This game won't last... And this is coming from someone who loved the other tide games

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
1

Gear progression sucks. RNG shops were a terrible idea.

Balance is bad, and it clearly wasn’t done with high difficulties in mind. Psyker is useless on heresy and above, and it just feels like dogpoop to play. Most other classes only have one or two viable weapons.

Specials are wonky. Sound effects are off. Some specials will spawn right next to you and pop out of a door without warning or noise, like pox bursters. And, to be honest, most of them are too darn tanky. Mutants are the only ones that should be able to take a beating. Pox bursters, hounds, and flamers should all die to a stray fart, like snipers.

Mobs can fire ranged attacks through each other with impunity. A trapper or a sniper should not be able to shoot through 20ish of his friends and hit you so easily. This was less of an issue with hookrats because they had to be closer… And even rat gunners and flamers killed their friends.

Toughness doesn’t work as the tutorial states. Chip damage must go.

Suppression is wonky, dodging ranged is wonky.

Melee combat is clunky. The dodging is too slow, stamina regen being cancelled by dodge feels absolutely terrible, and most melee weapons are just flat-out non viable, causing each class to favor one or two particular ones.

Penances are terrible. So many of them feel ridiculous and counter to class design, proper gameplay, and teamwork.

Weeklies feel more like monthlies.

The mission map is laughably bad. There’s always certain mission types missing from the pool, and you can’t even choose the difficulty or modifiers. Endless horde is perhaps the most annoying, DULLEST modifier to play, and it’s all that’s available 90% of the time. Don’t even get me started on the fact that heresy atm is bugged and ALWAYS has endless horde unless another modifier is present.

Grims are stupid. they will literally reduce you to two health, and chip damage means that’s not even manageable.

And I’m going to be honest, the ranged enemies and gunplay are cool, but you spawn TOO MANY of them TOO OFTEN. Especially on heresy, it feels… annoying to walk into a room and find it filled with 30ish dudes with guns who are able to take cover perfectly while you… can’t. To make things worse, this happens… basically every room. Every. Room. Couple this with the suppression and flinch… come on.

Spawns need work. I have seen things spawn completely in the open, right in front (or behind) of me. Enemies should never spawn like that. Make them spawn behind their magic doors, give better sound cues, and make the doors SUPER LOUD.

Y’all have the makings of a great game here, but you’ve made a ton of questionable decisions that end up making it a worse game to play than V2.

42 Likes
2

Remember VT2 on release?

Yeah. That game never made it either.

19 Likes
3

Vermintide 2 on release was far more solid, even if it wasn’t perfect. This one is a mess right now.

19 Likes
4

Yeah, it’s pretty ironic how people are ready to bury the game before it’s even released. VT at release was only good for rekindling the passion for L4D-type of games, it was quite severely buggy to the point of actually being very painful to play at higher difficulties. Eventually, it was fixed and polished though. VT2 was even worse, not only it had numerous technical problems, but it was very light on content at release.

Darktide seems like a much better modelled VT2. Sure, it has problems and there isn’t really much content right now. But problems will be eventually fixed and content filled in. Personally, I’m just excited for having a VT2 sequel in 40K, but that’s me.

7 Likes
5

VT2 and most of its careers were half baked at release and all needed to change over months, along with stuff like Hyper-Stacking, phantom hits, bad spawns, crappy traits (which they never improved.) The list goes on.

I’m not saying DT is going to be a more polished release product. All I’m saying is VT2 wasn’t “great” for at least a few months after release.

5 Likes
6

Easy bandaid fix for spawns is to make them spawn at a distance. Design currently seems to intentionally make enemies spawn very close to the player in most positions. After fixing the audio cues and some other finetuning they can move the spawns back to being on top of the player, though I believe the game loses something from no longer having spawn management somewhat in player hands.

7

While true that it wasnt the game it is now, you would expect a way better start for Dark Tide with the experience and changes they made to V2 through its lifetime. Yet its worse in some core aspects.

6 Likes
8

as critical as this feedback sounds, most of this is solid criticism and valid in every case

Most of these things that are wrong about the game are core design features that are flawed in design and need major work, these are not the same issues that were present in Vermintide 2 and require much more indepth work to fix. Im hoping they address each and every one of these points for the sake of the games lifespan, because in its current state its going to lose a ton of its playerbase soon after launch.

7 Likes
9

I’m fairly certain that VT2 and Darktide are very different from a technical standpoint.

10

VT2 had its share of problems on release. But there were a lot of other aspects of the design that were in an okay spot. The keep as a mission hub was much more fun to run around. There were 15 careers to experiment with, and there was at least one strong build per character out of the gate. And resources were at least shared between characters so leveling up wasn’t too painful IMHO. There was a scoreboard. There were bots that used your leveled hero and the ability to make private games. Yes, the RNG of crafting/upgrading items was dumb, but at least you got three items as a tangible reward per finished mission. DT rng is even worse and you get no items most of the time (and we can’t craft our own from scratch either). And of course modding helped us all get my by providing plenty of QoL improvements.

Sure, VT2 at launch had issues but I stuck with it. I just refunding DARKTIDE today as a show of disappointment.

7 Likes
11

No argument from me here. While I’m really enjoying the game and loving what they’ve done overall, the lack of polish and the obviously unfinished and untested content has me going “Exactly how many games do you guys need to successfully make and maintain before you stop with the clownshoes on release.”

You know what’s not different from a technical standpoint? Keyboard controls. The second beta had obviously just been developed using an Xbox controller game kit. Which is why half of the entirely bog standard keyboard options people are used to (invert mouse for example) weren’t even live until this beta. Or consistently saving the settings the player put in? That’s like…input 101. I’ve never played a game before where half of my settings would arbitrarily reset in the middle of game.

Stuff like that just leaves us going…“how far behind ARE you guys?”

2 Likes
12

This has become my biggest gripe about the game currently, on higher difficulties every single room feels like a chore to clear, the game is at its most fun in melee and with the current mass amount of ranged units it feels so tedious to have to clear out the ranged units before advancing into melee.

A big issue with this is that enemies still struggle to go into melee and the range at which they decide to switch to melee needs to be doubled its current distance

3 Likes
13

I like it, mostly.

VT2 was just a mind-numbing melee fest from start to finish. You just slay from enemy to enemy down a corridor until you’re done, pop out your ranged weapon to snap shot the occasional special. I enjoy VT2 but after 1000 hours I wanted something a little deeper. Something a little less “now it’s time to turn off my brain and just keep aiming for faces until there’s no more faces left.”

DT on Heresy and even starting on Malice, each room provides a tactical challenge. You gotta sweep it, work as a team, check your corners, mind your angles of fire, flank, suppress…does it all work perfectly? No. But it’s pretty good.

My only complaint is a single ranged guy can stop you dead in your tracks from advancing. That’s super annoying. I can understand walking into a volley of fire or a Reaper being a hard nope. But a single guy who starts shooting you when you try to advance out of cover literally pushing you back with an auto or las gun…is pretty damn frustrating at times.

5 Likes
14

While I hesitate to say it won’t last, I will agree that in many ways it feels a step back from Vermintide, particularly at higher difficulties and especially from a melee perspective. There’s nothing here that I don’t think can’t be fixed, but I think it’s too early for a proper release given the myriad tuning issues that should be implemented, not to mention outright bugs.

To reiterate on Namazu’s points, the balance is fairly weak: Veteran often feels like the only class worth its mettle at times in the higher difficulties (maybe with an Ogryn to hide behind, and even then, only maybe).

Audio still leaves a lot to be desired (silent berserkers, anyone?), and the capacity for a Flamer to shrug off a fully-loaded stubpistol at Heresy difficulty doesn’t make the specials more fun to interact with.

The ranged AI, while better than it was at the start of the pre-order beta, still feels out of whack. I’ve said it before but getting shot shouldn’t stagger at the very LEAST if it’s just toughness damage; give us a chance to slide out of danger, not pre-emptively slide around with fingers crossed.

Chip damage to toughness isn’t great. I won’t say its gamebreaking but you might as well just bring back temp health at this point.

Suppression doesn’t feel great but it’s a mechanic meant to induce teamwork, so it is what it is.

Melee continues to feel greatly inferior in this game to Vermintide. Ignoring the hubbub with ranged enemies, my biggest grievance is that most classes feel like they have an obvious pick in weapon for all occasions, rather than a variety to pick from for jobs in how they want to play. Vermintide 2, I picked the weapons I did because I wanted to play a certain role in the party and/or just liked a particular weapon. Darktide, I feel like I pick the one I do because “it’s the best”, even if I don’t love it. Dodging also feels extremely anemic, the ‘drag’ coming much quicker and more pronounced than in Vermintide. I said it in a prior post, but it’s a shame because Vermintide was the series that made fps horde melee combat fun, and Darktide’s manage to regress on that front.

Penances aren’t great, given their anti-team design, but I’m not much of an achievement hunter so I’ll leave it at that.

Weeklies can be taxing timewise but that’s more a gripe than an issue I think will ‘ruin the game’, so we’ll leave that there as well.

The mission map is horrific. There’s many reasons for it, but I can clear the plate and just say “we’re paying for all the maps, let us play them as we please.”

All world items (grims/scrips/crafting materials) are something I’m not thrilled with; while Vermintide’s static positions for tomes/grims lose their mystique once you know where they are, I don’t think many of us play these games for the scavenger hunting aspect. We want to fight and be in the action. I’ve found when trying to complete a 25 scripture weekly, however, I spend as much time searching corners and behind boxes as I do fighting the enemy, and simply put, it’s not fun. Crafting Materials I’m willing to give a bit more leniency since they’re more of a ‘bonus’, but again, searching for them takes me out of the action.

Ranged enemies are a topic of themselves I’ve already talked about in another post, so I’ll skip that here. Spawns do need work though; there’s a bad case of enemies materializing in front of you, and the ‘rear trickle’ is extremely cumbersome to deal with given the relative silence of enemies/the doors they spawn/drop down from.

There is a lot to like here, and I was super excited for Darktide. I still am, but it needs work, and lot of it. Vermintide 2 did as well, but the core principles felt much more grounded than they do for Darktide right now.

5 Likes
15

Interesting. It seems like some people want a better VT2, while I’d rather much prefer a sideways VT2 - and for that instance I find Darktide perfectly filling the bill.

It’s certain that melee in Darktide isn’t really that good as VT2, but in VT2 melee was nearly the entire game. Sure, it flowed better, but at the same time it wasn’t particularly complex thing - you got used to it fairly quickly, and then there weren’t much else aside from Sienna.

And I’m very glad that in Darktide melee is only a bit less than half of the game. I’ve played quite some Heresy games and a couple of Damnation (although doing it in random comp isn’t particularly great) - and honestly I’m not seeing any issues with ranged mobs. It’s like people don’t really want to deal with them and complain instead. -Tide mobs always follow quite narrow set of rules, and Darktide is not an exception, there are tons of tools for dealing with ranged mobs - you only have to use them. Well, a couple of things aren’t working particularly great (like mobs still shooting you point-blank before switching to melee - it’s a ton of hurt in Damnation) - but those kinks would eventually be balanced.

I could keep going but I probably shouldn’t, all those points are already discussed at length in other topics.

16

Melee doesn’t feel as clean in DT to me.

It’s like the introduction of Toughness has made them feel like they can dial up the horde more. Not taking a single hit in VT2 Legend and Cata was something to shoot for every game. It feels nigh on impossible in DT. There’s too many shenanigans with spawns, too many guys in hordes just endlessly sprint attacking you until they get a hit, and ranged guys stripping you of toughness quickly leaves you getting down by the first hit or two on Heresy. I’m finding melee more frustrating to master, because it seems like they’re both giving the enemy more cheats and giving us more weaknesses and limitations.

2 Likes
17

While I don’t share your pessimism about the long term health of the game (games much worse than this have lasted for long periods of time), I do agree with you on almost all of the issues you’re talking about, especially melee combat being clunky.

7 Likes
18

I think they’re progressively going to address most of the problems, but it’s still very disappointing they could come up with so many bad design decisions when they already had two previous similar games to learn from

Also, the game needs a better LFG and matchmaking system that doesn’t spam 1 player 3 bots games because it’s immediately on a 60 seconds timer, when all these players could form full squads instead

I still genuinely like the game but at the same time, kinda bitter

3 Likes
19

This. Laughed out lout. Quite heinous that I need to set keybinds every time game is opened, and a bunch of them simply won’t even save. How is this an issue in this day and age?
This tedious process, the RNG missions and the warp-spawn-behind-you mobs are stopping me from enjoying this game. Have gone back to VT2.

1 Like
20

Vermintide had a gear chase behind it that made it more interesting. Even on T4+, I don’t see gear making so much of a difference that I would farm endlessly for better stuff like I would in V2.

I’m just going to go ahead and agree with the whole sentiment. After about 50 hours, I got real tired of the grind because I didn’t feel like there’s anything left that I really need to do. I got an Ogryn to 30, and a Veteran to 21, plus a low level psyker, so I got to the point of multiple characters, but I just don’t have any reason to do it anymore. Farming for oranges doesn’t seem necessary. All the vanity gear is just “ok”. The gunplay is just mediocre and limited. Maybe once some more maps come out, I’ll have more reason to jump in again, but I wonder how long that will last, because I’m not expecting to be surprised by anything. I already feel like I’ve done every type of mission this game has to offer, it’s just going to be in different locales that aren’t released yet.

Like I mentioned at the top, I think the biggest thing is just the lack of a proper end game mechanic. Sure, crafting is coming, but none of it feels relevant to succeed in T4/5, that’s mostly just about having the proper team and, generally, being level 30. There’s just hardly any substance here to work with. Once you’ve put enough time in to experience the levels and mission types… that’s it.

And all this is coming from someone who put 500 hours in Back 4 Blood and 330 hours in Vermintide 2, plus all of the classes I like to play in the latter are decked out in reds, so… it’s not like this is a new thing for me. I just feel no drive to succeed here.

2 Likes