I was so hyped for Darktide. After playing through the launch, all my hype is gone. I’ll return eventually but it’s hard to get excited again after the initial stumble.

I very much agree with Bricky’s review of the new Darktide updates.

Basically, I think there was a fundamental disconnect between what most people wanted out of it and what I wanted out of it. As a massive fan of the original L4D and L4D2, the idea of a Warhammer version of L4D was incredibly appealing. As a game where you jump in, play a round or two, and then move on to whatever it is you need to do during the day it functioned incredibly well.

However, it seems the majority wanted a game with an expansive grindy end-game with lots more loot progression and maps. The maps part I can relate to, variety is good, but do we need yet another game that you need to play for 10,000 hours before you get the “good” stuff? Really?

The crafting system was and still is pretty broken, btw. I just really hope fixing it doesn’t remove the possibility of easily getting high-tier weapons to try things out without gimping yourself for the higher difficulty missions.

I like the new maps, the new talent system is kinda interesting to fiddle with, the variant abilities for the 4 classes are awesome, but I had no issues with the way the game was before. The new boss fight is fun to play a few times, the 2 new maps are alright, and the new weapons are very hit and miss.

EDIT: Oh! For those that haven’t figured out how to sidestep the entire janky crafting system, here’s how you do it:

1. Go to Brunt’s Armory and pick the weapon you’d like to have

2. Keep buying copies of it until you get one with good stats (for a level 30 character, stats have a rating cap of 380. Anything 370+ is basically perfect)

3. Sell all except the best one

4. Take your good weapon to Hadron and consecrate it up to max rarity