What would it take for you flip your "Not Recommended" rating?

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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Like many, I’ve given Darktide a “Not Recommended” on Steam. I’ve updated my review a few times as things change, but it still stands as Not Recommended.

If you have a “Not Recommended” rating on steam, what would be the minimum changes that would cause you to switch to Recommended?

My response:

When people ask me about the game, this is what I say:

There are amazing parts of Darktide. The atmosphere, combat gameplay, audio, music, environmental design, and enemies (mostly), and 40k-feel is all great. But everything surrounding that core experience is miserable and poorly designed. From crafting to resource management, gear progression, build diversity, and the insane levels of RNG, this all makes it hard to feel a sense of progress or reward for playing the game. The game doesn’t respect your time at all.

So what is the minimum that would take for me to flip the rating to Recommended?

#1 - Remove blessing & perk locks.
The crafting system is pretty bad, but the locks mean that you can never escape the compounding effects of multiple layers of RNG inherent in the crafting. Removing the locks would give players considerably more flexibility to tinker and experiment with builds and extract more value and longevity out of the content that’s already in place.

#2 - Resource sharing between characters
We already share premium currency across the account. At a minimum, let us share ordos, melk money, and crafting materials. Icing on the cake would be sharing curious too. Not having shared resources is a direct disincentive to playing multiple characters and mixing up the gameplay. Sharing resources would let players play what they want and apply the rewards of progress where they want to.

#3 - Freely pick difficulty + intensity levels for missions
The whole mission board is pretty miserable, but at a minimum just make it so that players can choose the difficulty level of the missions that are randomly rolled AND ensure that there is always a selection of both low and high intensity missions on the board. The other modifiers and secondary objectives can stay randomized, but being able to consistently pick a high intensity mission on a desired difficulty would be great (for example).

Those three things are the minimum for me. They don’t even seem like that big of an ask in my opinion, and it would do so much to open up the game space for players.

But beyond that, is there more that can and SHOULD be done to improve the game long-term? Absolutely.

We need content badly, in particular more MAPS and classes. I’d also love to see some more variable elements to mix up the missions themselves, like subtler modifiers that can some into effect, more secondary objectives. I’d love to see the reward system made more transparent for Emperor’s Gifts and better connect that with the challenges you take on during the mission. I’d love to see seasonal content actually start up, where each season has special challenges that reward cosmetics (and I’d expect FS to pair this with a set of premium cosmetics for each season too).

Ultimately, there are tons of places DT can go in terms of content and seasons/events to drive sustained engagement. But if the core is still miserable, none of that will matter in the long-run.

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All of what you said and also:

#4 Huge progress made in both client and server performance and stability.

#5 Tons of new free content, so that the game can even pretend to be worth the asking price at launch, and to make up for a launch that should never have happened, and the absurd mismanagement ever since

#6 On top of removing the locks, we must now get ‘red’ weapons or another way to increase and max stat bars. We must also get a way to earn/buy specific blessings. The RNG must be swept away in a cleansing fire. Linear progression towards goals.

#7 Blessings and Talents must become far, far more interesting and impactful and actually be able to change playstyles far more, and completely change the feel of weapons. Only very, very few blessings do this currently.

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This one is important for me as well, although I don’t know if I’d entirely hang my rating on it. But yes, I do find it ridiculous that for a given weapon there is usually 1 clearly best blessing, maybe 1-2 other very impactful blessings, and then 3-4+ blessings that are complete garbage, or broken, or just useless. Doing a serious numbers balance pass across the underperforming blessings would be amazing and help create more build options immediately.

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Removing the locks would be the bare minimum for me to be able to recommend it to people that liked Vermintide or similar games for example and like to brainlessly kill stuff.
To recommend it to “normal” casual gamers they would need to add way more content and probably need to rework the crafting and gear progression completely.
They would also need to put in like a red line into the missions or they need to connect them somehow. As it is now you’re just playing missions that feel really seperated from each other (although they all look the same) and have no connection between each other. In Vermintide the missions kinda build upon the previous missions. Sometimes the connection was really subtle but it was there.
Can’t recommend it to anyone at the moment, probably won’t be able to in the near future.

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For me, the absolute minimum to change it from negative is honestly.

#1 as you said

#8 character edits after the fact. I hate the name I choose, and being as tall as possible on one of my characters. I am not going to delete them and start over. Being able to change them after the fact is mandatory, especially when your height affects gameplay.

This would get me playing again and probably change it to at least neutral (no review)

#9 Just a lot more balance passes in general

Is another one I would add.

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well having not recommending alongside 600 hours played would be a little silly so i have it as recommended , and have done since the start , the game itself is about 95% i really only have a couple od minor issues , its all the extrinsic bolted on stuff thats bad and being old i came up before that all existed.

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There isn’t a whole lot of depth to the systems as they stand, really. There are so many blessings that wouldn’t really change a lot, even if you increased the numbers on them. And so many blessings that make no sense for the weapon they are on. So, so much need to change here.

And the ‘depth’ of the classes is truly pitiful as well. Almost laughably shallow compared to the big words they were using before launch, and before they showed the copypasta from VT2.

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For me, only content would be enough to change it into positive.

More classes, weapons, missions and maps, unlockables, something meaningful to progress.

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For me I actually temporarily turned my review Positive on Darktide after they “finished” the game. But it was returned to negative due to #3.

At this point the frustration level with the systems surrounding the increasingly stale core gameplay loop is what remains the biggest hurdle to a positive review.

My top 3 is the same but the order is different.
#1 - Freely pick difficulty + intensity levels for missions
#2 - Resource sharing between characters
#3 - Break the locks

that will net a positive review but it will NOT keep me playing this game that much longer. I was promised a live service product when I purchased and I am very open to the business model of such a live service (such as subscriptions or cosmetics store purchases or whatever) but there hasn’t been much live service. If the game wants to retain ME, as a player, and extract fat stacks of cash from my wallet then I require the following things:

#1 regular additions of new and unique feeling classes/archetypes
#2 regular additions of new weapons, especailly the 40k ones. No more plasteel axes thanks.
#3 New maps. One every other quarter wouldn’t be bad if we got new classes every quarter.
#4 New enemies with derivative and unqiue types. I am fine with more or less reskins with stat tweaks. For example more bulwarks with slightly different shields and weapons? great for added flavor. But I want new enemies too.

I think I am fairly forgiving on the whole but there are right and wrong ways to add to the game and so far the only patch that has impressed was Tools of War and that only technically got us to the 70+ weapons we were promised on launch. Retaining me as a player that will pay into the system requires new stuff. Getting a positive review from me requires delivering a non-frustrating experience around the core gameplay loop.

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Let’s start with proper apology.

Dismantling Crafting, loot, UI - burn that crap to the ground, there’s no salvaging it.

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:point_up: Either in words or action…

The lack of progression has kept me from playing the game post-Winter holidays. I don’t want to burn myself out in case they manage to fix things up.

Other than that my largest gripe is basically everything else that was missing at launch. My negative review is basically a list of those items. Class depth / the number of class choices is second on my list after crafting.

I don’t know for sure that I will flip my review vote even if they fix those things, as I don’t really feel like recommending anything from the company currently. The same goes for future purchases. I’ll probably skip the last Sienna career, despite buying all prior content (excluding cosmetics) + a few cosmetics just to support a product I thoroughly enjoyed, and it will surely take a lot for me to put any more money on Darktide. If they were to release the missing classes as paid content I’d probably quit the game again.

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I already flipped my review and recommend it on steam. Why?

Cause I have more than 1000 hours of play on this game. It means I have spent 4 euro cents per hour. I consider that they made it.

What would make me happpppppy
End of the RNG. A system where you have points by the consecrating level and that you can spend freely to decide what you pick as perk, blessing and also modifier.

But I am not stupid… it won’t happen
What I would want?
I want a crafting more easy for the casual gamers. Cause this game needs players.
I want more content (map, subclass, weapons but weapons is really not the priority).
I want bug fixes… and balance for blessings / weapons.

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Removal of locks, ability to upgrade stats on equipment, map selection.

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Haven’t even bought it, due to the RNG crafting and map choice.

Vermintide forums have had about 1000 threads about wanting to choose our own difficulty and deed modifiers for years.

Darktide devs: “Lets make it so you can’t even play the map you want to play on the difficulty you want to play it on.”

Crafting shouldn’t be as extremely RNG due to it’s impact on gameplay.

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Memorialized you.

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At this point probably nothing could ever make me recommend anyone to ever buy anything from FatShark. They have shown themselves to be a company of the absolute worst kind, who are incapable of telling the truth even when it’s in their best interest to do so. Their default is to lie, to the point that they lie when it actively hurts them to lie, nevermind when there is nothing to be gained from lying.

No one should ever buy anything from them ever again.

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Ok, after the comm link. A rimjob would be needed too.

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I will never change my review, even if they hugely improve the game, it will serve as a little time capsule for (what you’d hope would be) the game’s lowest point.

What would take for me to play the game again, would be to make the crafting system something resembling a serviceable system that isn’t completely hostile to players, like removing the locks and allowing players to upgrade weapon stats/modifiers. There would still be other, fairly major issues of course, like the godawful mission selection system, but I could grit my teeth, grumble, and tolerate them enough to play.

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  1. Big improvements to performance and stability (STILL can’t reliably get into the hub or missions six months into a non-early access game)
  2. More content (maps, classes, non-premium cosmetics, weapons, enemies)
  3. Complete overhaul of most Mourningstar systems to reduce RNG, item cost, and overall respect the players’ time more
  4. Fix crafting I guess (idk I don’t even interact with it anymore)
  5. Hold an uprising against whoever is doubling down on said Mourningstar systems and abandon the Live Service model (literally put my head in my hands for a moment when I saw one of the new maps was locked behind a community goal. Do they really think their average 3,000-something players will hit that goal any time soon?)

Overall I’m just drained from thinking about this game and will probably uninstall for a while, I don’t think I’m even gonna try the new update. Good luck, FS, you’re gonna need it.

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Fatshark deserves every negative review and comment. They worked hard to become one of the worst game developers in recent history.

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