Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you:
No adverts like this in the forums anymore.
Times and dates in your local timezone.
Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance.
Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely.
Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net.
If you are already a member then feel free to login now.
FezzikDaBullgryn wrote: I really hope it's not pay to unlock extra weapons, but it likely will be. Point is, if it's a level based system, where you for instance need to be level 20 to unlock the Ripper gun for the Ogryn, it would be far better than day 1 being able to just equip it on every level 1. I just want a reason to actually play the game, as there likely will be ZERO story. If I have to kill 1000 heretics and mutants to unlock the auto-rifle for the trooper class, that would be a reason to play.
Where the hell are you basing this on? Have you even played Vermintide?
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2022/06/10 12:27:43
BUILDING ON THE FOUNDATIONS OF VERMINTIDE
When I started working at Fatshark, my colleagues shared an exciting proposition: We wanted to do First Person Melee, but good. Like, really good! And in co-op. Over network. I asked if we had a good example of another game to set the level of expectation for the scope. We quickly concluded that no, there’s probably none. I had previously worked with many combat mechanics but mainly in a single-player capacity. So all the minor tweaks and tricks you employ to make a punch feel impactful usually rely on time manipulation or slowdowns to get it right. You can’t do that in multiplayer. Most of the tells and interfacing we create require a good, clean view of the enemy. We wanted scores of enemies on screen. So looking at that, we gave a silent Swedish nod of “this might get tricky” and then built the Vermintide combat.
When we started working on Darktide, we discussed an even more exciting proposition: taking the core of Vermintide, putting it into the 40K universe, and adding ranged combat to it. Not like separate sections of classic shooting. But integrated. A mix of the two - A hybrid between meaty Melee and Classic FPS. Because 40K has never been about running around with rifles. 40K has never been swordsmen clashing shields. 40K, in its essence, is Bolter in one hand and Chainsword in the other, facing a tsunami of enemies. Do we have any examples of this from other games? No? Another silent Swedish nod and it was “go time.”
We started out with a very colorful prototype, using Vermintide content but with very bright blue and red mockups of guns. The first “limited scope” was a proper but straightforward aim down sight with some basic recoil and spread pattern controls. It was a step up from our previous games. But here’s the thing: if you put an awesome, cool gun in a player's hands, it comes with expectations and reminders of other games that solely focus on the first-person shooter aspect. We knew this was a risk. We wanted to avoid presenting and reinforcing these expectations. In Darktide when hordes of enemies close in on you, you swap your Lasgun for your Thunder Hammer and wreak righteous havoc on their corrupted souls. We’ve opted to call this Hybrid Combat - not FPS with an optional melee weapon. Players will need to learn how to use both and when to switch between them.
After creating the first prototypes, we sat down and took a long hard look at the game. At the end of that conversation, the Combat team put it bluntly: Shouldn’t we just build a proper FPS experience for our ranged combat? With all the bells and whistles, blend states and dynamic weapons and advanced recoil mechanics and suppression loops and interfacing that come with it? So we did. We even infused all those details into the progression system, allowing players to tailor the weapon handling through a mixer-board-like stat system that makes your gun unique. You are still highly encouraged to bring out your melee weapon because trying to kite a horde or some of our angrier elite enemies will end up with you dead. But up until that point, you’re free to shoot 'em up as much as you like.
STAYING TRUE TO WARHAMMER 40,000 & CO-OP PLAY
Our core pillars have always revolved around staying true to the lore and supporting co-op play throughout. Most of us in the combat team spent a ridiculous amount of time discussing minute details that we needed to resolve to create a proper 40K rendition. How does one aim a lasgun? Is there an iron sight on it? Do the models just lack that detail because they are tiny plastic representations? What are the effective ranges of lasfire? And how well do they deal with armor? Do they have holo sights in the grim dark future? If they do, would it have a slightly gothic arc shape? Of course it would. How does the recoil of a lasgun work, and is it heresy to suggest it has it? If you slap a tactical flashlight onto a lasgun does it, in fact, become twinlinked? At the end of the day, the balance has always been between lore and fun. The “rule of cool” happens to embody the design principles of both Warhammer and Fatshark.
(Not sure if the link will work, it is unlisted, but a preview of the lasgun.)
We’ve always wanted to build a game that allows each player their time in the spotlight. We’re aiming to create enough challenges and player moves that there is both variety and roles to fill. We want Darktide to be a game where it’s not just four players pulling their weight in stacking enemy corpses per second but rather an intuitive shift in your behavior and who takes point. Making enemy hordes be easily dealt with by your fully automatic, flechette shooting Rippergun, while making it weak against heavily armored enemies allows other players to step up and protect you from the elites in the secure knowledge that you’ll purge the poxwalkers.
MIXING IT UP WITH RANGED COMBAT
With the inclusion of a proper ranged gameplay loop, we added a couple of new concepts into the mix, such as Combat Ranges. We expanded on the melee range seen in Vermintide with both a “Far” range and a “Close” range. Core to the experience is the notion that enemies and players behave and perform differently based on their combat range.
Far Combat is the cover-based peeking and accurate shots of combat rifles.
Close Combat is the chaotic and fast dance of short-range damage dealing while dodging and weaving between enemies to survive. Shotguns. Submachine Guns.
Locking fighters in Melee Combat forces both sides into the hand-to-hand combat of Vermintide, which can be helpful as it removes the concern of the ranged threats and replaces them with much more immediate problems, often involving chain axes.
Controlling the range you fight at is central. We wanted movement and positioning to be an essential part of the gameplay loop, whether that means assaulting into melee to quiet the enemy hellguns barraging you with lasfire, or keeping the enemy horde at bay to allow the team to mow them down with gunlines of flamers and autoguns alike. We introduced elements like sprinting, vaulting, suppression, enemy positioning anchors, and combat vectors to create a direction for the combat and allow the players to control the flow of action and manage the ranged threats introduced. A colleague also added sliding as part of an internal hack week project. We quickly integrated it, bridging that last distance as your effective sprint runs out, and you need to slide-dodge a blast from a shotgun to bury your power sword in the gut of a Chaos Ogryn.
Attacks are not all about damage. This has been a critical pillar we built the Vermintide games around, and it holds true for Darktide as well. At its core, we think about attacks as two separate things: Control and Damage. It’s all fine and good to do solid damage, but if you’re not interrupting the enemy while you're at it, you’ll be eating a rusted axe to the face. This goes both ways, where getting stunned or hurt are two different consequences of getting hit. We try to build this deterministic loop where you are in control and should be able to avoid taking hits. There’s no random chance, no false attacks, no “Whoever clicks fastest wins”. We want you to master the gameplay and it’s why we introduced the “Damage taken stat” to the end-of-round screen of Vermintide. It’s the most important one.
This became a problem for us with the introduction of ranged enemies. Specifically, lots of ranged enemies. Dodging and sprinting to avoid shots only take you so far. So we introduced Toughness. It’s a simple shield mechanic allowing players to soak a couple of ranged hits before getting hit-stunned and killed by incoming fire. It’s “the Emperor protects,” but within reasonable limits. It’s the number of shots the Ogryn can take before he realizes he’s been shot. It makes the game work and makes the combat more fun while keeping the player in control and responsible for any damage. Just remember to stay together, as regeneration is tied to sticking with your team.
So, that sounds kind of involved and complicated, right? It is. It’s been one of our primary concerns. Vermintide wasn’t really well known for explaining things. But Vermintide was known for playing quite well. To me, there are certain features you build and a couple of details you add just to make it play right. It’s those little touches that make the game feel good. They don’t necessarily need to be understood or explained or exploitable by the players, but they make or break the gameplay. And as long as the enemy behavior is intuitive, and lines up with the lore and the player fantasy, it just works.
ENEMY TYPES
One of the main tools we have, which has also turned into one of the most important rules for us to follow, is the Enemy Types we use. Since everything is complicated and dynamic, we had to build a little ruleset to develop and design around. If we keep to the rules, things combine and work together fine. That’s the main idea until we find something super fun to implement right away. Then we break all the rules, but for all the right reasons.
ROAMERS & HORDES
Horde enemies and Roamers are the baseline threat you face. They are easy fun. Players should kill them at their leisure with any weapon or tool at their disposal. Gratuitous gibbing fodder… Until they appear in masses and the players get distracted and overrun, that is.
ELITES
Enter the Elites. Built to challenge and promote specific behaviors and load-outs, Elites break your flow, demand your immediate attention, and will end you unless dealt with properly. They also provide an excellent chance for the Plasmagun-toting, “I crave big explosions and instant gratification”-type players to blast them out of existence to the applause of the rest of the team. That thing about your moment in the spotlight.
SPECIALS & MONSTERS
We throw Specials at you to enforce and challenge teamplay; once you’re grabbed, downed, gnawed on, or hanging from a ledge, you rely on your teammates to purge whatever heresy put you in this position and get you back on your feet. Monsters challenge the entire team and demand everyone's attention while providing an excellent distraction to allow the horde to kill you. We build our enemies with a purpose. We stick to the rules, build that rock-paper-scissors dynamic with our armor types, player weapon profiles, and enemy behaviors. The ask is for the team to identify the threats and adapt their behavior accordingly.
Playing a game of Darktide allows four players to join together and try to survive a mission. There are parts of the mission that you traverse, facing varied and generated compositions of enemies. Since we never build bespoke scenarios, it’s very much a once-removed design process of setting up rules and flows and fail-safes to keep the ebb and flow of threat suitable but deadly. We use a lot of chef allegories since we never know in detail what will happen where or when, but I think we’ve mastered most of the recipes by now. Building up that gut feeling of what consequences an increased Special coordinated attack timer has or tuning up the number of bodies in a horde requires a lot of playtesting. Running the same combat reference level over and over again. The same goes for the mission events, where we challenge the players to solve a task while surviving an ongoing battle within a fixed arena. Tuning which enemies best sabotage the players' efforts of a specific event or knowing when to throw everything at them to create a hectic chaos dance of desperation is always a balance between sadism and benevolent game master.
In the end, the formula and core are the same. We wanted to keep what was great with Vermintide, expand on it with solid ranged gameplay and provide true hybrid combat. It has been difficult. It has been challenging. It has been massive amounts of lore, clicking, and passion. At the end of the day, we’re proud. The experience found in Darktide is fun and panicky and overwhelming and impactful, while our veterans and people who stick around to master it find and explore that depth that makes you stick around. At least, that is what we think we built. We hope you feel the same way.
That was a great little read through. I think FatShark are the premier warhammer company since THQ died a sad death. They definitely have a commitment to it, very much the same as the folks at Creative Assembly. They are fans and know their stuff and that is dead important with making a good game that is true to the universe.
A little bit formulaic although I feel that's just a prologue mission. I wish the person playing the demo wasn't utter gak
Looks pretty great though, the particle effects in the darkness coming off the lasgun is a really cool touch. I like the look of powering up the hammer too.
I was amused by that first door they opened. Its a real little piece of background, but it didn't open in any sort of way I was expecting (either rolling to the right, or hinged in one direction or another, or splitting), but instead popped out and slowly raised (presumably) on a metal arm deadlifting the whole thing.
Its subtly awkward and poorly engineered in a very Imperium sort of way.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2022/06/13 18:59:14
Is it just me or did the player look "invincible"? I mean getting into melee like that with a horde, in a horde shooter, is usually KO, but he just jumps around and is back to full in less than a second it seems, after also taking out 100% of the horde with just his las. I'd really like to know also, what is the use of a 60 round mag, if it's single shot, and reloading is less than a second? 60 rounds speak to automatic shooting, maybe it's an upgrade?
Is it just me or did the player look "invincible"?
Left 4 Dead, Deep Rock Galactic etc are very easy in their medium difficulty setting and Vermintide 1 was too (don't know about Vermintide 2, didn't play it) if you have at least some basic knowledge of the game. The difficulty starts to become noticeable only in higher difficulty settings thanks to a combination of hordes becoming much more dangerous and increased number of special and elite type ennemies, requiring the players to have good coordination and good management of their ressources (special "mutators" in Deep Rock Galactic can also heavily increase the difficulty of a mission and Darktide's developpers have confirmed that such "mutators" are also in the game).
Anyway, since it's a demo which was playable at an event, I expect the difficulty setting to be set at medium, at best. Thus, yeah, the player looks invincible.
Also, keep in mind that Darktide is not a "normal" horde shooter. Players are expected to actively engage in melee combat : they have the tools to do so and the game difficulty is also balanced around it. In Deep Rock Galactic, which is more of a "traditional horde shooter" with most of the ennemies only capable of attacking in melee and the tools available to the players being 95% ranged oriented, melee combat (which is very basic) is only used in very specific situation because it is actively discouraged.
I'd really like to know also, what is the use of a 60 round mag, if it's single shot, and reloading is less than a second? 60 rounds speak to automatic shooting, maybe it's an upgrade?
1. It might be a lore-related decision. Lasguns are described as having huge magazine capacity compared to an autogun of similar size.
2. It might be gameplay-related decision to make the lasgun more useful against a large number of ennemies (even though the ripper gun and the autogun seem to be better).
3. It might be a combination of 1. and 2.
4. Even though less than a second seems short, it can still be FAR TOO LONG in higher difficulty settings. This is something I noticed playing Deep Rock Galactic using the highest difficulty settings.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2022/06/17 10:00:00
Very interesting, especially given that the particular article it is written by Dan Abnett. They look pretty manky which is what you want from Nurgley enemies. Everything they release about this game looks fantastic. Really excited to play, I really hope it's worth it.
Very interesting, especially given that the particular article it is written by Dan Abnett. They look pretty manky which is what you want from Nurgley enemies. Everything they release about this game looks fantastic. Really excited to play, I really hope it's worth it.
All that made me want is for an actual r&h dex again.
They nailed the nurgle Stagnation theme perfectly in them.
https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/0/766717.page A Mostly Renegades and Heretics blog.
GW:"Space marines got too many options to balance, therefore we decided to legends HH units." Players: "why?!? Now we finally got decent plastic kits and you cut them?" Chaos marines players: "Since when are Daemonengines 30k models and why do i have NO droppods now?" GW" MONEY.... erm i meant TOO MANY OPTIONS (to resell your army to you again by disalowing former units)! Do you want specific tyranid fighiting Primaris? Even a new sabotage lieutnant!" Chaos players: Guess i stop playing or go to HH.
Very well might be the best 40k game yet. However the melee combat doesn't impress coming from Vermintide.
Hopefully just a symptom of unfamiliar players and low difficulty but it hasn't looked anywhere near as engaging as VT.
BlaxicanX wrote: A young business man named Tom Kirby, who was a pupil of mine until he turned greedy, helped the capitalists hunt down and destroy the wargamers. He betrayed and murdered Games Workshop.
A delay of 7 weeks or so, 6 weeks or so before release is never a good sign.
But have a beta signup.
I find it so interesting that they (and other developers) apologise for delays to game releases. I would much rather a game was delayed if the end result was better. There's far too many recent games that have clearly been pushed for a release that has led to a buggy miserable experience.
Really what they should apologize for is giving release dates so early in the first place. It sets expectations, and then studios are reluctant to upset the applecart (even when its necessary).
Yes, there are budget and advertising issues, but the general audience isn't going to care about that.
My biggest problem with announcements like this is that its so close to the release date, the limited amount of time they're giving themselves for the new date doesn't seem like enough (and are obviously for issues they already knew about).
The specific way they handle it creates a lose-lose scenario, where they're quite often going to do too little, too late.
It is better than just a crap release, but I always thinking 'maybe you should've announced this two months ago?'
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2022/07/28 17:40:38
Certainly, although I do not know that much about game development, I would think with bug testing there's a lot of potential leeway depending on what problems have arisen. This extra month might be that most problems (obviously issues they already knew about as you say) are in hand and this is just a bit of spit and polish.
I completely agree that the early release dates are a problem, but it is an industry wide problem that I don't think many developer studios get as much say as they would like.
The amount of work I've done in the past where I have been told that the deadline is X so you better get it done, regardless of how times you say the word unfeasible
EDIT: I signed up to the beta so I am hoping that I get to sneak that in.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2022/07/28 17:57:26
Cadre Coronal Afterglow w1;d0;l0 
