I want my garden to be tidy. So I cut the grass, very boring, no skill. Just pure time. This is exactly DT’s progression - Pure time and no skill. Could play on lower tier missions and still craft to orange weapons with T4 blessings by spending materials.
VT2 - Have to play highest difficulties, collect books, dice in mission etc to get emporer chest. That is designed to only give red weapons by skill.
Negative engagement - Going to casino. Feeling good winning something for little effort of throwing in a bit money.
Positive engagement - Learning something, building knowledge/skill, education and leads to self improvement.
Nothing to learn and nothing challenging to time based progression with no skill involved. It is time based because you can get there doing low tier missions, just longer (time).
I f*cking love this analogy. Same thing with me but different: I work out at the gym because I want to get over my chronic fatigue that I sustained during my chemo treatment from leukemia. It also helps me build discipline from committing myself to my work out regiments - I also do more workouts at home too to build upon my resolve - never quit, never give up, always push forward.
When I play Vermintide 2 after gym workouts I constantly challenge myself to be better and do better as I see it as another means to improve myself.
The whole: grind a boring thing so you can get a thing unlocked so you can play with stuff - is so needless and unnecessary. All it does is artificially inflate player time while doing absolutely nothing for you. You’re not learning anything, you’re not getting better as a player by grinding a silly resource out so you can finally play with a setup. It doesn’t do anything at all. It just repeating the same boring stuff.
I’m not exactly a new player, but I’m not a old player either. I got my Zealot to 30, a smattering of levels across my other characters, and was absolutely stiffed on my rolls on the weapons that I wanted to use because of RNG. So I left after a couple of months and have been sporadically keeping tabs on Darktide since, in the hope that the casino would be reworked into something deterministic. Downloaded it after the sticker book was introduced, got shafted again, then uninstalled.
With the discussions around it, sounds like I’m going to be shafted from both sides, with not enough hours and RNG grind behind to get the leg up that veterans would have, while also being far enough into the game that I’m past the point to be considered a new player.
Making it so that new players, returning players, and old players getting new loot have an easier time getting to the point where they can experiment with their gear is my ideal but I don’t have hope for it. Someone at Fatshark thinks that RNG on the player’s end is needed to keep people’s interest, ignoring all of the older games that still have a rather dedicated playerbase and the sheer amount of hours people have in the 'Tide games (with people specifically stating that it’s in spite of their crafting systems, instead of because of it).
I dunno, I just wanna be a reject in 40K, turning all of these heretics into mist in a beautifully made hive world with some absolute bangers playing in my ear. I don’t need a loot treadmill to keep me running through this game, just like I don’t need it to keep me running through the Chaos Wastes whenever I can coerce my friends to play it with me.
Padding the game and disguising progression as “content” to give false impression you got a lot of entertainment time from what you paid.
You see the idea here is that you have to invest in more time in DT and therefore as result play less of other games. Play more of DT, more exposure to cosmetics.
Assassins Creed Valhalla Vs Witcher 3. Look at how differently they approached their side quests. One does padding fetch quests, other one creates real mini story around it, with moral dilemmas, decision and impact of decision felt later. Padding to make people think “I got 100hrs out of this game”, but really the interesting storyline missions amounted to 12hr.
TBH a lot of the time I’m playing VT 2, I’m not looking to push my limits. I’m just wanting to have a fun time killing ratmen and heretics without thinking too hard.
No flack for those who do want to constantly push themselves to their limit though. Sometimes I want to spend some time improving my own skill.
But the difference between me chilling out and just smashing some Pactsworn and grinding is that I’m choosing to chill, while the game is making it so that I need to do the repetitive busywork grinding. With the chill I can always choose to just… not while with the grind I have the choice to go play something else, which I do whenever a game decides that I need to hit a grind wall.
And this whole “grind is endgame content” mentality, with an endless gear progression that resets, has poisoned the brains of all gamers from my/our generation onward so much that no one remembers what it felt like to finally beat Blaster Master, Chrono Trigger, Double Dragon, Castlevania, or any of the Zelda’s, where the progression was the adventure and the challenge was to beat the game and then you were done.
That’s what we’re all fighting for brother. An ideal system is where we don’t need to grind for stuff. At best it’ll be part of your core leveling experience where you get everything unlocked by level 30.
i’m in the same boat as you in that i’ve “completed” my item progression(a very long time ago), but as someone who also enjoys getting stronger outside of just skillset, i’m open and looking forward to the expansion of gear progression and crafting.
if you don’t like those aspects of the game that’s fine but we all knew it was gonna be a part of this from the start. it’s always been fundamental in the “tide” games. there’s also someone that posted in this topic that’s allegedly play-tested the new system and said we’re not losing our current weapons or having them changed, so it sounds like there’s not much to worry about in terms of losing any progress.
from the sounds of it, it’s just going to be that we’re going to be able to gradually make our current gear stronger passively by just playing and by completing challenges. what’s wrong with that? we’ve all been doing exactly that this whole time anyways~
I also wonder if these itemisation changes won’t suddenly introduce more hidden RNG to sneakily lower the value of the weapons we own. Imagine if your stack of almost perfect high base score weapons suddenly lost their value because of the conversion introduced some new hidden flaws.
These changes better be straight forward, and not lose people’s progress. I don’t want to spend weeks or months trying to recreate my old builds and weapon synergies.
I never needed the loot treadmil in VT2 and I loved (almost) every second of the 1600+ hours and I’m looking forward to the many hours still to come.
Meanwhile, I’ll likely be well off with the new “weigthed reset” coming, I’m just baffled as to why there needs to be a reset to begin with.
Nobody decides to not pick up a game because others have done so before them. Those that do, were never potential customers to begin with, especially in a PVE game.
I hope that we can make enough of our concerns heard regarding the unwanted and unneeded reset.
If someone could give me/us an explenation as to why the reset is needed / warrented, I’d gladly hear the devs out. @FatsharkStrawHat
Any good explenation would go a very long way in helping understand why this path was chosen
Gear/item power progression only works if the game development studio continues to buff enemies/encounters or nerf you, such as gear grind resets/seasons for both PVE and PVP in MMORPGs and ARPGs.
Because the game must scale with you, the simplest solution is for the developers to nerf your talent trees or weapons, which means you may be weaker after the update and must grind back to your previous level, or Fatshark to severely buff enemies so the game does not become a faceroll, which will set you back until you’ve grinded your way back to the appropriate power level.
I think that the reason people (can only speak for myself) enjoy Tide games so much is for their intense gameplay and not for their “gear grind”, considering L4D has no gear grind.
There is plenty of room for personal improvement at Darktide.
Follow ChocoB, to name just one person, and you’ll discover things you never knew were possible!
I think I know what you’re saying. That we’ll get to keep what we’ve got but what we’ve got won’t have value anymore. I’ve seen that happen before in other games.
Then for another game called Division 2 I talked about the interesting “human” like AI in that the enemy exhibits acts of self-preservation, but also seeks to take advantage if player team in bad situation.
In DT the soft gunners exhibit self-preservation such as experiencing suppression, running to cover, back pedaling if you get close then switch to melee against you. Disablers/Elites come straight at you, no fear of death.
If game enemy AI have more “human” like behaviour regardless if an alien, animal etc it presents variation of tactics against you.
Imagine a rager sees a Plasma Vet in the distance, then decides to zig zag to cover options left to right to close the distance against you. That’s scary thought!
I love it. My only concern is the future Skynet is going to learn from games.
I remember playing halflife 1. The troopers had impressive, for the time, AI. They would take cover, flank, throw grenades. Fire from cover, advance with grenades. It was really quite impressive for it’s time period. I wish games had developed on those lines, instead of ‘oh this is hard, so it’s exactly the same except you need to shoot him 500 times instead of 5.’
It really is lazy way to increase difficulty. If that is the case we wouldn’t need devs to make games more difficult we would just use mods to buff enemy HP or their DPS.
Another great example is Mechwarrior 5 enemy AI.
Each part of mech has it’s own armour value. 2x Arms, 2x Legs, Torso, Head But the back of those also had separate armour value i.e. Arm Behind where your triceps is.
If an enemy mech is taking too much damage it purposely turns to fresh side or spread the damage to other parts you do against it to prevent penetration. It won’t blindly tank, it will kite you and turn away it’s injured component from your direct sight line of fire. Sometimes they will retreat over a hill, and wait their buddies to take over then repeek fire at you again.
That is example of how an enemy AI plays as a “team”.
Imagine a crusher is sent forward first but the ragers use him as meat shield for their approach, then once they’re close enough they fire off combo at close range. That’s team work.
It is possible and doable - Total War AI will use spearmen to block your unit from flanking, but then their ranged units actually pull back to minimum range required to curve arrows from distance whilst your unit is locked in with their melee unit holding you in place.
But as you’re not fighting against logical humans in DT - Then default behaviour is understandable - Straight line right at you, and more predictable.
fatshark may not be the best at balancing but the gear you upgrade does scale you with the difficulties you play. you can play this on maelstrom with all grey gear and no perks or blessings but would you? i don’t think so.
it’s a combination of getting better at the game AND getting better gear along the way. this game also isn’t l4d, chess, mega man, or even vermintide 2 and isn’t meant to be; it’s it’s own thing. you’re comparing all these other games to this when darktide is simply darktide. i mean, you can compare this to whatever you want but at the end of the day this game isn’t meant to be anything else.
you say you don’t like the idea of gear but a lot of people do, myself included. one of the reasons i got this was because i like the idea of getting better weapons and improving my builds as i get better.
again, fatshark may not be doing the best job at balancing everything atm but the game is always changing and getting updates. if you don’t like the gear system at all and you think it’d be better without out, that’s fine, but this game was always intended to have it. i also don’t think that people don’t like the gear system, they just don’t like the gear system as it is right now.
The number of good AI examples in games are out there. Just very few. They’re just AI sees you, go towards you then shoots you.
Look at the game “Ready Or Not” - Enemy AI uses sound positioning, they don’t need line of sight to know where you’re standing. They don’t care about civilian casualities. They will blind fire through the wall where they hear your footsteps with zero line of sight to hit you full auto. People are giving negative reviews calling it cheat AI - But I think that is by design.
In that Metro game where you shine light on giant spiders size of dogs, they back pedal back to their hole. They wait and approach away from your cone of sight i.e. side/behind. So you only have the clicky/hissing sound audio cue origin to react. AI programmed to know your sight cone. Genius.
Weapons, maps, progression, skills, all great - But we tend to overlook the smaller details that take alot more work put in by devs.
