Darktide is a much better coop game and a lot more fun than vermintide ever was. and still only beta.
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I just wanna chime in and say I think some serious rose tinted glasses are in play for anyone to say VT2 release was noticeably better than Darktide. Remember how hero power, y’know that incredibly central stat, wasn’t even working properly until weeks (more than a month?) after release?
I have some issue with Darktide sure, but to me it definitely feels more solid so far than VT2 release. I’ll fully admit I’ve been taking thing pretty slow, and am not even max level yet, but despite the issues I’ve been having a pretty great time with Zealot overall so far, jumping between quite a few different melee weapons mission to mission, getting better at dealing with the new mechanics and getting into a nice groove.
Constructive criticism is great, not so keen on complete doom and gloom takes.
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The timegated contract currency and shop is the thing that irks me the most regarding the new progression. It takes the pacing out of the hands of the players and forces rigidly to a pace the developer demands. Sure, you can just play 2-3 maps in between refreshes, but it just feels bad to have to wait.
Speaking of timers, the mission selection timers are also driving me a bit mad. For a period of about 3 hours last night there was only 1 difficulty four mission available and between all the times they refreshed, it was the same 2 maps.
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The core gameplay is good. Great, even. Needs tweaks here and there, but it’s absolutely a solid foundation that I’d be ready to dump tons of hours into.
There’s a few things outside that though…
- All the RNG, grinding and timegating around gear is a huge downer. We had such a good system in WoM. Are we getting something better later on that just isn’t ready? Or did we revert back to the grindy RNG-fest for live-service reasons?
- Having to grind resources and do weeklies for every one of my dudes individually is a massive chore. I don’t know what the goal is here, but it sucks.
Then there’s a nagging voice in the back of my head that’s telling me not to bother because the top-end of the difficulty ladder is going to be a ghost town in my region. Time will tell on this one, but my gut tells me my window for playing high-rank is closing. Not being able to play Cata because of no players was hands-down the thing that killed VT2 for me.
Again, the core gameplay is sick. It looks amazing. It sounds amazing. I know “feel” is subjective, but to me it feels great to play. I’m having a blast with my shield ogryn. It’s just some of the surrounding stuff that’s killing my hype.
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I’d argue that Vermintide 2 really only started to win players’ trust back after Winds of Magic, with the free Drachenfels updates and low-cost class DLC. For all of its blunders within the first year and a half or so of VT2’s release, Fatshark actually did some solid long-term damage control. The quiet cancellation of Versus is always going to be a black mark on Fatshark’s record, even though I personally don’t think it’s a big deal and FS even admitted that they announced it way too early (to drum up hype at E3 alongside Winds of Magic). L4D versus players will continue to bleat and screech about how versus modes are the only things that keep horde shooters alive, though, and how Fatshark going dark on Versus is some great betrayal akin to the Horus Heresy or something. Your average casual passersby is going to hear that and think the same thing if they don’t know any better.
As others have stated, the strengths and weaknesses of Vermintide are exaggerated in Darktide. The core combat and game feel are even finer tuned in this game, and it’s is a blast to play as a result. UI, readily available information, matchmaking, class balance, and gear grind are a step backward. Overall, I think it’s launching much better than VT2 did — but that won’t matter to first-timers who weren’t around for VT2’s release.
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The 50k average daily players won’t last. It’ll drop to 1-2k average like vermintide 2 did. It’ll pick up on new maps like that did, and drop off just as soon. The last of content is already making me pace myself with the game, because otherwise I’m going to burn myself out.
They managed to make me prefer the lootbox system over the system they have here. At least the lootbox system gives me rewards for killing a monster, collecting grims and tomes, etc. Here it does nothing at all and it feels like any mission I do too well on we get 2 monstrosities at the very least. Or don’t too well on, 2 monstrosities to wipe our team that was struggling already. I don’t know why they decided to look at Back 4 Blood’s difficulty and take the progression system of a mobile game to mold it together, but it’s very painful. Also gotta love the forums censoring swear words in a 18+ game 
Not gonna lie, anyone who’s disappointed that a new game in a niche genre that takes place in a niche setting will lose most of its 50k players is a fool or hasn’t been playing games for very long. The fact that Vermintide 2 can consistently keep 5k players is fairly impressive as it is, considering how much it has going against it. For some reason, people within the past decade or so have freaked out every time a game’s launch population plummets. Youtube videos start to crop up, cashing in on the outrage with titles like “X GAME DYING???” Then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of people thinking the game’s dying and thus leaving the game.
There’s plenty to criticize here, of course. And a lot of people are rightfully turned off by the quarter-baked loot system. Just don’t be surprised that a game’s population rises and falls. It is exceedingly rare for a game to maintain or grow an already-large playerbase over extended periods of time.
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The majority is polished. There is a solid game play loop here. Compared to the previous beta things have improved a ton (I can now dodge snipers, yay) but it is a bit sad that so many of the lessons learned from VT seem to have been forgotten. It is also sad that they don’t add a bit more content prior to shipping… a delay til next year would be a good idea.
With that said, everything is not there now. We are being spoon fed content so it’s difficult to know exactly how much will be there at launch.
Oh, and I love endless hordes, but grims do seem to take a very significant part of the health away from my tiny friends although it does not affect me much (percentage in stead of fixed number maybe?)
While I agree that Vermintide 2 isn’t “dying” and that a big fall off in new players isn’t a huge issue necessarily - some comparisons are in order.
Deep Rock Galactic has slowly and steadily INCREASED its base concurrent player over years. It’s base numbers continue to grow. Payday 2 is practically ancient these days and it’s base numbers continue to grow, this after the developers have stopped working on the game for a long while and they restarted development on it again.
Vermintide is NOT very casual friendly IMHO, because for a lot of people the sense of progression relative to playtime is slow. Unless you really committed yourself to progressing up to higher difficulties a lot of players will play recruit or veteran difficulty and conclude “that’s it? Now I just run these missions over and over again?” So they get bored and quit. Then there’s also the issue of transparency in how basic mechanics and stuff works that’s really confusing and nebulous and a total turnoff to people not willing to dive into archaic Reddit posts or steam guides to figure out how things work.
Payday 2 and DRG manage to be more enjoyable and rewarding at lower difficulties AND higher difficulties. The progression systems are FUN and not punishing and grindy and overly RNG based. And they also don’t require a huge grind to get the “best” gear that is needed to play on the highest difficulty if so inclined. 10-15 hours and you can have all you need to play on the highest difficulty if you want.
I think this is why player retention is better with these other games and why the base line player counts continue to grow as more people discover the game be get sucked in. For the Tide series, player counts are very spikey, with players jumping in when new content drops and quickly falling back to a relatively lower baseline.
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You make good points. I’m not super familiar with Payday. Didn’t enjoy the gameplay or the community when I tried it, though I am aware that the devs also did some good damage control with their own scandals. But DRG is a special case. Ghost Ship does something very simple, yet unique: they keep their game’s scope small. DRG is not a very complicated game, and its ‘major’ content updates don’t actually add a whole lot. But this is actually a winning strategy, because it means there are fewer variables for the devs to stumble over when they do add new content. This is supplemented by the solid gameplay, easy-to-learn mechanics, and procedurally generated maps keeping every run fresh, of course. And GSG has definitely made a few blunders in DRG’s lfietime (the one that players point to is usually the robot enemies being annoying to fight), but this is mostly excusable because the few other things that DRG sets out to do are done very well. Fatshark doesn’t have the liberty of keeping their games as trim as DRG, but they could definitely trim a lot of fat and make their games even better.
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Stupid tittle but surprisingly good feedback. Most of it, at least.
OP is right about a lot of things, but I don’t think Darktide will die and I am sure those things will all get ironed out. Can’t wait for tomorrow, great time to be alive.
Do you remember the early Assassins in Vermintide 2 and how everyone said it would kill the game? 
That was hilarious. I will never forget Assassins jumping over 100 meters to get you.
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You forget that Payday 2 on release also was lacking in content. I played it. I remember it. EVERYBODY was running Firestarters (3 series mission with massive XP bonus at the end) all the time and nothing else. Literally - Nothing - Else.
Bringing it up in it’s current state is a bit dishonest - It has over 50 DLCs, a great number of them mission and content packs.
AND - The game was also casual unfriendly. In fact it still is. Being casual friendly is not a must to attract an audience, good gameplay is.
Well and they had this live action series with a great meme culture on YouTube I guess. That also made a big impact.
As for grindiness, you brought up Payday 2 - The game that has 100 Prestige levels and before a most recent patch, resetting the level would delete everything but your inventory. EVERYTHING.
Well, I agree that 25 missions or 25 tomes is a bit too much.
Me personally atm have a lot of free time, so I’ve already done my weekly on my zealot and ogryn. However when you have just an hour of free time at best 25 missions seems like a slap in the face.
I think that a solution to this problem would be not dump a random set of quests but let us choose our “grindload”.
Is there another modifier? 
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Unless this is tongue-in-cheek, yes.
So far we’ve seen the following:
Endless Hordes: Spawnrate of Hordes and Specials increased
Fewer Hordes: Spawnrate of Hordes and Specials decreased
Lights Out: The entire map is dark. Bringing your flashlight or fiery weapon can alleviate this
Old Mist: The entire map is covered in thick fog. Vision range slightly higher than Lights Out, but you cannot counteract the fog.
Fewer Hordes was taken out early, because like all the other modifiers it granted you extra XP and Ordocks, so you were rewarded doubly when picking this and everyone played it. That was on day one and it was gone day two of the beta.
When the game launches, I’m sure picking this will reduce rewards. And the modifier was really significant. You’d run the entire map and have at most one singular Horde. Malice felt like Sedition with that modifier.
This is so stupid because in the reveal of warning hazards (just gonna steal DRG’s name for them because its blatenly obvious they got the idea from that game) they claimed that some of them are helpful and thats how its suppose to be, having them reduce the rewards would be so stupid, its their own fault of the way the missions are implemented that everyone was picking it, dont punish the players for it
Also the fact that they have only shown 4, which really is only 2 because both the horde ones are just tweaks to the horde spawn timer, and the other 2 are just different levels of visibility reduction is slightly worrying. That better not be the only ones because that would be quite sad, especially since vermintide 2 had close to 20 (the deeds and weekly events were essentially the same things)
Well, it’s less of a punishment and more of a “let’s test this other thing now” thing. As for inspiration, could have also been the other Vermintide games. Or any of the meriad of Roguelites. There is tons of games that use modifiers to spice up their maps and levels.
As for the Horde modifiers, tiny little correction - It scales the AI Director up or down in every aspect that is related to spawning, not just Hordes.
Fewer Hordes will also spawn Specials and Elites at lower rates, while Endless Hordes will spawn more. The only thing not changed by the Horde modifiers is the Ambient Enemy spawns that patrol the level before you arrive.
And I agree, I hope they got a few more. I already know which one will also definitely be in, because we had it in Vermintide 2 - Nurgles Pestilent Smell or something like that. Basically permanent health drain.
Since Winds of Magic and Chaos Wastes both featured a ton of modifiers, I see there being a lot more. If not now, then I hope they will introduce new ones soon thereafter.
It shouldn’t be too hard to implement ruleset changes for levels and it adds a lot of variety.
I agree with most of your points, but just as a heads up if you want to run grim missions take +wound trinkets. you wont get more health in total, but grims take off wounds not health %. same with getting up from the ground. so with more wounds you can essentially get downed more often without dying instantly.
VT2 released on an unfinished dev version. Just sayin.
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lol, really?
The more you know.