Weapon swaps have lengthy animations that feel sluggish and unrewarding.
Vermintide 2 was a game where quick thinking and decision making was rewarded in gameplay. Weapoons had quick draw animations so they could be integrated in the fighting loop.
Darktide’s weapons have variating draw animations, some of which are insanely long (looking at you flamer with your 3 seconds draw).
It feels like in vermintide, the balance came when it was time to reload your weapon as that was an animation you had to go through to fire again.
Having to watch your character “arm” and hit your weapon every time you even want to take it out… just doesn’t feel good.
I agree that some of the animations themselves seem a little odd, such as arming the weapon each time.
But the idea of a delay to “ready” heavier weapons makes sense. It forces you to choose between lighter weapons that you can switch to whilst in the thick of it or heavier weapons that will require some breathing room.
I expect these will get tweaked a lot until they find the best spot for each weapon.
It does feel more awkward compared to Vermintide 2. I don’t understand why they’ve regressed in that regard. Weapon switching should be quick, fluid, and fun to pull off. These games are all about this rhythmic dance. Where you side step enemies, weaving your own attacks in-between, watching out for specials that may spawn during the incursion, then quickly switching weapons to deal with special units before they pose a threat to the party whilst dodging in an efficient manner. It has to be fluid to operate. It has to be quick.
If Vermintide 2 is an exquisite, exotic, dance of death than Darktide is the opposite of this.
yeah they talked about this, weapons all have weight now that influences the ready time , the swap back to melee though is still always instant.
it does make sense to me , your trying to lug out a flamer bolter or some other big heavy thing its gonna take a few seconds, but a auto pistol can be out in a heartbeat.
i guess its to help keep the smaller weapons viable options.
i can understand it feeling off after v2 , a clearer indicator of the readying phase would be nice for sure
I’m curious why having delayed weapon swap isn’t seen as skill while instant is? I get the idea of insta swapping to a bow / gun and popping a special but having to make the tactical decision of drawing your ranged weapon because you know you can’t just quick swap in the middle of a horde seems like extra skill ceiling as opposed to less.
I think the change was to make Darktide slower and more tactical and give it some weight as opposed to VT which feels floaty.
well i just meant it made sense to me , didnt mean to imply they were going for realism . i think they are just adding more variables so that weapons can be weaker in dps but still usefull. pretty clever imo
yeah in the 4 and a half years since launch they have really honed that. im sorry this is just funny. bardins dual hammers are just as good as any other pick?
cmon man , i get it you dont like this but lets keep it reasonable. just not liking haveing a wait time is a fine reason . im pretty much use to it now so it doesnt bother me but if you feel after all this time you have givent he change a fair go fair enough.
i would say some clear visual indicator like a circle doing one revolution to show the “arming” time would be nice
Rather than realism, I think the idea is specifically to avoid the situation in VT2 where you could instantly go from cutting down hordes of enemies to one-hit snapshotting a special in the distance and back to fighting in melee again without having to ever really make yourself vulnerable.
If you want to weave melee and ranged, you can use a pistol which does have near-instant swap time. The heavier, more powerful guns require more commitment, meaning you’re expected to have them ready ahead of time and rely on your teammates to protect you from melee threats while you use them.
Sounds like shlt game design, we’re supposed to be worth an army of trash warriors, so both from a lore perspective and the requirement to rely on teammates with specialized roles is both unfun and unrealisitic. A step down from Vermintide 2.
Would like to clarify: you are vulnerable when you’re in ranged. There is no ability to block incoming attacks when you switch to a ranged weapon. You have to make calculated dodges when attempting to snipe enemies. Doubly so when you’re engaging in a horde or fighting a boss and have to make quick shots. There’s a layer of complexity there which makes Vermintide stand out from most First Person Shooters. It’s very rewarding when you master this mechanic. Can pull it consistently, are able to dodge effectively, while also parrying enemy attacks in-between, on top of weaving your attacks. It’s a dance, and my god, does it feel very rewarding to perform.
Only game that has this type of snappy weapon swapping is Doom Eternal; but that game doesn’t let you simultaneously parry enemies while quickly weaving your attacks, while also side stepping.
This is in part why I strongly feel that Darktide is just another generic Left 4 Dead clone instead of a true successor to Vermintide.
think thats your problem, you seem to be expecting vermintide 3 , this is darktide 1 they are deliberately different and you can still do that dance , just not with a big gun you have to make a choice do you want flexibility or capacity?
sounds like good game design were not space amrines were low level convicts scentenced to die so from a lore perspective and the requirement to rely on teammates with specialized roles is both fun and a good choice for a CO-OP game, i dont know if its better or worse thats subjective but i do like it.
To be fair I think they are encouraging the idea of cooperation and teamplay over raw mechanical skill more in DT.
The point is you have to rely on your teammates to keep you clear from melee threats when you are trying to snipe the sniper. Your own skill, no matter how good with being able to weave between melee and ranged, is no longer enough.
You have to make sure that if you are engaging in melee that you are covering for an ally that can deal with the long ranged threat a distance away.
Darktide feels like a game where it is designed to be a lot harder to ‘carry’ and more about covering each other’s asses.
There are still ways to do it of course, a las pistol and a good sword is a general purpose and flexible toolkit that works in most situations, but obviously that isn’t as good as the dedicated specialist weapons.
nobody picks weapons based on the swap speed, they just suffer while using weapons with the long animation, I have played heresy and damnation almost exclusively since a couple of days into the preorder and you just don’t see them being used. Except the occasional ranged standoff with a group of dregs or scabs where the players engage with the enemies purely with ranged combat, the combat functions almost identically to VT2 and has the same insanely fast special timings/attacks which is very noticeable in any kind of closed quarters because the specials will spawn, give you an audio cue and attack before even a medium time animation ends.
The game was not balanced for the animations and seeing how many fundamental systems were already changed based on feedback the combat itself was barely tested, we have to stop looking at a lot of things as deliberate well thought out choices that are made to promote teamwork and start looking at them as an idea they liked and put in without properly testing it or seeing how it affects gameplay and game feel. Any design choice that makes the game feel worse while not properly encouraging the thing it’s meant to encourage(in this case the supposed teamwork) should just be removed, making you suffer through the incredibly long animations only encourages the person to go to the forums and make a post on how sluggish, unresponsive and plain bad it feels. You can see the feedback that people hate it on all platforms and it’s so annoying that you even have the Fatshark sponsored videos commenting on how it feels bad, looks bad, discourages HYBRID COMBAT DARKTIDE - The Best Boltgun in 40k History - Bolter / Chainaxe Veteran Full Gameplay - Warhammer 40k - YouTube
It’s also very janky because you’ll pull out an autogun, rack it, start Veteran’s Volley fire which makes you rack it again. This also often happens when you pull out a ranged weapon without ammo so you have to enter the rack animation and then after that you can reload.
The power of the weapon is also not balanced by the pullout animation because the plasmagun which can delete even the toughest enemies in the game insanely fast(for heresy and damnation you need a good roll though for oneshots) and is pinpoint precise(always hits the center, the reticule is a lie) has an almost instantaneous pullout animation and it doesn’t increase the weapon’s pick rate, you can rarely see it.
It’s often remarked for specials and the combat that you have to rely on your teammates to cover you and that mechanics like this are promoting teamplay but unless you’re in a gestalt psychic telepathic field with instantaneous mental communication that just doesn’t work in practice with the special, ranged enemy and regular enemy timings that are so fast on heresy+ that even in voice comms you can’t properly verbalize the threat before it attacks in closed spaces which comprise 70% of every map.
Fatshark is starting to realize this because they’ve already sped up the mk12 lasgun animation, unfortunately we’ll have to suffer this mechanic for at least a year before the overwhelming feedback starts showing real results and they remove it, making the game instantly feel much better while the weapon balancing remains exactly the same because this mechanic serves only to balance our enjoyment of the game