https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wwmPSwTGUANo lady Ogryns, sorry folks.
Customizable features include gender, height, skin tone, hair style, flash bits and personality. Each character, male/female, has 3 different personality types per, each with their own set of dialog lines.
The hub for the game, ie. the keep from VT2, is actually a full social hub. So not only will you be there with your own party, you'll be there with all other players too. The devs estimated up to 20 other players. Not...quite sure what the point is or if I like it? Generally I wasn't interested in dealing with VT2's larger player base, some of whom can be trolly and toxic. I get that from an in-game perspective, it's a big massive 40k starship and they've brought an entire penal legion to the planet to deal with the threat. So unlike VT2's cozy 5 person cast, it makes sense that your hub is the ship and you run into all the other penal troopers present. Still, it's one of those things I don't feel I need (with a large group of friends to play these games with) so all it really brings is some atmosphere or novelty for a while. I don't really mind, as long as a) networking problems with other players don't fuck up my hub experience and b) I don't have to deal with obnoxious trolls spamming chat, saying inflammatory things over open mics and/or trying to interfere with what's going on in the hub.
Missions will no longer just be "Recruit/Vet/Champion/Legendary/Cataclysm." Apparently they'll have multiple difficulty variables you can tweak independently as well as random mission modifiers. I'm guessing that's akin to VT's weekly challenge mission modifiers or the Weave modifiers, just used and applied more consistently and hopefully with a good dose of 40k thinking. (Radiation leakage, warp surge, stuff like that.)
Another change is that missions will be queued up for you. When doing multiplayer, instead of just hitting "Quick Play" you'll approach the mission board and choose one of the available missions, with its own modifiers on top of the actual mission objectives. These missions will rotate frequently. The idea is that you'll "always have a mission to do online play with" but I dunno, sounds a little sus. VT players are skilled at finding the path of least resistance and I'd be a little worried we'll see a return to VT1 days, where there's certain missions/combos people just won't play. Remains to be seen how it plays out. I wonder if they'll still have "custom game" missions or not. That said, people have pointed out it sounds similar to Deep Rock Galactic's mission board and I'm cool with that in that game.
I'm a little unclear on level lay out. Previously I got the impression mission areas were procedurally and randomly generated but this video implies something somewhat different. They use the phrase "hand-crafted" a lot which implies VT2's completely hand built maps. Maybe it's a blend of the two. Big rooms i.e. modules are fixed and lovingly hand crafted but the # and way they're connected might differ. You might also view other previous areas you've played through while fighting from a new area...the idea being they're trying to show how this is all happening in the same hive city. Either way, Fat Shark said this will allow them to generate new content faster, and I don't doubt it. Instead of having to hand craft an entirely new level with new visuals etc....they can make new bits and pieces of a level and slot them into the existing rotation of level layouts.
Part of my concern here seems to be coming true: areas from what I've seen so far all tend to look alike, in that everything is "industrial." VT2 had a pretty good range of different environments so each level felt fresh even though you've played them all a hundred times. Just when you're bored of caves, its swamps. When you're tired of swamps, its cities. I wonder if DT's environments are going to wear out their welcome faster since everything is steel, skulls and industrial features.
They're promising a lot more random mini-events within missions, up to and including mini-games you need to perform while under fire. Devs noted that players figured out random events in VT2 with enough play time so they're aiming to have more variety there to keep people on their toes.
Grims and Tomes are back in some form but they're now part of mission parameters so they won't always be present. There's also something called "Circumstances" which will change missions in a "more unavoidable fashion." Wondering if that's like "power failure" or the aforementioned thought of "radiation leak."
So there's mission parameters, random events and circumstances. I wonder if they've done all this to spice up the fact that missions otherwise are going to feel kind of samey without them.
On the gear and progression front.....you'll get loot after each mission and when you level up. There's shops to buy new gear, there's crafting to modify gear as per VT2 (as well as being able to MOVE TRAITS BETWEEN pieces of gear (thank god, an easier system than mashing the reroll button for 5 minutes to get what you need)) as well as contracts that let you target specific gear drops you need. I really hope Fat Shark has learned their lesson about putting animations on repetitive actions the player needs to take dozens and dozens of times per session, like crafting and opening loot boxes. That shit got real old in both VT games to the point mods were created to remove the animation times and Fat Shark even made updates to speed that stuff up. I like me some detailed warhammer-esqe animations but like I said, I hope they've learned from the previous two games to tone it down. Crafting, opening loot boxes and the mission-end loot count up just gets tedious waiting on all these unnecessary animations when you've put hundreds if not thousands of hours into the game.
The same weapon or weapon class will have its stats vary within a range. So two handed hammers won't always have the same exact stats, but rather lightly randomized stats within a range that is still appropriate to two handed hammers. I wonder how deep this goes. VT2 is notorious for having MANY hidden attributes on weapons players never get to see but feel. If they're going to randomize THOSE attributes I hope they do a much better job of showing them and explaining them. The hidden weapon mechanics in VT2 are what I'd call esoteric in nature.....so if you can't see that a given weapon, for example, has an inferior block radius except by using it and figuring it out, I can foree that being an issue.
Class talent trees are back.
The story progression will apparently be tied to level. So rather than just playing through a linear series of missions as in VT2, I'm guessing what missions the mission board offers you changes as you level up and allows you to more organically experience the story as it develops.
There will be a mail box in the hub that developers can send stuff to...including "lost loot" you might have gotten from a game you disconnected from. That's a really nice feature IMO. Not that loot was ever that big of a deal in Fat Shark games but it's a nice touch none the less. No player-to-player mail, however.
Pre-saved loadouts for your character means you'll be able to have different builds and quickly switch to them before and after getting into a group but before the mission launches. This is super nice because I play with one guy who is big into build crafting, and it's not uncommon that he needs 3 to 5 minutes between matches to swap stuff around. Giving him loads out will make his life and our's much better.
Author
Topic: WH40K Darktide. Despite the power of Chaos, the Imperium stands! (Read 22621 times)