Why i am against choosable missions and conditions, but only difficulties

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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I dont want FS make missions and conditions freely choosable.
But this said, i’m not against choosing difficulty.
I really dont want some maps beeing orphaned and almost nobody will choose them, because they aren’t worth the time and effort or are disliked by lots of players, but not all players.
The few who like the exceptions wouldn’t find enough players for the missions/ maps they like and the quick plays will become more and more stale, because it will be the same maps over and over.

I’m also thinking about the backstory we have that is Terrium beeing attacked and overrun by Nurgles plagues.
Its not us who can say lets go here and there and fight under the conditions we like, but the NPC’s like Masozi, Morrow, Hadron, Zola, Rannick and overall Inquisitor Grendyl who tell us where we are needed and can apply to a mission and what conditions we will encounter.

But the difficulty should be then choosable to everyones favor and likings.
I think this would be the best for long term variance for casual and hardcore players alike.

edit: I want to add that the random Missionboard should allways have every missiontype available and that weekly contracts that ask to do specific secondary objects need to be overworked/ adjusted, so that they are allways possible to do.

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Sorry but this doesnt makes too much sense to me. By increasing more available missions on specific diff, you are practically giving players oportunity to not play certain missions anyway.

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Nah sorry not being able to choose which maps to play is just awful.
I just cant see it work. Do you know a game where this actually works?
I dont even know a game which does that :sweat_smile:

All I can think of are things like dungeons you can only complete once a week but even in this instance the player is free to choose when he plays this dungeons.

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Actually… Deep Rock Galactic does this. And it works. But DRG has proc. gen. map making and lot more of objectives and biomes variety.

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i see your point and you are right.
Well i then would even say scrap choosable difficulty in favor of no misison min-maxing.
In other words leave it as it is.

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Chivalry 2

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hm true maybe we need just more maps and content in general to make that work.

but correct me if I m wrong in chiv2 you actually choose the game mode if I remember correctly?
wasnt there something like the huge siege thingy and another arena type of thing?

In Darktide this would mean you can choose the objective kind which would be nearly equal to map selection? Its hard to compare even though chiv2 is a game that does restrict map selection. : )

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I wouldnt really care about “orphaning” missions. After hundreds of hours playing this game, you will welcome any change, and thus forcing you to play every mission, at least from time to time. V2 is living proof of that. It also features more popular and less popular maps. But i kept seeing all of them at 2000h hour of my play time.

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DRG does this the right way imho. First of all, you can basically always choose each mission type, just not in every biome. Secondly, the semi-RNG nature of the mission generation results in enough variety that you will be, generally speaking, always be able to play something you like. There is a very solid variety of different modifiers, loadouts, biomes, mission types and sudden map-events like the machines or the seasonal stuff (rivals, meteors) that the semi-limit on mission selection just feels very natural. There is a reasonable lore-wise explanation as to why certain areas of Hoxxes are not available temporarily (the planet’s rotation), which gives you enough plausable immersion that your potential disbelief gets suspended.

Most importantly, however: You can always, ALWAYS select the difficulty. It also gives you a very organic incentive do play different missions via the weeklies, without pressuring you to do it too much. A mission for your weekly is with a modifier you don’t like (I’m looking at you, “Low Oxygen”)? Play a different mission, in the meantime, the rotation will have it switched up to something that might be more to your liking.

DRG is not only probably the best 4-player-coop gamer on the market, it is also a very good example on how to handle EA and a live-service. The game still has some rough edges and some of the design choices are somewhere between questionable (a few) to plain bad (only a handful), but when you compare it directly to DT, you can easily see why DT fails on this front. Not enough variety, not enough missions to select, missions not only feel similar, they take place on the same half a dozen of maps that almost all look alike, there is, basically, just 3.5 different “final events” (hack stuff, destroy demon, assasination, and the half event is “carry ammo”, since it is underused).

Not only has DT alot less variety than DRG. Play DRG back to back with a round of DT and you’ll notice immediately how EVERYTHING in DT is built around you spending time in the game needlessly, to stretch out your presence and disrespect your time, in order to get you to spend money on Aquilas. DRG does not do that. At all.

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Arena only was choosable in the very beginning and had some in the Serverbrwoser, but not anymore afaik, havent played much since BP. choosable modes are only 1v1 or 3v3 and the regular battles on the TO and TDM Maps.
Server Browser gives you FFA and Duels also, but you cant choose Maps really.

regarding DT i agree that it will improve with having more maps and conditions over time.

I remember some short experience with VT1 and everybody was only speedrunning 1-2 Maps and everything else was orphaned. It made me quit the game in less than 20 hours, because i couldnt experience the full game without having only bots.
When i knew VT2 was almost the same, i didnt even bother to buy it.

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No, Op has this one right, if you could pick all missions and conditions there is a real possibility that it would be effectively impossible to get fully populated games going on less popular maps and conditions as everyone swarms the most popular ones ad nauseum.

This is especially the case as the condition and mission pool grows.

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What backstory? It’s just a bunch of disjointed missions with no story to them at all. If the devs have created maps that are too long for the reward, or maps that just aren’t fun… yeah they won’t be played. How is this different from almost any game, ever? Not like effort goes into these maps, anyway. They’re tile-based and we only have 5 maps, which are repeated in various ways across the 12-13 missions.

Do you also argue in MMOs that people at the endgame should be forced to play in the starting region, so the region isn’t empty? No?

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There is also a chance that people will instead chose to wait (log off while doing so) when a unpopular map is the only map available for them to play on a specific diff, and will continue to be so for next 70 minutes potentionally… Not to mention that many people use quick play to find a game which basicaly forces them to play what ever mission is waiting for players to join.

Consider my pow. Fatshark released a bunch of unoptimized maps (specifically the entire zone featuring tree). Now i get 34 to 57 fps max on these maps, while on others i get 59 to 90 with the same graphic prefs. How can i be hooked to this game when i cant skip those maps which are curently destroying my game experience?

Also. Imagine that i have only time playing this game 2 hours a day, and only at specific deadline, bcs you know, Rl. Chances, that i will have the ability to play specific map i want are rather low thx to the current rng style map selection. Sorry but that is unacceptable to me. I paid 59.99e for this game, fact that i dont have acces to content i paid for 24/7 is very bad. And trust me i would think twice before buying this if i knew that.

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I’m not a min-maxer at least not foremost and even not seconded.
I really dislike people tweaking any games experiences and only work things off for efficency.
Believe it or not, i’m somewaht immersing and listen to the calls in the Morningstar, choosing the missions available not allways for beeing efficient.
I also play lot of quickplays at chosen difficulty and it would be very bad for me to end up playing only few maps because people have the choice and prioritze maps from a effort and reward calculation.

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The obvious solution is to make all the maps good, the solution isn’t to remove all player agency and choice. The entire release reeks of removing all player agency and choice, and completely disrespecting our time.

Why should anyone be forced to be play maps they don’t want to, because you want to play them? Why should anyone be forced to wait 3 days to play a new map, because RNG rotation decides no?

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i like the idea of you pick the difficulty and the map and miission are random , maybe a bit like the old SC system where you could thumb down a few maps and it would do its best to not put you on those. i definitely like throneside and the outside sandy one the least.

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thats a matter of taste and not assesable.

i said choosing difficulty like for QP is fine.

why should i only play the efficient maps with speedrunners like i experienced in VT and therfore quit this game early, because you want to?

to improve that the missions could only last for like 30 minutes and the board updating more often to provide more variance in a short time.

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OK but actually we should extend this to everything. Why should those pesky minmaxers only play the class they want to play? We should make class selection RNG. I also don’t like that people can pick their talents. Or their weapons and the blessings on them. In fact, people shouldn’t be allowed to pick anything at all, because oh noes some of the talents and weapons might not be used much, and I desperately want all of them to be used. Let’s make it all RNG, so we can be completely sure nothing goes unused.

What we certainly shouldn’t do is let paying customers play the game in the way they want to play it. That would be terrible.

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What we certainly shouldn’t do is let paying customers play the game in the way they want to play it. That would be terrible.

I’m a customer and i made a post of what i’'d like and i already got likes and responses that are agreeing fully or in parts.

I’m not into your sort of sarcams and respectfully ask for not beeing snippy.
I apreciate you shared your opinion on this, Thank you Sir.

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You made a post about what you’d like, and what you’d like specifically entails that other people won’t get what they like. I’m not a speedrunner, and I’m sure I will want to play all or most of the maps. I just want to choose which map I want to play.
Your take is that your desires and your opinion is more important than other people’s likes and opinions. Which is… ok, fine, but don’t pretend you’re not actively arguing for other people to not get what they want, so you can get what you want.

If you don’t expect sarcasm in replies to that, then… welcome to the internet, I guess.

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