With the story progressing the mission board feel more and more wrong

[theCrius]

I was just thinking a few minutes ago that as soon as I logged in, yesterday, my character have been summoned and I’ve seen the new cinematic.

Which made me think: What happens when a new character reach lvl 30 now? It gets the “traitor’s killed anticlimactic cinematic” then immediately after the new cinematic about “carnival”.

Which is… weird? Wrong even from a storytelling point of view, I’d say?

Which made me think that if the mission board could be something like the Vermintide 2 one, it would be even simpler to manage the progression of the story as you could tie the vision of the cinematic to the unlocking of the missions as well.

I’ll leave the Vermintide 2 mission board here as reference for who hasn’t played it.

Campaign Selection

Mission Selection (inside the campaign)

I never understood, as many here I’d say, the choice of having random missions instead of a “let the player choose”, especially as Vermintide has anyway a “quick play” mode in which you simply join someone already running or that has selected a specific mission instead which is exactly how it works in Darktide too.

Things like the random mutator could be even just be a simple matter of choosing “Run this vanilla” or tick a box “Run this with random modifiers” which should please the Fatshark hunger for feeding us RNG whenever they can. Add another box for “make it aurics” and you have the same features but with more control for the player and better control for the storytelling.

[Heretical_Cactus]

@theCrius

I never understood, as many here I’d say, the choice of having random missions instead of a “let the player choose”

Server + plus:

missions:	15
difficulty:	5
Mutation:	10
Mutation 2:	10
Permutation:	7500

[just.dont]

@theCrius

I never understood, as many here I’d say, the choice of having random missions instead of a “let the player choose”

3 words:
Company
Hosted
Servers

[theCrius]

@Heretical_Cactus

Server + plus

Not sure what this should prove/support/whatever?

@just.dont

3 words:
Company
Hosted
Servers

Having the sessions run on company hosted server doesn’t really have anything to do with the ability for the player to choose what mission they want to play.

From a software and platform engineering perspective, every time a player want to start a map, a new instance is deployed and run for that player + rest that can be there at the start of join later.

The only difference technically is that the player can choose from all the missions instead of the random ones.

The “servers” don’t host the map. The map is in the player’s client. The server simply have something like:

maps_id_available = {
 {id: 1, mission_id: "abc", diff: 5, modifiers: [1, 2], secondary_objective: []},
 {id: 3, mission_id: "ghi", diff: 5, modifiers: [2, 3], secondary_objective: [2]},
 {id: 2, mission_id: "def", diff: 4, modifiers: [4], secondary_objective: [1]},
 {id: 2, mission_id: "def", diff: 3, modifiers: [], secondary_objective: [1]},
 ...
}

And so on.

When a mission start, the client receive simply

{id: 1, mission_id: "abc", diff: 5, modifiers: [1, 2], secondary_objective: []}

Which translate to a specific mission, damnation, 2 modifiers (the id define them) and no secondary objective.

The weight on the servers is the same as if that object was instead generated by the client, with the player selecting all those variable or part of them, for example just the mission, difficulties and if it needs to be with modifiers, vanilla o aurics for example.

It has nothing to do with this being server hosted.

[just.dont]

@theCrius

The “servers” don’t host the map. The map is in the player’s client. The server simply have something like:

While technically true, it’s not relevant to this discussion.
The cornerstone issue here is that FS implemented company-sided matchmaking, and for such matchmaking to work well it must be divided into well-defined and predictable buckets. Otherwise players will inevitably start seeing a little too much bots and/or long times to gather 4 players in unpopular missions.
Even with current limited pool of missions and narrow quickplay (which connects you to a mission pool within specified difficulty) it was already happening sometimes back in pre-P13 days where current online player numbers weren’t so good.