I don’t think there is a lot of pressure at all playing the lowest difficulty? And you only should increase the difficulty once you see the current one doesn’t give you any problems.
If you stick to missions w/ a difficulty level of I there’s no pressure. Anyone w/ competitive expectations of rando teammates won’t be playing at that level.
Ah, flashbacks of the Horn of Magnus.
Some outfit pieces are unlocked just by leveling up. Others are unlocked by satisfying “penances”, aka the in-game achievements. You can preview these cosmetics from the penances menu
A tip that has really helped me: Put on headphones, turn off the music. Everything dangerous has an audio cue, and most of them are positional.
This includes a sound that indicates you are about to be hit. Those infuriating spawns just behind you will never hit you again if you learn it, and instinctively block when you hear it (block is omnidirectional). It sounds like a short, sharp intake of breath. Learning to react to that properly got me the “don’t take any health damage” penance.
Just hit level 7 and now I am getting a mission freeze and crash to desktop almost every other game, sucks as it takes forever to get into the game as it is, with so many loading screens.
Will they learn one day? Possibly, no
Did this ever get bots for solo play?
“Over the next few months, our sole focus will be on finishing the game we sold you”, is how I interpret that.
If you’re going to release a game that’s not done yet, just put an Early Access label on it.
Why do I have the feeling that by the time this is truly worth playing long-term, it will no longer be on game pass?
If you want some shooty co-op action, you could do worse. Graphics are fine. The game is active now, so finding missions is straightforward. Runs are predictably around 20-25 minutes. I haven’t had any crashes or failures that I can recall.
Gripes and problems? Sure!
- Most players not using mics, which makes real coordination difficult, meaning…
- Lots of full squad wipes (especially in the climactic last 5 minutes)
- Gear and loot systems feel stingy and punitive. If you like a particular weapon type/kind, you just have to hope one shows up in the shop or you get it as a rare reward. This feels really dumb, given how different all the weapons play (and how many there are, and how many are “locked” until you hit a given level), and also seems like something easily fixable: Players should always be able to buy at least a gray/basic version of every weapon they have unlocked, and it should be scaled to their current level. Players should get tokens as a reward which they can use to pick the gear they want, instead of a random piece of gear.
- Repetitive, but that is also the nature of these games
- No gating of levels for missions. You’ll be 5 seconds from launching a top-tier mission and a n00b level 5 will pop in. You’re gonna wipe.
- The bots are horrible. If you’re playing with all bots, you pretty much have to stick to the bottom tier of mission difficulty, and note that some secondary objectives become impossible (the bots will not pick up scriptures or grimoires)
- Characters are completely isolated, so they all have their own currency and gear pools (Destiny does this, too). Given the loot system, this is more frustrating
- The weekly assignment system is pure grind (Run 15 missions! etc.)
Next patch should be a big improvement:
we acknowledge the feedback that players desire further agency within the Armoury Exchange. We will release a new feature to the Armoury Exchange where players can acquire any weapon type by its mark (Mk) that has been unlocked by achieving the minimum level required. This will be made available in the next patch to Darktide
we will not be implementing the Fuse / Combine blessing functionality. Instead, earning a blessing will
permanently unlock the ability to re-bless with that blessing at any time
(source)
That’s excellent, looking forward to getting back into it. Though I don’t think the crafting stuff was the worst bit of the experience; I mostly got annoyed at replaying the same handful of levels over and over. I dunno what’s up with the mission selector/quickplay but it feels like half the available levels are hardly ever in the rotation.
As an aside, I tried to replay Back 4 Blood on gamepass a couple of weeks ago and just couldn’t get into it. The combat in Darktide is just so, soooo much punchier, and the changes to the deckbuilding really sucked the flavour out of it. Darktide is, overall, pretty flawed but the moment-to-moment gameplay is fantastic.
Having gone back to Vermintide 2 for a bit, it is all the more surprising Fatshark had such a poor launch with Darktide – they had more or less already built this game before, and had some solid models and designs from which to iterate.
That said, I think Darktide is superior in some ways…but Vermintide is a much more complete game and more “fun” for long stretches currently.
I am looking forward to the next patch as well.
Patch 9 on the way!
From the comments it seems the game is not much better than it was at release? WTF are they doing?
Wasn’t this the same with their previous Vermintide games? A year or two after, their games seems to be in good shape, but not at release.
No, I recall Vermintide 2 being pretty damn good at release.
It had some issues on the first months, in particular connectivity issues, during the first 8 months the Steam user reviews weren’t that good
https://i.imgur.com/WcFA1vi.png
They climbed up slowly later.
Vermintide 2 released with something like 12 classes and many, many more maps than we see in Darktide. VT2 also had more systems in and complete. It also had a storyline that made sense, not the vestigial tale in Darktide.