standard procedures the more severe the problems.

took quite a while until people realised gas = bad / lit and ventilated islands = good.
if this is the same clientel aboard the train then its no wonder matches go south until eventually the dropouts get bored or finally activate the other neurons and keep the pace.

simple as, sah :muscle:

even with half way aware publics, it´s definately doable up until HISTG.
as for auric maelstrom i can´t say, at least for me so far the map´s been a no-show, would love to test it in I II V E G or C I VI.

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Its a great mission and i love it on the board. The SINGULAR problem it has, if you aren’t low skill, is getting placed into an already started run that was already lost because the team you’re joining is too far behind when you join.

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As I’ve said before I hate the idea of a timed mission and the map design makes it even worse with flamers and bombers. Getting paired with bad teammates is much worse in this mission than in any other, so…
The map design is cool though, I would play it if it was a normal and longer mission. So far I nope out of it everytime the quickplay puts me in them.

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