I think the mission select is even worse for new players than for older players. I’ve been thinking about it and haven’t seen it mentioned much, despite being a pretty strong point against the current mission selection mechanics.
The rough progression of the story only makes any sense whatsoever if you’ve been playing since the first batch of maps.
A new player, currently, will pick up the game, and for lack of an actual mission order anywhere (nor the ability to pick an order if he was aware and wanted to) end up doing things like:
Playing Dark Communion as the first map, despite it assuming, storywise, that the player has seen the other Karnak related missions and/or events
Play the special assignment as one of the first if not the first map, despite the mission story wise assuming that the operators are experienced
Kill the Karnak twins and then stopping their revival before even being considered worth talking to by any story character in level progression cutscenes
I’m sure there’s some more inconsistencies that I can’t think of right now, I’m not sure what the order of the stimm carnival missions is, for example, nor am I sure about stuff like Rolling Steel and Dukane’s involvement. It does seem weird that they’d be sending 4 rejects fresh off the prison ship to that train alone. There’s an actual real consequence to this mission failing, this isn’t like a throwaway mission where they can send out another 4.
My point is just that the missions in some cases have a hard story order to them. A new player has no way to see the order without spoiling himself on it with outside resources or something, and even if he did, playing them in order would take waiting for missions on the mission board.
The more actual story progression is added, the worse this issue gets. I’d assume the whole Moebian Steel arc, when finished, is going to make absolutely no sense to a new player because of this.
VT2 for example never had this issue because this is what the VT2 mission select is like:
You see the order and you can pick and play them in order. If players care they will do it. The story makes sense. The first time experience is good. Simple!
The Throneside Comm Station had the slight narrative beat that Rannick was using it to send messages because he suspected there were traitors on board the Mourningstar. As far as I’ve experienced, there hasn’t been any update to the chatter about that even after you hit the milestone levels that show that yes, there was at least one traitor on the Mourningstar.
Most of the missions can’t even keep their own internal narrative straight anyway, the majority of the time we leave the newly reactivated/cleansed/repaired locations to the traitors and heretics where they just immediately break/corrupt/turn them off. It’s a mess.
True, it’s definitely not very interesting. I think partially this might be because they tried to make it mission board friendly, for the initial batch of missions. So they all feel kinda pointless storywise, so there’s no actual story to speak of anyway. At that point, all the “storytelling” (if you can call it that) was in the 5 or so level up cutscenes.
The newer missions do have some actual narratives. I’m not saying it’s groundbreaking but what we do in Dark Communion, Rolling Steel or Clandestinum Gloriana makes a lot more sense in self-containment than what we do in Smelter Complex.
Their design on how the story delivered changed, but not the mission board being random, so it’s just not working on that front anymore.
Hard agree on the way the story is conveyed. Another bad thing seemingly inspired by Destiny. That was a total mess too as a new player. Part of why I never got fully invested past a single season or two.
Who is X person/faction?
Why do I care?
Oh this guy is neat.
Wait, why is he the bad guy in this dungeon?
Oh, this is old content that is still in random rotation.
Since when has anyone paid attention to the story of darktide? I have 2,000 hours in darktide and have never once cared what the story is. Im just here for the gameplay loop.
But then there’s this whole player base who like Warhammer. They buy cosmetics. They role play guardsmen. They’re into WH40K. Probably should look out for them as it’s their money that’s propping up our gameplay loop.
And also; I liked the 3/4-map story arcs in VT2. Would it be so hard to put the levels on a map, explain why they’re linked, then shape a simple story around why we keep going in to the Torrent sewers and what the endgame was there? And also why, in the best part of “30 days” (let’s say), we go from a doomed for death prisoner to a [fully trusted?] member of the inquisition, sent to take down the biggest, baddest generals on Tertium.
