the concept of a main hub where youre able to interact with other random players and visit multiple shops, like destinys tower, is appealing. but it just doesnt work for these tide games, especially not darktide. it adds bloat, it isnt fun to traverse and it doesnt incentivize socialization
for comparison, we have v2s horn keep. it was pretty large for its purpose as a main hub, but at least you were in a gameplay state. you could swing your weapons, shoot your ranged, jump, equip and use items, etc. it made it more engaging to interact with by default. there was also a shooting range that didnt require an additional loading screen, hotkeys for every important vendor/station, a “platforming” section that led to the top of the tower, secret passages, and even little abodes of the main cast. it felt like it was actually designed for you and your useless party to hang out between missions. additionally, v2 was a significantly better running game, which diminished the bloat that the keep added
currently however we have the morningstar. we cant interact with anything that isnt a vendor or the inspect tab on players. we cannot do anything movement or gameplay wise except break into a slight jog. vendors are inconvenient to get to, and none of them i care to interact with on a character level besides hadron because shes my wife.
it takes forever to load a character into and run to the other side if you just want to play a mission. this time is doubled if you want to change characters. this bloat also detracts from the social experience the morningstar is intended to deliver, not like theres much to it anyway. all we can do for socialization are some fortnite 2017 tier emotes. there isnt even a ball to kick around with other players
the recent addition of the inspect player tab only in the morningstar makes me think that fatshark thinks that we care about anything outside of the vendors or the missions themselves if the main hub isnt at the very least interesting. we dont. and if you do, then please explain in excrutiating detail why
I remember thinking a while back, that if there was some kind of FOB (forward operating base), that was a bit more like VT2 keep, on Atoma itself, I’d rarely go back to Mourningstar. Heck, I’d rather just bounce from mission to mission most of the time.
Not that its restricted to the Mourningstar, but I do like the ambience up there.
There are a lot of times where I think of how much better the quality of life in the game would be if the UI we have to use was better. Without the morningstar I think the main UI of the hub would be complained about far more since that is all you would see.
I think the big issue is that the morning star lacks life and a reason to go back there. Payday 2 kind of has the same problem with the safe house after a while, it looks cool but feels extremely static in nature.
We really need something akin to the DRG rig (it doesn’t need to be too silly but just a general idea). I already contributed to a theead about the bar here: Hub Idea: Pub - #2 by Rocker_Fox
It would be fitting to have maybe a chapel area for zealots to hold prayer or even just access to the launch bay down below. I think even having a personal quarters which has stuff with all your characters would be nice. Have it start out as 4 basic cells and as you progress they get more filled out as you get more achievements complete / finish parts of the story.
As it stands it feels very MMO hub which is not a compliment at all.
I wish the hub was like the one in the Outlast Trials. In that game you have your own room which is fully customizable and you can see everyone else’s room who’s in the hub with you. Also you can arm wrestle anyone, we need something similar
y’all missing the actual problem. in the vermintide games the hub was useful because, importantly, the people in the hub with you were the people you were doing the runs with. darktide uses a matchmaker that throws you into random groups unrelated to the hub area making interacting with the people in the hub useless for any purpose but trolling, and trolling is pointless in this game because everyone’s too busy being mad about not liking the RNG to care about a troll.
the mechanics of darktide have rendered the hub irrelevant to the gameplay experience and it’s basically a solo area that happens to have random strangers in it you have no reason to interact with. but someone at fatshark (or more likely their backers are tencent) have concluded it’s supposed to drive MTX sales. well joke’s on them i only notice paid cosmetics when i want to insult a player.
Thanks for posting! Couldn’t agree more. The Mourningstar is just a grimdark strip mall at the moment and when you’re there you’ll be back and forth between the two vendors that make up the atrocious crafting system 90% of the time anyway. There are no game mechanics in place to encourage users to be in the Mourningstar for anything other than the bare minimum Psykanium and RNG lever pulls.
It’s supposedly the command center for a campaign against Nurgle’s cultists but you wouldn’t know it! They should try to add fresh mechanics that make the war effort feel active and alive. If there’s a place to get a sense of the impact your efforts have had its the mourningstar. If done right it could also inform crafting system improvements and make payed cosmetics more appealing since players will be able to strut around in view of other players.
There’s just a whole layer of game missing that would make the Mourningstar valuable.
I installed the hub hotkeys mod and haven’t actually cared about anything Mourningstar related for months, besides maybe aimlessly running around waiting for team mates to get ready.
Definitely seems like a hold over from a far different version of Darktide than the one we got.
“But who will buy our costumes if they cant see themselves strut in 3rd person?”
I’m just sad they used dev time for this obnoxious, resource hogging and time-wasting piece of trash. Let’s not forget the socials screen was broken for 6 months (arguably still is) so think of the priorities.
Imagine if we had matchmaking and a menu where you could coordinate builds, form teams based on builds.
What bugs me is that we could have something akin to the VT2 keep or the bar. Honestly at this point I would take the bar since it would add a lot to both the world and the gameplay.
I installed a mod that permit to access from the character selection screen to all vendors…
Yeah, I love the Morningstar… what can we do in it? nothing…
Does it matter? absolute no
Is it important for them? surely… but not for me… I see that as a loss of time
I remember telling my friend when we were playing Destiny 2 that if the entire Tower (Morningstar in this case) was a menu with a splash art background with all the buttons to access the vendors/screens I needed in one place, I’d be happy. I don’t care about the lore implications of this central hub, I want the convenience of being able to access the shop without having to move just by pressing a button.
My only gripe with Taal’s Horn Keep is that you have to walk to the Bridge of Shadows to leave for a mission, why can’t I just ready up and start the countdown without having to stand in the circle!
Nobody felt any kind of immersion seeing the Mourningstar NPCs in the new Traitor’s Curse cinematic?
I thought that was baaaadass! And I really like the flavor of the comms chatter. Not sure where else we’d get something like that.
I think the hub has potential. It’s mostly soulless right now, and I think that’s likely down to technical (16 player limit) and development/priority issues.
Even Taal’s Horn Keep in VT2 was a bit of QoL regression from VT1’s Red Moon Inn, with how spread out things in the hub were and the Bridge of Shadows circle, but mainly in that in VT1 you could choose to retry the map, go to the next map or a random map in the end screen, saving a load back to the hub.
I might have read the names in the obnoxius radio chatter (that I muted as soon as I learned of the existence of a mod to do that) but I could not tell you why I should care for any of them.
I know one of them is called Zola but just because it’s the abbreviation of gorgonzola (a soft cheese) in Italian.
I’m not one to care for the lore of multiplayer games.
If I could manage everything from the character screen I probably would. Yeah there are probably mods for that, but its just to highlight my point that I don’t really care about the hub area. Its only there for me to waste my time running from point a to b.
Fatshark also seems to be adding features into hub area that I really don’t think matter at all, like I’m not going to inspect a random dude in mourningstar, I might inspect someone who is going into a run with me to see what he’s rocking. Then there is emotes which I’ve probably never used.
I don’t know the names of the folks around the mission terminal, but I recognized them immediately.
The radio chatter is great imo. It’s character building for the true heroes of the Darktide story (which is starting to be fleshed out more in-mission, as demonstrated by the new Mercantile radio chatter).
If you don’t care about lore, why even bother responding to my points specifically about lore/immersion?
I think what doesn’t get brought up about the DRG space rig enough is that it’s tightly packed. Everything that is needed to start the mission is right there, you practically bump your shoulders into an important terminal just by turning around.
Same with the Warframe Orbiter, even then the orbiter has a menu for quick access.
When I say “MMO Hub” one of the big factors of that is how everything is spread out. While it’s gotten better it badly needs the hotkey mod as a default feature.