I am making this account here, on the Fatshark forums, just to emphasize how important this is.
This game needs Solo and Private mode.
I do not care how or what you, the devs, were thinking when you decided it was okay to launch this game without Solo and Private mode ready to go. It was the wrong decision.
You’ve turned game series that used to be a fun horde shooter, regardless of whether you were with friends or alone or in an open lobby, into a mandatory PUG roulette where if you lose, you get an awful experience. And you lose a lot.
This affects everyone, at all difficulty levels. The people who prefer to go slow and/or goof around have to speed up for rushers. The rushers have to slow down for slower players. The toxic players get more angry and more toxic.
Nobody is enjoying this because everyone is forced into the same pool of players and there’s no way to opt out. Nobody gets to play how they want to play.
This is how you kill a game series and sink an entire studio on a failed live-service.
If Solo and Private modes are not top priority right now, then make them top priority. They needed to be in the game 10 hours ago.
Nah after all the “we need private lobbies/solo play” threads they said it would be available after launch. Hopefully they bring the bots up to VT levels with that at least and not just a team of Generic McDefault vets.
It was said, so far as I remember that solo with bots would probably be in at release, and that private lobbies (unsure if anything was mentioned about bots in these?) were being “worked on” and would be implemented some time in December.
Whether either of these things actually happen does not excuse their absence on release.
They need to let Mission Host select his/her other characters as the bots to allow for a team of USEFUL bots when no one joins. Make it a “select a slot” system so that whoever doesn’t fill that slot is replaced by a specific bot.
100% absolutely. There’s already bots in the game (albeit, not great bots), and it is an absolute MUST HAVE. Especially for people with shitty internet, like me! 400 kb/s is not exactly conducive to play a multiplayer game. Darktide plays fine just barely, and if my wifi slows down for any reason, I’ve entered rubber banding hell.
At this point I’d take the generic level 1 Veteran bots if that’s all they have.
Including myself, I know at least 3 people who have already decided to drop the game based solely on the complete and utter lack of Solo and Private mode. We only play when we know the other just so happens to be playing, and neither of us wants to play without a 4-man.
All other acquaintances I checked with also said they were grouping into 4-man pre-mades with the primary intent to avoid PUGs. Playing with friends was secondary to avoiding the random matchmaking.
Players are grouping to avoid a problem the devs created by the lack of Solo and Private.
Forget collecting cash shop revenue from a loyal playerbase like Vermintide. Darktide’s servers will be in a death spiral in a month if they do not get someform of Solo or Private mode out as soon as possible. They can overhaul it later to add customizable bots. Just get whatever slapdash construction they can out there now cuz the game is already live.
i genuinely can’t believe this game launched without the ability to make private lobbies. the mountain of problems that is just being brushed under the rug is seriously depressing. i was so excited for this game
I agree a lot with this thread, I’m getting burnt out telling pugs to share ammo and having some jerk yell at me in game that " there’s literally ammo everywhere" as he proceeded to leave me and the ogryn with no ammo and our party wiped. It’s why I didn’t like pugs in Vermintide, I still don’t like it here.
I dont want to indulge people who want to perma pan toxic players, but I also don’t like having to be around those toxic players. We both payed for a game to play but pugs can make it so hard to have fun at times.
The ability to opt out and play solo/private lobby’s is something I really miss from Vermintide 1 and 2
I am a first time player of the Warhammer series and today I tried Darktide for the first, and unfortunately last time. My brother and I paired up and were matched with two other players for our first game.
Unfortunately while we both thought it looked great and had a lot of potential. We were paired with a person who obviously knew the map better than a couple of first time players. Ran ahead and consumed all of the ammo for himself. This left my brother and I with only our blades. When I did get ammo it wasn’t much. I would have liked to try further to see if the game got better with a different mix of players.
But my brother was harder to convince and said if this is the way the game is he doesn’t want to play it. I have to agree it was very frustrating and I wouldn’t want that to be the experience all of the time.
I uninstalled the game after one session. Which is sad because it looks really cool. The only way I could see this game being playable is if you could go in there with a team of 4 people that you know. Those people would be able to share ammo fairly. Joining the in game chat and having a bunch of guys getting pissed off at each other is of no interest to me either. Sad.
The PUG experience is, well, bad. Unless you’re 30 and running lower-level missions to grind them (and why is there grind in a game like this?), the odds of getting a fun PUG team are too low. As anyone could have forseen. During beta I didn’t mind, forcing players to test specific modes is often the point of beta, but that’s history
It takes the fun out of leveling up alts when your low-level character is either on a team of 30s getting carried, or on a team of people who just don’t know how to play.
One more thing that VT2 got right. One more case of “why didn’t you just copy what worked”. Being able to pick the mission I want and run it solo or with a friend would certainly extend the life of the game. But, hey at least the cash shop works.
This has been my experience. I simply do not play if I can’t get at least two other people with me, and we still spend a long time trying to find a fourth player to fill things up. That’s a long time spent not playing, and most of it without the game even booted up in the first place.
I’m getting more and more frustrated being stuck like this. More often, I just ignore the game entirely now; I can get games together better in Deep Rock or MechWarrior 5 - which both include solo play with bots, in their own ways.
Solo play (with bots) and private lobbies are probably still ONE of the top priorities (hopefully).
Based on what’s been shared in the Community Update #1, before launch:
about solo play (w/ bots):
Solo play is in its final stages of testing as we fix the last issues that remain. We aim to release this at Launch. If not, a patch shortly after that in December.
about private games (middle stages of development at the time):
We expect to be able to release this later in December.
I just hope the bots will be capable enough, so they can handle themselves more or less decently up to Malice at least, manage to dodge disablers (mutants, dogs, trappers) and able to clear the immediate area before saving us if we’re downed. No idea how/if they’d handle tagged priority targets (or even marking targets themselves). Probably no ammo management. Most likely shared capabilities with Vermintide 2 bots(?).
Hopefully with some customization options (class, weapons).
I really wouldn’t expect much though.
That’s a lot to tackle for a feature that didn’t get any spotlight until loud community concerns.
At least, anything functional would be appreciated.
And this is the signs of the beginnings of a live service’s death spiral. When a live service puts such a harsh barrier to people who simply want to relax and play, those people will very quickly move on to play something else. Often, those other games have many similar live service elements too, its just that they have features that allow for a more relaxed experience.
This isn’t an MMO with large raids for entire guilds to gather and schedule their days around. This is a simple ‘drop-in; drop-out’ co-op game. People do not approach games like these with the mindset of, “the 4 of us will meet up at 8PM on Thursday to tackle this mission”. People simply want to be able to jump in, play for an hour or 2, and hop off. And if a friend comes in then all the more fun.
As it is right now, this live service forces people to pre-plan a 4-man team. And the need to do this is killing the live service.
That the devs needed to be reminded of this shows just how far up their own asses they were.
To the devs. We’re still waiting for this core feature. Get it done. You are losing players and gaining negative reviews every day that goes by that these features are not implemented. And both of these things are 100% deserved since you dared to shove this unpolished, unfinished mess of a live service out the door.
Just a bump and reminder that we’re still waiting on solo mode. Its been 3 months.
Just yesterday, I was talking to a friend of a friend. When she mentioned that she was interested in trying Darktide, I explained to her why I ragequit Darktide, the lack of solo play being the main reason.
When she realized that Private mode has that insanely stupid 2-player limitation and just how arbitrary that limit is, she got turned off of the game immediately.
“That’s so stupid”, is what she said.
How many more sales are you going to lose until you flip that switch and allow solo players to create a private lobby, Fatshark?
She wasn’t the only sale you’ve lost via my direct unrecommendation over the last 3 months, and she won’t be the last.
