Basically weekly contracts and hourly armory shop.
This week I got contracts like “finish 25 missions”, “retrieve 25 scriptures”, “retrieve 12 grimoires” across my 2 lvl 30 classes, and almost all my playtime this week were running contracts, which, to put it nicely, wasn’t fun.
I had plans for my other 2 classes as well, but in this state I doubt there’ll be time to spare.
As for the armory, I know I’m definitely not the only one complaining. Having players to constantly online just to check shop restock, even mobile games these days know better.
I know there’ll be people saying me being a slave to the game, and you’ll be right.
But the fact is, there is no further progression after you hit lvl 30. So if you want to get better gears, these are the only 2 viable options.
I rather weeklies be shared, as well as the reward, across all the classes but the current Fatshark doesn’t look like that’d be something they’d want. They don’t want you to have fun in Darktide, only get you hooked enough that you start buying stuff from the premium store.
The weeklies would be fine if they didn’t have that massive lump sum at the end and were more individually rewarding. That completion bonus is so toxic.
It’s not just those weeklies, the game is lacking late game content in general. The only things you can do is grinding for better items, that’ll actually add nothing to your gameplay or going for challenges, and there are just so few and some of em are super tedious to set up, esp if you do not have 3 friends to play with… When I started the game I thought the level 30 grind was just a nessesary evil and once I’m geared up the real fun begins as in Vermintide, but Darktide has actually nothing to offer once you hit 30. You cant even farm for shiny blue glowing weapon skins… neither do you have some grindy challenges for hats or some achievements for completing the highest difficulty. Not saying those are the best solutions for keeping the game going but it was actually something that gave me an incentive to keep playing V2…
The way weekly contracts and the entire mission rotation works, is a huge c@ncer.
(I still was hoping this would be a nice mechanic but after 70 hours in the game including beta, i have to say, this is a very bad design)
The issue with mission rotation is that you can almost NEVER play the mission YOU want on a level YOU want.
Plus since the contracts are not shared across your characters, you always have to switch between characters to get them done.
Why wasn’t it good in the way it was done in Vermintide? I can’t understand why they changed it.
For the mission rotation i have a very good solution for the devs.
Just look how Ghost ship games did it in Deep Rock galactic. Only the general Zones/bioms are on a fairly short rotation timer. Within them, you can find every kind of mission and you can start them on the level you want. But this current system in Darktide is just stupid.
And what should be shared across characters:
Weekly contract progress
Currency from the contracts
Crafting materials
There should be a shared stash/inventoryfor weapons
Weekly contracts feels more like a chore rather than something fun to do. In Vermintide 2 you could easly complete them while playing with different characters and having fun not thinking much about it. Now, if I want to play two characters, I should complete 50 missions, 24 grimoires… no enough time for that.
And honestly, I expected better rewards for that. Like, don’t know… cosmetics like in Vermintide? Now it is just RNGd weapons and RNG dayly weapons with RNG stats (but hey, they are better than the other shop)
Why wasn’t it good in the way it was done in Vermintide? I can’t understand why they changed it.
I think it’s related to Darktide using Dedicated Sever instead of P2P.
I’m a programmer myself and from what I understand a match in Darktide could be very demanding in server resources.
Having a limited map pool makes it easier for players to join existing sessions, therefore making better use of constraint server resources.
imo it’s a sacrifice has to be made in some way so I can tolerate for now.
I’m not sure if it’s the same for the armory, but I think they should at least implement some level of player agency instead of pure RNG hell, like having per-player “preference” so some weapon will show up more frequently if the player choose to.
A duct-tape solution of course, but might be a fair one if they aren’t ready for breaking changes to the system.
Dedicated servers are not worth limited choice in missions that I can run and lack of modding imo. I’d much, much rather have the janky P2P if it meant I could have modding back (to fix the jank that Fatshark can’t catch or is too low priority for them but critical for me) and be able to choose what map and what difficulty I want to play.