Thoughts on Darktide at the 1-year mark

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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The “Crafting” and RNG-gambling gear acquisition is a huge issue that dramatically undercuts everything this game tries to do. No matter what cool content gets put out, what changes they make to classes, what new things they add, the gear system will undercut and detract from it. It’s a huge drag on this game, it feels like something a C-suite is deeply wedded to without having a real design or business concept behind it and just can’t let go, and that was only ever halfway implemented.

The gear and crafting in this game actively deters progression and experimentation, it generates lots of frustration at the game without any outlet (most RNG gear systems are designed to generate frustration to get people to pay enormous amounts of in-game resources, or cash, to bypass it) and lots of direct ill-will towards the developers.

The class updates have also been odd. The current Veteran setup is indicative of this, in that we’re on the 3rd set of Veteran talents, and we’re absolutely going to get a 4th revision at this point. The Veteran feels like it was designed by a different ethos/team than the rest of the classes, it feels like something developed by someone deep into tabletop RPG’s without really playing this game (a fast paced survival shooter) much, resulting in a talent tree far more restrictive and keystones with far higher skill floors and more limited functionality than other trees, and lots of builds that don’t even bother with Keystones.

Fatshark’s communication is also really just… not great, and the above issues are just exacerbated by this.

The cosmetics stuff I won’t complain too much about in general except for the Krieg cosmetics. These were released with some dramatically sub-par offerings with tons of issues both in terms of basic quality (clipping issues, sizing, etc) and creative interpretation, particularly the Veteran cosmetic, and Fatshark had the balls to charge an additional premium for them for “extended development”.

Someone at Fatshark should be personally and professionally embarrassed at that release.

Overall Darktide is a mix of excellence and garbage. This game magnificently captures the 40k universe and atmosphere, is visually stunning, and has a great fundamental combat loop. It’s held back by some truly awful gear/crafting features, haphazard development, a couple poor cosmetic releases, and terrible communication.

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22

I don’t agree that VT2’s crafting is better (nor provides more agency) than Darktide’s, and I’ve gone into that a lot elsewhere at length. The blessings situation is not ideal, and there’s a lot of justifiable frustration around not having the T4 version of each blessing and other wacky things like Flachette being seemingly harder to get than T3s/T4s. But there are several avenues for getting blessings, and ultimately I think they’re a somewhat-poorly-implemented attempt at creating reliable progression in the system. And then the locks…shame we can’t break them with cubes to make “perfect” 80% weapons.

But crafting materials translate directly to time. And at 10 hours or 1000 hours, I’d rather be stuck with enough materials for one upgrade/modification in Darktide (where you can at least choose exact perks or blessings, once you’ve acquired them) rather than VT2 (where everything is random outside of red weapon properties).

Another aspect to these two systems that I think gets overlooked is how in Darktide you will progressively gain more agency as you collect blessings. In VT2, every weapon (outside of reds) is random rolls over and over forever. And red weapons in VT2 are for long-time and top-level players…which I am very happy is not the case in DT. Even the weakest player can progress without having to do top-level content for a chance at earning something new.

My totally-unsubstantiated headcanon on this is that if they release everything in the files, whales will buy it all today and then FS will have nothing but negative growth to show on their reports for months to come!

23

It’s been said a 1000 times already but the gear progression (purchased, won, crafted, however you get it) is brutal in this game. It’s even worse for some classes, imo. My Ogryn has 9 melee weapons and 9 ranged weapons to choose from–there are only a couple I’d consider sub-par right now. My Psyker has 19 ranged weapons to choose from when, by my made-up statistics, 90% of Psykers use 1 of the 4 staves. It’s almost guaranteed that anything that drops or shops is going to be something I don’t want on my Psyker.

I’d almost rather just select from weapons/blessings that all had the same stats (basically removing item progression) and play around with different builds like they were as easy to reset as talents… as opposed to dumping endless resources into weapons you’re pretty sure are going to be worthless. The frustration of wasting a lot of resources with nothing to show from it easily outweighs the surprising/rare “wow that roll isn’t bad” moments.

As much as I’d like an entirely new system I realize bandaids are much more likely–I think it’d help to at least be able to spend some amount of resources to simply reset a bricked weapon back to gray with its base stats to try again.

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24

I can definitely recommend this game now especially if its one sale, which is not something i could have said even a couple of months ago.
That said i also always lead on with the caveats that crafting sucks and it especially sucks for newer players, fatsharks development cycle is what it is in a supposed Gaas game, mtx store that is obviously fomo and overpriced and this game still has some annoying QOL stuff that you can fix with mods but not everyone wants to mod their game.
If you can overlook this stuff then you will probably enjoy the game enough for you to get moneys worth of hours.

This game is mostly amazing when you are in the thick of the combat and on actual missions. This has always been the case in my mind, but now you also have some agency on what sort of difficulty you want to play on and what types of builds you want to run without feeling like you have to go into troll territory to get some challenge out of it or to simply enjoy the weapon you want to try.
Sure its not perfect and the recent sound bugs for instance are good example of this. But when it works its really good now.

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25

everyone’s compalints about the gear system mostly show to the people that don’t care about 100%-ing their gear that there’s a lot of people that have totally missed the point of playing the game.

realize you’re supposed to have fun and not “make progress” and you’ll enjoy yourself more. or get bored, if you don’t enjoy shooting games for it’s own sake. either is better than loitering around a game you don’t like because you have a problem with needing to “gain progress” and sunk cost fallicy keeps you stuck there. i’m sure there’s some nice mobile game ready to reward those kinds of people with “god-rolls”.

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I don’t know how much time you put into VT2, but by the time I had 400 hours into the game (less than the 480 I have in DT) I had effectively every weapon maxed out I could conceivably want, and if I didn’t, I had the resources to get it.

You’ll get to a point where Green/Blue/Orange dust is effectively limitless and you’re then just left with the PitA of re-rolling properties on your red item until you get the combo you want. If you do legend book runs you’ll get many, many red items and the duplicates can be scrapped for upgrade others to red. It’s annoying, but at a certain point the only pain point is sitting there for 5 minutes re-rolling properties until you get what you want.

I wish the weave Athanor system is what we had in DT. Totally deterministic yet still requires a fair investment of time to get a weapon leveled up. A combination of RNG blessing hunting and deterministic stat/perk/blessing assignment would’ve been awesome IMHO.

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I literally put my complaints in plain fing English and made examples for why I hate this system only for another one of you morons to come along and try to AstroTurf it with bad excuses.

Half the fun in a coop / horde shooter is playing with the god dam toys. Believe it or not I actually like making different builds for even the same weapons but this system sucks for it.

I don’t even give a dam about grind, I give a dam about grind to leads nowhere’s and gives you nothing. I play roguelike and am used to resetting (see Lethal Company, Risk of Rain, Hades, etc ) but not amount of trying to act high brow and pretending that people are “missing the point” makes this system any less garbage.

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28

Actually they haven’t.

I think a lot of people complaining about crafting and progression would be happier if the game didn’t even have item progression at all, or if it was brief and completely deterministic (like the Athanor system from VT2).

Most people complaining about the system are complaining about it because they “just want to play the game” and they don’t want to be thinking about and wasting time with a poor gear system. They want to test out different builds, i.e. “play” different builds and not get shut out of the opportunity because of an artificial barrier likes locks and RNG.

I’ve played SIGNIFICANTLY more of Payday 2, Deep Rock Galactic, Vermintide 2 AFTER I’ve effectively unlocked everything in the game. The game gets better and more fun to play AFTER the gear progression is over.

So this isn’t about chasing 100% perfect items for us, it’s about getting through the progression system so we don’t have to deal with it anymore.

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29

There is also the fact that i see kinda often when i play with my newer buddies, “hey that evi you run looks cool how can i have it?”
Then i go to explain for 20 minutes how you need to play 20 games to get the chance to craft something that works even remotely closely to what i have, and even then they might not even have the blessings for it.

Sure if you got 1000 hours in this game like i have, then you are at the point where you mostly can craft something close to what you want. Newer ppl however? its way worse.

This is really driving people away who just want to try cool stuff without having to grind 100 hours to get something remotely close.

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There’s a lot less going on as far as traits go (fewer and fewer real options), but I have a really hard time with any arguments that only apply to (very) late game.

I think Darktide’s attempt at long-term, continual progression (mostly via blessings) is a better design intent than VT2’s full book Legend runs with a small chance to drop a random red (the best a player can get in the game).

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your complaints were “i don’t like how fatshark did this, I DON’T!”, saying it plainly doesn’t matter when there’s no substance to it. “i should get all the items i like exactly how i want them” isn’t a strong argument it’s just you being needy.

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Couple things on this: First, Progression is absolutely part of the “fun”, it’s a core concept to RPG mechanics, and frustrating that is a fundamentally bad game design aspect that actively detracts from fun.

Second, there is a problem that there’s a huge difference in power and capability between an “okay” weapon and god roll or near god roll. Many weapons or builds effectively require certain perks/blessings to be really useful (e.g. Power Cycler on the Power Sword).

Trying to get a “perfect” weapon is a silly pursuit, but even getting a “great” weapon (something notably better and build-fitting than what you can just buy from the Servitor) can take an absurd amount of resources and time, or the time it takes to kit one build out can be dramatically and unnecessarily different from another. It makes experimenting with different builds or new weapons very frustrating, when you can take a month’s worth of gameplay rewards and resources and might only get one weapon that kinda fits the new thing you want to try after dumping 50k plasteel and a million ordo dockets.

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33

it’s not an RPG it’s a co-op shooter.

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Whatever it is, I’d say they sure put a lot of development into gear progression systems if they weren’t expecting people to care much about gear progression.

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35

Gameplay is still net negative enough to not recommend it.

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36

Yeah neither is “well the progression needs to be locked behind an RNG slot machine because Reasons”

Again, acting high brow and pretending people are missing the point makes you look incredibly stupid. We get what the system is and we hate it.

Dam right I want to play with the cool toys, THATS THE ENTIRE REASON THEY ARE IN THE GAME, TO BE PLAYED WITH! What is the point of putting in a bunch of blessings and have ideal combos on that are clearly supported to be combined and work together only to lock it up so you can’t actually build towards it?

It’s a bad system where the pieces entirely do not fit together.

Also “want it Now” is a funny way to say “Literally any time between 50 and 400 hours”

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37

that’s been happening since VT1, actually. there were a lot of people crying about how reds frequently weren’t objectively better than oranges when that game was active…

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I agree that VT has a big weakness in that there isn’t much to the items in terms of traits/stats/properties.

In DT the gear progression isn’t that bad when you’re leveling up a character. I started leveling up a 5th character with other friends and it’s… fine. Most of the gear is frankly irrelevant at lower levels and lower difficulties - you can use whatever.

A fundamental question, and one I was asking here over a year ago during similar discussions, is this: how long ‘should’ it take to get a weapon that meets a desired set of criteria to use in a specific build? 5 hours? 20 hours? 100 hours?

Should you have full access to everything “late game” or not?

I personally don’t care for DT’s model of a potentially never-ending grind (there’s always the possibility for something slightly better). If i could’ve been done with the DT grind by now, as I was in VT2, that would be great.

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39

As a note to this VT was well before the era where companies got it in their head that every game needed a never ending 1000+ hour grind to keep people playing before till the end of time. Even then people didn’t come back over and over because of the gear grind, they came back over and over because the game was fun, the missions were creative, and the weapons had great interactions with the enemies.

I think people who vehemently defend the item grind forget that the reason the tide games got the press they did was that it was essentially L4D with a melee focus and a really good melee system for the time.

It’s painful to see games forget their roots (Payday 3 vs 1 and 2 being a big example of this) where they stated out as essentially fun pick up and play L4D clones which evolved into a Live Service monster.

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darktide is one of the few games i can play at nausea and will come back for more.

ever since the good ol days of doom there were few coop games were you didnt even notice you were replaying it for the 1000th time for the flow of the action was so damn addicting.

as games progressed it motivated me less and less to go for yet another run and i think quake 2 was the last real “endless game” when i just went on after each playthrough.

being simple or repetitive isnt a bad thing per se and if the setting feels right and myself immersively at home i just suck in the atmosphere and enjoy the action.

that being said, any kind of “progress” will largely be lost on me, the only thing i seek for motivation is to increase performance and mastery of the game in terms of skill.
i get why its a thing nowadays and made my peace with it long ago, but guns with different “values” will never fit my idea of an immersive universe.

different barrel length, calibres and stuff like that, sure, but a ripper doing less damage being essentially the same gun? nuh-uh.

so yeah, i cuss at every bricked weapon courtesy of mommy hadron, frown when getting a useless gift at the end of the match. but at the end of every round i take a look at the clock if there’s time for “yet another”

can’t say that for many games.

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