Obviously i do speak for myself in the first place. But we have a reality where arena shooters are dead, and almost all games with no ranking system or any kind of progression aswell. Not like it happened suddenly in a year 2012 by someone’s evil will or smthg. It was an organic evolution.
And it’s much longer when you can farm lvls, weapons, cosmetics. Progression is a fun multiplier, because chasing things and feeling of acomplishment is a regular pattern of human psycology. Even “skill growth” in it’s core is a chase mechanism.
While balance still needs work its at its best right now. This is my viewpoint from someone who plays Auric Maels much of the time now but still dabbles in Heresy and Damnation when friends come on, also remember this is my personal experience, ppl can disagree but its my view and experience :
We have large hordes but not totally insane armour spam.
Most weapons are in a better place regarding balance (most).
Aurics have timed hordes.
No crafting blocks.
Bunch of new weapons and a new enemy (we do need more).
New class which rocks (perhaps a little too much tbh)
Mortis Trials, which I enjoy from time to time.
Im not keen on Havoc due to the demotion system which means pubs are a mess but… its like a vanilla Cata3 Deathwish mode that many people had hoped for in V2. Im glad we have Havoc and I hope they remove demotion or add quickplay.
Sound ques are mostly sorted. For me.
Game runs great for me, is mostly stable now. For me.
There is more that I probably forget but right now Im enjoying Darktide more than ever. I even prefer it over Vermintide 2!
There are many things that still need improvement but Im confident that Fatshark will eventually get there.
I still hate the FOMO store more than anything in the entire game
Tbh if the enemies in Auric gave out a higher dmg and this became more threatening then I’d be spending much more time in auric than in havoc and would likely have a similar outlook.
But auric is too easy now (imo) compared to auric of old, so I am forced to use the horrid havoc terminal.
And even if current havoc modifiers are THE PITS…they’re still not hounds or snipers for the billionth time and right now I’ll take anything (anything) so long as it’s something different.
I really do hope we get more permanent modifiers and more difficulty on the normal board. I miss all the maps not on havoc rotation
I’m not sure there’s been a “Best” time in Darktide. There’s a lot of change, some good, some bad.
I really preferred the older, original talents before Patch 13. I don’t like the trees, I think they’re overcomplicated messes that are more about the illusion of choice and progression than they actually are, that 99% of the playerbase are not actually equipped to properly understand (because there’s a gazillion mechanics in this game, and practically none of them are explained at all within the game itself, and even outside the game aren’t necessarily particularly intuitive). I really wish they’d stuck with the older iteration, trees feel like something a senior dev hamfisted in after playing Path of Exile without really questioning whether they fit a different genre.
With regards to enemies, I wish the game was closer to earlier iterations, with fewer but more menacing Elites/Specials, instead of just vomiting a dozen ragers and shotgunners and clown cars of Bulwarks into rooms.
By contrast, the crafting system until the last year or so was so bad it was an active bleeding drag on the game’s ability to sustain itself and generate a playerbase. I still think itemization and weapon stats and blessings and the like are painfully overcomplicated and under-explained, but the situation is infinitely better now. If I had to draw a line and say “Darktide was best when”, it would probably have to be when this patch come out or sometime after.
Likewise, a broader array of the game’s weapons are viable now than they were before, even if not perfect. I don’t miss having Autoguns visibly modeled with quad-stack magazines that should hold 50/60 rounds actually having capacities measured in the mid-low 20s or even teens.
well, aint “farming” nothing and still play doom after 31 years so
some people wanna see numbers go up, suit yourself but good gameplay is timeless.
arena shooters vanished cause people got used to easier gratification instead of getting roflstomped 100:0 by a very few longtime players 24/7
they showed a very concentrated mirror of one’s abilities with little to no room for errors, hence not appealing to the masses.
still it aint hard to find a match in quake live or champions, just don’t expect any win for the foreseeable future unless you’re a real prodigy.
but that aint the point, I’d play darktide if it was one guardsman with weapons 1-7 and the maps lined up like a pearl necklace cause the gameplay loop is great is what i’m saying.
Good gameplay isn’t timeless, not since most games migrated to dedicated servers. There are plenty of games with good gameplay and most of those have a satisfying progression system or hell, even multiple progression systems to keep the players engaged beyond the honeymoon phase. If you remove progression from Darktide you go back to pre-crafting and pre-talent tree Darktide that had an average of 2k players and was losing 10% of that playerbase every month. No progression = no playerbase = no money to pay for the servers = no game
You still have tones of games where roflstomp is a thing, sometimes or most time via smurfing, but still. Some modern PvP games are still fast paced and more complicated aswell as skill demanding. Like The Finals or Deadlock i mentioned, yet they are popular.
Sure and some others aswell. But that’s not gonna be enough to sustain content delivery flow.
Online bottom in DT always were 3-5k online when there was 0 content. Even now after crafting fixed, arbites droped it’s what we have.
That’s the ammount of players you can expect enjoying killing the same mobs in the same corridors over and over. But if you want new maps, new enemies, mechanics etc. you need to satysfy the market. It’s just the reality.
besides this wasn’t referred to darktide exclusively but plenty games from late 90s early 2000s still getting played by dedicated fans, no such things as
hence timeless.
if I’m still kicking by then I can play quake 2 in 2070 if I do want so.
and likewise I’ll enjoy it as I was in 97, more or less depending on the physical condition
that’s the thing, people got used to constant belly rubs and are bamboozled when there’s no new carrot dangling in front of their faces.
didnt say I would, quite the contrary if I had a say there’d be no perks or blessings just weapons as different tools for the job, plain and simple.
which is about the base that sticks around for the game itself and not some seasonal circus around it.
see the numbers drop after each patch, even when a new class came around.
most players are mindless consumers without real dedication and jump ship when it’s opportune.
from a players perspective apart from the sustainability, nothing of value was lost.
emprah knows with 2k able players you had better matches than with 10k
wouldn’t mind host a server at my costs myself in the future to keep a small but dependable playerbase myself.
heck, even got a good spare rig I use for the odd conan exiles server so no biggie there.
of course, fatshark doesn’t support that business model (yet) so sadly we depend on player numbers when we should bask in player quality
from a certain perspective I can understand why, but each of those “new games” (disclaimer I dont like the"champions” of the latest quake myself) offer the “excuse” of classes, loadouts etc and seem “team heavy” when quake 3 of old was 1 on 1 with identical characters and weaponry, so no “hiding” behind traits, loadouts or the effort of others
of course there’s TDM and CTF but the real event was to see who was god at the time, one dude ruling supreme and owning the competition.
again, I’d rather pay x€ a month for a server with 3k quality people than chase 20k tourists that vanish in a month anyways when the “new content” aint new no more and are to play with.
if that means 5 min more wait time in the queue, so be it
Did you ever play Tribes Ascend? That was an exceptional example of simple but gloriously addictive gameplay. And FTP too! I got a lot of mileage for zero cost out of that. hover-skating around the map and shooting and flying through the sky at twitchy breakneck speeds was sooooo much fun.
all of the slap/punch eras when it worked on more than just the puny warp-bound human marionettes. especially when you had to actually set it up and time it properly or the boss would recover from the slap humiliation and probably grab. then they overbuffed it and then they removed it. power maul buff does this again but its not nearly as funny as slapping spawn in his tentacle face. just the SFX of the slap noise hitting weakpoint coupled with the sad ‘durr’ of the staggered spawn was an experience in itself.
I cannot get over the real brutal momentum tac axes on zealot. Always trying to mimic that shredder feel, once I even had some speed bug and shreddered at the speed of light. Currently I am leveling an arbi to get that juicy 150% cleave and that actually seems to be able to scratch that itch (lvl 17). Let’s see how this feels at max level in havoc.
Other than that I still enjoy Darktide the same since the day I was hooked.
You can always nerf yourself for a challenge. Remove skillpoints, use non meta weapons or even weapons you dislike and skills you dislike. Go something completely obtuse, use a shredder with heavy sword on psyker or something, just for example.
I did actually give it a go with shield and maul today as that’s something I used to hate using so haven’t touched it in well over a year. It was surprisingly good and breezed through the AM level until a teammate exploded a barrel right next to us and sent 3 of us straight off a ledge simultaneously lol.
It would feel a bit unfair to teammates if I started going in without blessings etc…dunno. Could try it I guess.
As someone who’s been playing since the game’s “launch” a few years ago, this game has never been as much of a mainstay as it is for me now. I don’t have a problem recommending this game to someone when they ask now. Compared to before when crafting and building the skill trees were in my opinion, in outright unacceptable states.
I’ve always loved the gameplay, but those issues above used to cast a huge shadow over that for me. Any time they would put out an update, it was always “cool but when is crafting going to be in an acceptable state?” and then I’d go back to playing other games.
Now I feel the game has a good baseline, though I am disappointed by their approach to the game since the crafting update. I would’ve thought they would ramp up the number of maps they put out. Remember when they said the maps we have are intentionally more cookie-cutter so they could crank them out faster in the future?
I don’t care for Havoc, but it uses the same maps as the main mission board, so to me it isn’t difficult to justify its existence. From what I’ve seen people say, apparently VT2 has a similarly polarizing game mode called “weaves”, so its par for the course in my eyes. Mortis Trials was a misstep, because now it appears they have to choose between making a map for the main modes or for MT, not ideal for the current update schedule.
Most of the issues we have today are more typical of an online game, though they are still perfectly valid. Rough balance, and a stale meta both can be resolved so long as they keep hitting their quarterly update schedule. I’ll only really be worried the first time they skip a quarter.
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to play with.
