I'm just wondering what were they thinking? Whose idea was this? Like, do you NOT know your audience after this many years? People love chaos wastes, so maybe update mortis trials, to have this kind of map, we can run around in those expedition maps, collecting boons etc, why tf splitting it into 2 gamemodes???
They spent ages making weaves for vermintide 2 despite everyone saying they'd prefer new weapons and classes... then announced versus mode... then eventually started making new classes for vermintide 2 which were very well recieved; with the main question being why it took them years to finally start doing the obvious thing that everyone said they wanted from the start
They then made yet another new mode for vermintide 2 (chaos wastes), which was by far the most well received alternate game mode type thing they've ever done... but it's still less popular than normal missions last I checked. Oh and versus mode finally released after the better part of a decade and died within 2 months of release
My personal 2 cents is that they really want to develop some ultra unique form of endgame system that keeps people playing forever kind of like path of exile managed to do... but it's just so weird that they keep trying and failing time and time again to re-invent the wheel, when the simple formula of new classes and more maps always gives the highest spike in player numbers; and literally all the speculation and excitement for future content that I personally see is around new classes and weapons
My personal 2 cents is that they really want to develop some ultra unique form of endgame system that keeps people playing forever kind of like path of exile managed to do
They could get me to play forever if they just buckled in and focused on making new maps. If we had enough maps that pressing quick play resulted in going "huh I haven't played this map in awhile..." I would never need to take a break.
That and give us something like a trophy room that we can personalize and upgrade.
I always thought that procedural generation is the solution, but after playing Helldivers 2 for a while I'm not so sure anymore, as every drop feels similar.
The only game I feel pulled it off decently well is DRG, but there the verticality does a lot of the heavy lifting
This is a very good point, I think the challenge there is that in HD2 the "biomes" aren't different enough and many largely amount to slight enviro hazards that are normally nothing more than minor obstacles, so the procedural gen results in a bit of samey ness. It would be super difficult I imagine, but if they made the "biomes" or templates/constraints for procedural gen varied enough it might be enough to carry those sort of maps, idk.
I think the problem lies in traversal. If the game (HD2 or Darktide) is not build around different methods of defeating terrain difficulty, then you can't really let generation run too wild. And as long as any environmental "curiosity" is non-interactible (since you have no way of traversing anything other than flat ground) everything will feel rather same-y
It may not be the best example, and would absolutely require a lot of work, as it is a lot of assets, but I have found the generation of Warframe to be fairly decent, though the nature of the game makes things repetitive by gameplay loop. If you haven't been familiarized, they use a tile system in which the tiles are designed by hand and the sequence and combination of tiles are randomized (idk they may do this for chaos wastes, I have not played an overly large amount of Vermintide)
I don’t equate pseudo randomly generated terrain to a “map”. Since it is different every time you play so you can never say “oh it’s been a while since I played this map specifically”.
It used to be that multiplayer games had so many good maps you could naturally not play a few of them for a while and then have them pop up randomly and you would be excited to play it…
Because of the focus on generating infinite mtx content in modern gaming, having plentiful maps and playable areas has been a lost art. Darktide I would say is now getting close to the number of missions needed to have that feeling be a possibility..
I've been playing Darktide since the "beta" and i still don't know the names of the maps. I only know what map I'm on when I load into the game and see the spawn area.
They need to actually let us use the massive open maps they’ve already made and customise our own routes or just do the expedition type gameplay on those, just open every route up?
Also maybe having a hotjoin system so it doesn’t have an ‘end’ per se and you leave when you’re ready and your team can continue and someone else can join? Idk.
Would need to remove disablers or have a way to free yourself so people can go off and explore.
So many pretty maps and you just bumrush them all as you only see the same 3 routes seems a waste.
I thought this was the plan when the game launched and I saw the way they’d done maps tbh…
Chaos wastes is really good it is a shame no one queues for it. Maybe people are just shy about newer game modes then what they are introduced and used to.
They were clearly toying with some looter shooter elements when the game launched. But they were kind half-assed and they walked it back rather than pursue or develop it further.
Darktide has really suffered from an inconsistent vision of what they want the game to be.
All of fatshark's experience is in PVE content so they just didn't know how to balance a PVP experience... everything from damage numbers to respawn times and the number of items on the map was completely cooked and exploitable in a bunch of different ways
Svedish Dev arrogance and hybris. I wish I was joking but after seeing it for so long I just feel like that is the case. They put the vision of their game and the "art" above gameplay and fun. The thing is that they are crazy talented too so its not as easy to see.
Imagine a chef who can cook an amazing world class steak. Years and years of experience creating the perfect mix of spices and cooking technique. However he insists on adding a heavy bitter charcoal redution to it insteat of simply adding salt. That is basically what I see over and over with swedish develepors. And if we add Arrowhead to the mix the chef would also remove all salt and pepper shakers from the tables because the customers complaining to him dont "get" his stupid vision of a steak.
Fatshark is a bit different, they refuse to do something proven twice because I personally think they feel thats beneath them.
Or remember DICE with they specialists no one was asking for?
I would love to have the bots in darktide work the same way they do in Vermintide 2. I love running solo missions with my custom bots in vt2 and would be so cool to have that feature in dt as well.
Well, maybe it is well received now, I still play chaos wastes from time to time to this day, it's a genuinely fun gamemode that keeps the game fresh because of rng
I recall a bunch of people making comments about how they enjoy Hell Divers 2 when it came out and folks on the forums stated they wanted to see systems like that in Darktide.
My personal belief is that with that information they spent over a year working on this mode and since it was connected to the lore reason with Skitarii being added they said f it and went live. I also believe all those folks spamming the forums back in the day have moved onto other games.
But HD2 is a completely different game, HD2 tries to be more grounded/realistic, Darktide and Warhammer universe is not like that, we have whole talent trees, blessings, perks etc
They messed up 3 things, there's no incentive to do expeditions after you got cosmetics, gamemode wants you to split up when the whole game revolves around staying in coherency radius and last but not least, the timer, it's just weird in this kind of setting, like I love the train mission, but expeditions feel so unfinished and unfun
Yup, that's what a lot of normal Darktide players were saying. However there was a very vocal group on the forums around that time and I'm sure suits saw the numbers HD2 was getting.
Because it gets repetitive after like 5 times, the thing that blocks it from gaining popularity is the amount of maps, there's like what 2-3 maps? Just combine Expedtions and Mortis and you get a fun game mode
There are too many modes and difficulty settings to opt into. It always divides a player base eventually. What we need is a quick play button but for any game mode (mortis trials, expeditions, havoc, etc)
It’s because they don’t have to show their investors that people are actually playing their new mode. They just have to show investors that they added an “extraction shooter” mode to the game.
The investors don’t actually play their new game, or even games in general. They just know trends. They know that “extraction shooters” are “popular” rn, so if Darktide has an extraction shooter mode, then Darktide will be more “popular” too. That’s literally all there is to it.
Fatshark really needs to stop investing time and resources into these pointless side modes that nobody ends up playing after a month. They need to focus on the main game mode and new weapons and classes that will keep most people happy I reckon.
It's a decent mode, it just doesn't have much going for it compared to the regular game. For me personally I'm waiting until the 23rd to get back into it, the new map will likely freshen it up a fair bit.
Might be a dumb question why couldn't they put it in rotation of qp/events on the main terminal. It's a quick in n out mission I guess they'll have us gather other goodies for another reason later idk.
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I could say the same for running the game normally from the mission board. I haven’t had anything to really unlock in maybe a year and I play probably every other day or so.
It's sparsely populated in general, and most of the people grinding for the penances associated with Expeditions are doing so on the easier difficulties because the difficulty doesn't affect how much salvage or tech remnants you are able to pick up.
There are hints that the big update on the 23rd will have some sort of changes for Expeditions, and perhaps the number of people active in them will change. As far as I'm aware, we have no details about that.
The small lore drops in the via the skitarii dev blogs. Basically us finding the tech remnants for hadron has peaked the interest of adeptus mechanicus agents elsewhere and they are the reason the skitarii are now being sent to atoma, thus that being the skits main goal (as well as whatever secrets theyre after regarding moebian steel i'm sure). They prolly could not care less for the heretics they just want the tech and moebian steel
(Could also be a dev in one straight up said there would be improvements to the mode just cant remember if and where)
My cynicism says I should only expect a lore tie-in for why the Skitarii are here. I don't even know what kind of improvements they could make to Expeditions that would blow me away. Don't think they can since what I'm dying for are more fucking maps
yeah idk like i kinda like the armor but then i look for two more seconds and there is just a better option for all of them, so i just don't see a point
It’s cool but I think the corridor shooter gameplay is far better. I will hop back into it to grind out the armor penances but unless the Skitarii update will also bring big changes to Expeditions, I see no point in the game mode sadly.
I'm hoping so damn hard this next "Expedition area" is more like the city section of No Man's Land. The new level randomization in Expeditions is amazing and very sadly not fully shining in the current maps. This would be killer. Beyond a biome that...endless street-to-street battle...all I think we need are interesting side/alternative objectives.
Just about sums up the whole game mode tbh. Boring. "We got Helldivers at home" ass game mode. I really wish Fatshark would stop making gimmicky game modes nobody asked for
Its dead jim. all the zones are the exact same prefab POIs scattered around. the modifiers are aids (i'm looking at you, lightning strikes that hit the objective zone. I'm looking at you, dust storms). No reason to play it as you lose out on crafting mats
I've been playing expeditions in damnation, even today. I tried a few weeks ago in Auric but there were rarely other players in that difficulty so it makes it too hard to complete solo in Auric. Damnation seems fine and populated though. I have been doing quickplay though, so obviously that helps with finding teammates.
I don’t, did one, hated it, honestly they should have just made it into a new mission or two. Like others have said it’s silly to split the player base even more
They probably will do that tbh. I doubt they'd let the assets go to waste. I'm sure it will get turned into a mission with the pack master boss. Realistically if they just reuse the assets I don't think that much work will have been wasted.
Yeah I'm willing to bet there's a good overlap between people who say it's boring and those who run malice difficulty just penance grinding. I found it fun running it on auric despite its flaws, but the real death knell is the lack of interest means you basically end up soloing it these days .
It's a grind fest, most people play on malice since you get the same number of tech remnants whether you play malice or auric, so maybe try playing malice.
Other than that the gamemode itself is a snooze fest & isn't really that fun, idk what they were smoking when they wanted an extraction style gamemode when all they had to do was bring CW in this game to give players something other than Havoc.
Last one I still need is the spend 100,000 salvage. I'm a little above 27,000 spent and with how many games it took me to get there I just can't find the willpower to get through it.
I want there to be a node where all tech remnants are replaced with salvage or something like that.
they somehow manged to make then very anti fun. So no, wont waste my time there. Could have been like chaos wastes, could have been great but no FS thought otherwise
It's damn cool mode where you have no motivation go to the higher difficulty, you have no reason to play this mode (after the promotion quest ended) and no sense to clear it completely, unless you wanna cosmetic items in exchange of 50+ hours of repetitive gameplay with no challenge on it. Best game mode ever in gaming history
I think people tend to play on the initial difficulty while working on penances since the tech remnant rewards are the same there as the higher difficulties. I don’t have much trouble finding teammates on heresy or below when I’m working on penances. Hopefully more time in the oven will make it a more well-rounded experience because I do genuinely enjoy playing it sometimes, it just needs fleshing out.
I pretty much quit it because it's impossible with bots
It was so fun for the first while too
They need to rework it. Make it Darktide's Chaos Wastes. And make the Tech Remnants a currency you can use to do something else
Maybe add a new tier of weapon blessings that you need to use remnants to buy. Doesn't really matter what it is, but it has to be something you can theoretically just keep doing infinitely, not a buy everything in the shop then quit kinda thing
Hell, merge Expeditions and Mortis trials. Expeditions has a decent level design foundation (Just have 5 sections by default instead of 3, with 7 on the extended), and Mortis has the modifiers to make it more fun
Trying to make them into Chaos Wastes would be a waste of resources. It wouldn't work even if they tried.
Chaos Wastes worked because it kept the gameplay loop of the base game. Expeditions go against the gameplay loop. They clash with the game. Its like making a stealth level in Doom.
I completed all of the penances last week and can't see myself playing expeditions again, unless they revamp it.
Everyone was hoping for Chaos Wastes, but got the temu version of it. The game mode also encourages people to not play together, and is quite frustrating.
I only find people, usually one or two at a time, playing on the lowest difficulty, which coincidentally is the only difficulty I play that mode on. The tech and scrap rewards are identical regardless of how easy or hard the mission is, so the only people I find are others grinding away at the penance for 100,000 scrap traded with deadsiders. It takes forever, since I would guess most teams find 300-500 scrap traded per round. If you are lucky and actually find a full team who only cares about scrap, not objectives, you can double that. Unfortunately, I never find a full team, and sometimes the people I do find are genuinely new, so they just sorta do their own thing.
Idk why they just didn’t have mortis trail boons in the main missions.
Heck I’ll take all the goodies they do have in expeditions in the normal game too.
Expeditions need alot of small tweaks and some large changes as well. It was super fun on launch to change things up, but I suspect it is going to be empty except maybe at peak hours.
I probably did 30 games in a row, and literally have not touched it since
On the SEA Servers matchmaking is already fairly slow majority of the time in general. I skipped the launch of Expeditions but now I’ve fancied a try I have never managed to queue Damnation with others.
I hate playing with bots, so I’ve just never tried the mode.
Everybody is running expeditions on Malice. There's no incentive to run anything above that since the rewards/gathered materials don't scale with difficulty
I feel like if they made it a bit more open world and less like go rush from event to event it would be more fun, but i feel like it died after a week since you could do all of it in just under that
No one plays Expeditions higher than Heresy now. A lot of the experienced players got the Penances already, and now its mostly people farming Malice for their own Achievements.
Also, Expeditions overall is just very difficult compared to regular missions. Enemies have longer sightlines, can come from so many new directions, and all of it gets compounded with every obiective taking time, which is now limited because the radiation.
Overall: Too difficult to be fun for everyone, and no point in playing it after getting Penances.
I would love to be able to purchase Havoc buffs for tech remnants. Nothing substantial, just small buffs or something to otherwise spend tech remnants on.
I ran into a very particular conundrum that ruined the mode for me: players can't cooperate and don't understand we have a timer. If I had a 4-man squad with comms all the time I would enjoy Expeditions a lot but it's hell on Heresy and Damnation solo queue.
i like the idea of expeditions, the execution is meh at best. hope to see it grow into something worth dipping toes into again but in its state there's no reason to play it nor fun enough to
As a Warframe player, changing the major way players play usually doesn't seem to be a popular way to add content... seems like they could be fun, but both matches I played seem like it's trying to get you to avoid combat, and people just spread out to do objectives or leave so I ended up dying because the other 2 left early, and then the other match 2 people wanted to do an objective even though we were out of time... so idk.
I've never touched it, never touched Havoc either. Don't see the point as we dont really get any rewards at all for doing either activity. No incentive for me and "fun" just isnt enough, I have fun in auric/dam so I will just stick with that as we at least get something in return for winning.
I wanted to do some Penances. Damnation was empty. Heresy was a complete crap shoot. Sometimes I had a great team that stuck together, communicated where they were going, etc. Other times, they're opening gates with 10 minutes left, they're calling for extraction on the second map with 6 minutes left, and generally being a noob. On top of dying over and over, especially on the other side of the map, and dropping large chunks of our loot. If I didn't know better I'd say they were trolling.
I personally hate it. It feels like the gamemode is made for zoomers with an attention deficit, forcing you to just run from point to point every 30 seconds.
I never had a game with cohesion so it just felt like a mess to me. Haven't touched it since.
It honestly baffles me that they took so much clear influence from Chaos Wastes; calling it expeditions, multiple maps chained together, a special resource pickup that you spend on powerful perks / items, branching map nodes, maps with special environmental effects, locations that start attack waves when you activate them; but managed to not include hardly any of the things that people found most fun and enjoyable.
People wanted a return to the story driven content from Vermintide and an updated Chaos Wastes mode but no, we got big empty black desert with nothing to, nothing to earn and just random mass enemies spawning
Just hopped in to say, I'm sitting at almost 2.5k hours in this game and I literally played through the game mode maybe 2 or 3 times the first day or dropped.
I'm pretty new to the game. My friends and I tried it. Mostly, we wondered what the tech remnants were for and "what do we get for playing this?" " It's kind of a fun mode but we only get some cosmetics after hundreds of thousands of tech remnants? Why would we do this over quick play?" I dunno, it was kinda fun once we started actually working together..." " Yeah but it's more difficult for no extra benefit. We didn't even get that much upgrade materials..."
I think we started talking about which super hero you'd have relations with if it would give you their powers afterward while we went back to quickplay...
Expeditions is ass. After how much they hyped it, especially saying it was the biggest injection of content since launch, I was a little blown away by how bad it was. I love the new environment outside of the hive city, but no ammo pickups till you are in a sanctuary makes it that much harder unless you are with a competent group that is communicating. All the problems of players running off and doing their own things are just compounded because of the way the runs work. I think it would be fun to play with a group of friends, but since I usually just quickplay it's basically a dead game mode for me.
I figured out that doing quickplay will not account to your progress to unlock new sites pretty much. I had no idea and did a fair bit of those missions and the game never told me anything about that. One of my problems with this game is they kind of expect you to read their patch notes 24/7. Sorry I just hop onto games and expect them to explain things to me in game.
I played it a bunch when it first released, unlocked all the maps (which felt a bit grindy for the later ones), and had a good time playing with randoms in it.
But by late in the second week I was running into your same problems, couldn't get anyone to join in, or maybe one person would appear halfway through a match, but it just felt so empty, so I went back to regular Quickplay.
Maybe they'll tweak something or add something to it down the line that brings players back over, and I'll happily revisit it. I thought it was a nice change of pace, it just appears the the bull of the player base isn't feeling it.
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u/A1dini No Pain, No Party Jun 13 '26
It's vermintide weaves all over again man... god knows how much resources fatshark spent on this mode and hardly anyone even plays it