"This game is too repetitive" - the main complaint I hear from the casual players I know who play this game

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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I play this game for the challenge and fun gameplay loop, but I am aware masochistic challenge and doing the same thing over and over again doesn’t do it for most people, and is probably part of the reason why Tide games have poor player retention.

The late game past level 30 seems to be either grinding the crafting system for better numbers on your weapon, or trying to push yourself to do harder versions of the same thing.

It’s not much of a late game when you think about it.

Stuff that might help for casual bros experience:

More biomes, with more memorable map designs.

Randomised pathing like Archivum Sycorax so that doing a map feels different each time.

Rare advanced versions of bosses as you get to higher difficulties like in Monster Hunter which gives them a palette swap/an extra attack move/ moves faster/ are more aggressive. (helps with the feeling of progression.) (nurgles blessing is the closest thing to this, but they still play out more or less the same without the extra attack move/different behaviour)

Defeating tougher missions/bosses/modifiers should unlock you a special cosmetic/weapon skin.

Playing the game past level 30 should unlock more than just better numbers on a weapon. Use the hidden level counter so that when you reach level 100 you unlock either a new final weapon, a new blessing that changes functionality, or a new cosmetics/weapon skins, etc etc.

Story progression of any kind past 30.

Community event months with special missions. A Halloween set of missions for the month of Halloween anyone? Could give a chance for FS to experiment with fun stuff, such as melee enemies with 3x move speed, or beast of nurgle with infinite range purple vomit. There was a bug before launch where you could infinite slide on the beast of nurgle vomit and skate across the map. Why not bring that back for an all beast of nurgle map. I remember VT2 had event stuff like that, such as the rat toss, shame we haven’t seen similar in DT yet.

… Anyway, I hear the ‘too repetitive’ complaint A LOT from my friends who play DT casually and casuals I know, but I don’t see it get brought up too much in the community because us hardcore players have different priorities, which have mainly been about the crafting and mission board etc.

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The short response here is that you’re not going to get any of that. Fatshark is attempting to make a 'live service’s game, sure, but they simply don’t work fast enough to deliver.

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Same feedback from my friends - and your ideas would all be helping immensely although I think it‘d be to work intensive for this dev studio.

Yet „making it more difficult“ only caters to the the hardcore pre-patch-13-playerbase. The casuals you wisely want to retain don‘t need more frustrating wipes from my experience.

I‘d also also add: if the crafting system stays as RNG heavy as it is now drop rates for resources should increase. Leave damnation as is, give damnation rewards on heresy, heresy rewards on malice and so on.

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@Eisenfaust is kind of right, Fatshark isn’t the fastest when it comes to big event updates. The Event stuff is supposedly on their roadmap. If you have a certain mod, you are already able to spy some very obvious holiday themed rewards.
I don’t think timed events alone would be enough, though. They’d break up the mold for the event duration, definitely. But once the event is over the “magic” is gone. That’s the downside to events.

Random pathing and rare advanced enemies are cool ideas and definitely something this game should utilize more. It’s a shame they spent so much time working a codebase of sorts or a mechanic for it into this game. It hardly gets used by the current content. And these random paths could also be longer, like one map has two adjacent level segments and sometimes it’s one, sometimes the other.

And then Enemy, boss and gameplay variety. That’s big. Expanding this as much as possible will kill the repetition complaints faster than anything else.
It’s great that we now also have chaos spawns, but that makes the roster of boss encounters four, with two very similiar (Chaos Spawn + Plague Ogryn) and one being a glorified roadblock (I almost feel it was a waste of talent to make her since she goes ignored 95% of the time). Only the Beast of Nurgle stands out as unique snowflake.

Random Ideas (omitting the obvious ones such as Plaguebearer boss, etc):

“Loyalist Hunters”:
→ Every time you play a mission, there is a 10% chance that throughout a group of “Loyalist Hunters” appear, an assortment of 4-5 random, beefed up mini-Captains without the shield, fully stagger applicable, but they are fast and come unexpected.

Stronger / more unique patrols:
→ Right now like VT2 and VT1, this game has random groups of Elite enemies appear as a patrolling flock, but they don’t stand out enough. In VT1 they used to break up the mold. Beef em up or give them something unique the ‘normal’ elites spawning throughout the levels don’t have. Make em scary.

Warp Invasion:
→ Other Chaos Domain Daemons or enemy types randomly “invading” through a warp tear that opens.
→ Maybe just a strong negative effect on a player that comes with sudden daemonic Whispering noise

Random Encounters - Examples:
→ Things such as finding a group of surviving stragglers of guardsmen fighting against a big chunk of enemies, have the enemies be stronger as a tradeoff for the additional firepower you temporarily get. Upon rescuing the 4 guardsmen leave the scene
→ Finding the scene of an obscene slaughter, many corpses lying around with a few extra resources or Plasteel to pick up (not included in the max cap of X per difficulty) or maybe an automatically activated buff / debuff when you come across it
→ Warp hallucinations randomly affecting players in some maps or modifiers. This planet is supposedly experience a strong rift, why is everything so stable?

Whatever it is they add, it has to be infrequent enough to not be regular, yet interesting enough to stand out immediately.

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I would love to see a version of the chaos wastes or DRGs deep dives with randomized levels and escalating rewards for each complete mission. Call them campaigns or reclamations or something. Rather than the randomized gear and perk bonuses from chaos wastes they could just do like doom esq power ups or limited use guns. End it with a big boss fight of some sort. But like has already been said, FS moves slower than most live service companies so any big changes or content updates like that would be a long way off

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I know everyone hates RNG, but we really need more RNG in the missions.

The modifiers we have are neat, but we need more of them. Instead of 1 ‘big’ modifier per mission, we should have a big bag of them, and missions get a handful of them. Easier difficulties get a few, higher get more.

Some examples:

One class of modifiers could be the generic More/Less Enemies of Type X. Adds or subtracts a small bias towards spawning them. IE one may increase the bias to spawn maulers by 15%. Another may increase dogs by 15%. Small but noticeable changes in the makeup of the enemy force in the area would change how missions feel. Instead of ‘oops all snipers’ it’s just a decent bump so it feels different.

Another class of modifiers could modify the enemies themselves. One could give portion of them could be blessed by Nurgle, giving them a glow and a buff. Another could give a small percentage of enemies a weapon upgrade, plasma gun for a shooter, Lascannon for a Reaper, chain sword for Scab Bruisers. Not all of them, maybe 1 in 20 get an upgrade.

Another class could be environmental. Ventilation purge, power outage, etc. However they don’t have to be so binary. Instead of all power is out, it could fluctuate during the mission. Mix in some voice overs telegraphing what is happening/going to happen. Maybe some vents spread out through the map spew some Nurgle stank that causes mild corruption over time.

So we could get a mission with extra crushers, fewer dogs, more poxwalkers, etc. Where some enemies have a nurgle glow buff, and a few scab bruisers have chain swords. Oh and halfway through the mission the power gets cut for 5 minutes, and a few rooms have parts of them with Nurgle stanky.

If we get enough small modifiers, we can have tons of variety. And if we ever get some live-service plot progress stuff, they can be used to push the narrative.

Maps need the RNG treatment too. I don’t recall the map name, but it’s one of the newer ones. There’s a section where you have a 3x3 grid of small rooms and as you enter some doors shut and give you a single path through the 3x3 grid. We need something like that but at a much larger scale. So a single map would have 10 or 20 paths through it, and you don’t know which one you’re going to get when you start. Some doors/paths will just be closed, so there’s only main path through the map. Maybe the door is just shut, or the airlock lost power, but a different path is open to progress.

Instead of the handful of Event Rooms we have now, each map could have 10 to 15 Event Rooms, but any time you play the map you could only experience 3 or 4 of them. Sometimes there will be a stuck elevator and we need to kill the eyeball things to fix it, other times it’s just an elevator. Sometimes it’s just an air lock, but others we need to use our data interrogators while fighting a horde. There could be optional content too, like we get a report mid mission about a Champion in the area, we could take an elevator to kill them, and get a bonus, or skip it. Each map can have 5 or 10 End Rooms, like a boss arena, or sewer flushing, etc but you’d only experience 1 per play through. In effect we’ll have dozens to hundreds of possibilities.

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RNG in crafting hated. I personally dislike RNG in damage (although with patch 13 it has become more controlable and now it annoys me a lot less). RNG in missions and events and the like is awesome - that keeps games fresh. If they concentrated their RNG creativity on the parts of the game that actually profit of them - that would have been awesome!

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I mentioned in some thread that would be cool to have randomized enemies in terms of armor type+weapon every run, like maniac/full carapace maulers with dual chain axes, infested ragers, full flak reaper, etc

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Basically all of this.

Face it, games with the highest player retention are generally either (a) competitive in nature (eg multiplayer team vs team games. Battle royale, etc), (b) primarily single player experiences with a ton of content to explore (eg open world games), (c) or isn’t the above but has a lot of frequent content updates and other tricks to keep players working towards something.

DARKTIDE is none of the above and so it has a steep hill to climb.

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