I normally don’t like to make fusses about things, I’m usually a very passive player which can be both a crippling weakness but also a niche strength. But to this end, I feel that I must speak about something with the delusion that it’ll reach Fatshark, but still do it just to say that I did it.
It has basically been an entire year since Fatshark said “yes and yes” to playing solo with bots on release, and absolutely nothing has come of it. As someone who has enjoyed Vermintide 2 and the capability it offers to go at your own pace with your own team (of your own design), it’s disappointing to not see the same thing mirrored in what is effectively a sibling game.
Obviously Fatshark had to prioritize more critical changes, things like progression, crafting have all been big issues since launch and the fact that they have been fixed to a much better state is much appreciated. But given how they just launched the Traitor Curse and topped it off with the Orthus Offensive, it doesn’t seem too far-fetched to believe solo play is something they can give us.
Again, I usually try not to make a fuss about things; and I understand that Darktide has a multiplayer focus, but it is basically Vermintide with a 40k paintjob, so it doesn’t make sense why they both can’t share core functions.
But in any case, I know Fatshark has a lot on their plate; but I just simply hope that solo mode is apart of their plate instead of tossed into the proverbial compost bin.
i think you’re crazy. like flat-out, i think you deluded yourself into misreading something. they never had plans for single player, they just let bots fill the slots and if you’re really picky you go to private mode and hope your friends don’t join you.
PLAYING SOLO WITH BOTS & PRIVATE LOBBIES, A NOTE FROM THE TEAM:
We hope you’re enjoying your time in Tertium during the Pre-Order beta. We’ve been thrilled to see your excitement and reactions to Darktide. We’ve been hard at work gathering your feedback and bug reports while working on future patches to update stability & performance, balance adjustments, and squash out the bugs. That said, we’d like to take time to address a recurring couple of questions with you.
With Darktide, we set to work on a much-requested feature from the previous tide games: Dedicated Servers. We put considerable effort into engineering new technologies that would allow us to run dedicated servers at scale and run the huge hordes of our “Tide” games you have come to know and love. Dedicated Servers were a priority for us, and due to the Network Scale Test and Closed Beta, we were able to fully battle-test our dedicated servers (a special thank you to all who participated!).
Now we are confident in our Dedicated Servers, we would like to take the time and answer those recurring couple of questions that remain; “Can I play Darktide solo?”, “Can I play a private game with one or two of my friends?”.
The answers will be Yes, and Yes.
We’ve been working on an option to play exclusively in Solo Mode, where you will be hosting locally your own instance with bots. Because you will be hosting the AI and other game systems locally, this will increase performance cost. However, we continue to monitor and improve the performance where we can. Solo play is in its final stages of testing as we fix the last issues that remain. We aim to release this at Launch. If not, a patch shortly after that in December.
We have recently begun implementing Private Games as an option, and we’re in the middle stages of development for this. When launched, you can start a private game with 2-4 of your friends. We expect to be able to release this later in December.
We heard your feedback on these topics and needed some time to investigate the solutions we had available to us. We hope you enjoy these features when released and welcome further input on them.
Yep, I have like 2 private game penances I’d like to get. I don’t want to organize a group for it, when I could just do it with bots. But I can’t, because you can’t play a solo private game XD
it really isnt, i think your greatly underestimating how more complex a bot in DT would be .
But im sure Solo is pretty much where it was a year ago.
there are still key tier 1 issues like the soundscape that need heavy work, im sure a crafting do over is part of the future , though i do suspect that will be tied in with an expansion/dlc/big feature patch.
and as much as some people do dearly want solo and the devs im sure want to deliver it, it simply isnt an issue for the core and it is also a counter productive thing to add. as its going to be a bit of a playerbase split.
I’d take this post at face value if it wasn’t for the fact that the bots behave at much lower level than the ones in VT2. They don’t even have abilities, or the the capacity to pick up items to give to the player.
I have no doubt coding them to properly use medipacks would be harder to impossible to get perfect, but how hard is it to make a Zealot bot that uses CoSF whenever it gets surrounded? Same with a VoC Vet? Can’t be that hard since that’s how Merc Kruber bot worked, and he was great. My MvP bot really.
So much of it would be very easily doable with them doing a bit more damage (like 33% more they’d still be doing maybe 50% of a players damage between the 3 of them together), getting additional % toughness on any kill they get to make up for their incredibly low kill count (like triple), and one safe ability that is super easy to use like the ones I mentioned.
Would it be on par with the fully configurable bots from VT2? No. It would mean that they tried to actually make good on what they promised though as opposed to the nothing we currently have.
Whereas I agree Solo mode with Bots should be a capability in DT (and does exist albeit briefly in many cases) I doubt FS ever intends to provide it, though I’d like to be wrong. My impression lately is that FS has likely been reducing Servers. Providing support for more simultaneous missions by supporting solo missions would require more servers.
Increasing issues with server errors/delays, occasionally displaying a queue countdown, and apparently stealth changes to the Block List quantity (I’ve recently noticed that I no longer have a max amount of 50 blocks, I have to delete a person before I can add a person - current max is 39 after deleting some older ones to make room for quick adds, and then discovering I no longer have 50 slots). This all adds up to stealth server reductions to me, I assume to save money. Not a good trend.
But if you don’t mind not having full human player team support I believe FS could easily support solo mode with bots if they chose to do so. But I don’t believe they want to, or likely will. Certainly not if they are reducing server count.
Doesn’t have to be perfect as I‘d be happy enough if they picked up what I pinged and threw medpack/ammo crate once I call for healing/ammo via radial menu. I don’t need bots to judge complex tactical situations.
Unless you made it locally hosted (in best case even offline) - this is what SoloMod is doing and playing without input and hitreg lag is a blast!
Heck, if you can’t get the bots to be like players, just do what Payday 2 did and give bots ridiculous buffs to make up for it! Make them super tanky, make them unable to be interrupted on revive, something.
At the bare minimum they could make the bots work like they do in Vermintide 2 where they at least inherent the equipment from your other characters even if it’s limited to a vet or zealot bot.
Sure they have moments where they can oddly hold their own but it would be nice if they didn’t have base HP and weapons, at least having a level approximate power level weapon and several hp / toughness curios to compensate.
Last official word I’m aware of was that solo hasn’t been released because it’s not where they want it to be (I assume a matter of either UI or something to do with the crappy AI).
To answer your question. Fatshark has a -sketchy- definition of ‘truth’ and ‘promises’. Imagine it like this:
“Sure we promised it a year ago but that was only true then. The truth has changed and we’re not working on it anymore. We haven’t lied or broken any promises”
they mentioned, that they want bots to be placeholders, not alternatives to players.
ngl i find it utterly wierd to buy a coop game to play it solo, but there HAS to be a middleground
they are a complete failure as they are implemented.
