This post started off as a Youtube comment that I intended to leave under the trailer for the new Patch, but I’ve decided to rewrite it and post it on the forums instead as it felt more appropriate to do so. The two complaints in question are Fatshark ignoring the existance of solo players and the mission board limiting player agency.
While it mostly feels like Patch #9 is another step in the right direction for the game I don’t like the fact that some of the penances require you to go into a private game to complete them. This will really screw over solo players as we still don’t have a way to launch a private game on our own. I understand that the developers at Fatshark want to primarily focus on group play since this IS a coop game all things considered, but locking people that don’t have dedicated groups to play with out of unlocking certain rewards feels really unfair and it’s gonna affect the health of the game in the long run.
Until Darktide becomes easier to get into as a solo player I’ll have serious trouble recommending it to anyone over Vermintide, and it’s a shame since this is my main game at the moment and I’m absolutely in love with it. My suggestion for improving the solo player experience would be to let us launch private games on our own, remove the bots from the game entirely and make it so that the coherency bonuses scale with the amount of players that are currently in the game. The latter would also help out a lot when queuing into quickplay lobbies with less than four players. To give an example on how this would look like in practice if there’s only two players on the server and they’re maintaining coherency with each other they get the same amount of toughness regen as a four man team would. If there’s only one player on the server they constantly get toughness regen from coherency until someone joins the game. Reworking the coherency system in such a way would remove many of the complaints that the playerbase has regarding the bot AI and the lack of a True Solo type of gamemode. Playing solo without bots would make facing disablers truly dangerous as there wouldn’t be anyone there to help you in case you get grabbed, but that’s the main reason why True Solo runs were so popular and satisfying to run in Vermintide, and if a player joins an empty server they can still try to requeue to find a full squad if they’re not confident in their ability to start a match on their own.
Other than that the current mission board system either needs to be completely changed or improved upon. I’ve seen countless complaints about how people log into the game to check if there’s any good missions available, they see a bunch of maps with low intensity modifiers and they log back out to play something else. I’ve experienced this myself a couple of times, and I have to agree that it’s really disappointing when you check the mission board and neither of the available Damnation maps are to mine or my friends liking. My suggestion for resolving this problem would be to combine the map system from Vermintide with the current mission board system in Darktide, while making all of the mission board maps more difficult and rewarding at the same time. Let us choose whichever map, gamemode and modifier we want to play through a separate menu on the mission board UI while making the limited time missions give better rewards (like extra materials or weapons that are guaranteed to have a high stat roll or Tier 4 Blessings if there’s a difficult event tied to them), and have more crazy modifier combinations (like HI-STG with Hounds and extra sniper spawns at the same time, something truly ridiculous). You could also make it so that books are only gonna be available on the limited time missions to avoid having your players farm the same map over and over again, but in that case the limit of book missions available at the same time should also be increased and they shouldn’t have those crazy modifier combos tied to them to make farming weeklies something that you can chill with. Bonus points if the limited time missions are all tied to difficulties higher than malice.
Lastly, to end this post on a positive note, I want to thank you for sticking to your promises from the open letter you gave us a while back. Each update so far brought big improvements to Darktide and it is truly admirable that a modern game company is willing to stick to their product after a bad launch and bring it up to speed. This game is going to be a masterpiece one day, and I cannot wait for that day to come.