Warhammer 40K: Darktide - Xbox/Steam

[Lying Cat]

I played a bit of this last night on my out-of-date and barely-worthwhile 3080 and... I'm not that impressed honestly. The action just didn't feel particularly amazing, the characters chatter was bland and I just wasn't having a particularly fantastic time with it. So, refunded. I know it's not quite the same genre, but I honestly feel as though I've been spoiled a bit by GTFO in the "group of people go into a shit situation to do a job for something that is apparently authorised to give them orders" genre.

 

Obviously GTFO is much, much slower moving, but the tension when the shit hits the fan is much, much higher than it is here.

 

I dunno. I really enjoyed Vermintide 2, so I suspect it's a me issue rather than the game as from what I can tell it's very, very similar.

[NecroMorrius]

Weirdly it's running fine-ish now, everything on max/high and getting over 100fps. The DLSS3 frame generation input delay is still there, but it's only about as bad as playing with vsync on. 

 

I do agree that the game seems awkwardly plonked between Vermintide/L4D/B4B and GTFO. I want to get a bit better at it and see how it distinguishes itself at the higher difficulties. 

 

What is interesting is that no matter what you do, any combination of settings including vsync, DLSS2/3, reflex, turning everything off altogether, it still has this swimmy feel. Like the centre of gravity for the character is too far forward, even though the FOV is OK. It's odd.

[Nathan Wind]

I'm 17 hours in now, playing on the 2nd and 3rd difficulty levels and I think I might just prefer it to Vermo's. Still early days but the FPS play as Sharpshooter is really chunky and satisfying. I generally prefer FPS games to melee combat ones so the slight bias towards the former is pushing my buttons.

[NecroMorrius]

Crashing constantly since the latest update. Constantly. None of this bodes well for a game supposedly out in a few days. 

[smithstock]

I've been playing this on a 3070 and had to knock down a whole load of the settings, and put it to fullscreen mode to get 60fps. It can't be that demanding can it?

[NecroMorrius]

Those constant crashes aren't going to optimise themselves now.

 

Yeah, it's just... not very good. Seemingly all they've done is hobbled most of the systems from Vermintide. All the weapons feel bad, all the classes feel bad, the game has even worse optimisation, the levelling and perk systems are less engaging, the maps are less interesting. The mix of ranged and melee doesn't really work. You need a 5090 Ti to run it and it crashes constantly. All they really had to do was make Vermintide with guns and they've fallen over themselves to make something a bit rubbish instead. Still, I'll hold out for launch. Hmm.

[NecroMorrius]

Seems to be running quite a bit better after the 5GB launch patch. 

[NecroMorrius]

There are new Nvidia drivers for this, which add Geforce Experience optimisation support. Geforce Experience set to a 50/50 mix of quality/performance suggests turning off RTX completely and running in DLSS performance mode. On a 4090  

 

But the optimisation doesn't work, because the Darktide launcher rewrites your settings on launch every time you install new drivers.

[Stevie]

After having given up on the beta due to constant crashes, I actually purchased this today and it ran perfectly on my 3070. 

 

I played a few missions with random strangers as a preacher, and it was exhilarating. I've never played Vermintide, but the first person melee combat in this is the best I've ever experienced in a computer game. It just works. The gameplay is solid as a rock. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[NecroMorrius]

When someone with a mechanical HDD joins your game

 

[Matt Defis]

Still not sure whether I should pick this up or wait a little while until they've ironed out the problems, people seem really mixed on it.

[Kayin Amoh]

Tried it on PC. Game itself looks really cool, but it runs like ass on my machine and it crashed during what looked like an extraction in the tutorial. Gonna wait for the Series X version, but it does look like it has a lot of promise.

[Nathan Wind]

40 hours deep and I absolutely love it. Just got my sharpshooter to 30 so it's time to start a new class.

 

I prefer this to either of the Vermo's, and in fact, even the L4D's. Best game of this type for me. The boltgun and chainsword are outstandingly chunky.

[Matt Defis]

Bit the bullet and got it on Steam, add Yswr if anyone fancies a game.

[Hass]

I've been playing this for a bit now, just got my Veteran to 10 and have played around with the magic dude a bit but couldn't get on with him. It's all...ok? Feels like LFD2 but the game director and levels are less interesting. I get that there's a focus on melee but it feels like it all becomes button bashing pretty quickly. The game setting is wonderfully realized though. I'm playing it on the GFN 3080 tier and it looks fantastic and hasn't skipped a beat. Still can't put RTX on without horrible performance, hopefully NVidia putting the 4080s in this month will fix that.

 

Not sure if I want to keep pushing on with it although it does seem to keep pulling me back in each evening at the moment so it's doing something right.

 

 

[NecroMorrius]

This seems to be running a bit better now, which is great. But across the five or six games I just played, I couldn't help but notice everyone was TERRRRRRRRRRIBLE. Normal co-op stuff I suppose. Three lights out rotation maps in a row where I was the only person with a torch. Everyone hoovers up everything while one guy lags behind with nothing. Everyone pulls everything while the team is already in combat. Nobody calls out anything, nobody uses their abilities, everyone's shooting at point blank range and running out of bullets, everyone shoots or wanders into the demonhost however quickly you mark it. Everyone gets lost and runs off alone even despite you marking the route. It's just wild. Wondering what it's doing for matchmaking because I'm getting comparatively very low level players who shouldn't be queueing for that difficulty yet. Might try it on gamepass and see what the player pool is like.

[NecroMorrius]

Latest update: We've had the whole "we hear you" apology from Fatshark and they've paused some of the moneymaking content cycle to actually make the game work. It's in a much better state now, Xbox version has been delayed along with DLC plans etc. It's currently fairly good fun to play and running a lot better. But the above problem remains. It's frankly bizarre how bad the player base is - like they've never played a video game before. That's not just me being unfair, these people frequently can't find their way out of the starting room without being told where to go. It's really strange. Frequently when soloqueueing on quickplay you'll be thrown into a game which has barely gotten round the first corner where everyone is incapacitated or dead and you've got 3% HP. Is there something about the Warhammer 40K IP that makes people who don't normally play games spend £30?

[Meh]

I gave this a go a few weeks back, and fell off it so hard.

 

I picked the Psyker class, and I felt so powerless. Sure, I can pop heads - but when there's 50 bodies with heads attached running toward you, it all feels a bit pointless.

 

Probably playing it all wrong, but first impressions were not great.

[NecroMorrius]

Give it another try now, there was a huge patch in last week of Feb. 

 

I finally got chucked into a raid with a bunch of level 30s (I'm 26 atm) and it was fantastic fun. Very challenging with everyone needed to stick to their roles, which we sort of figured out as we went on (they didn't seem to speak English). As a sharpshooter I was countersniping and keeping the hordes of ranged enemies at bay, calling them out and generally providing ranged support, with a switch to melee whenever needed. They were doing sensible things like letting the Ogryns carry barrels, standing near each other to retain coherency, not looting during fights, prioritising enemies in some sort of order, calling out danger and using items effectively. Really top stuff, I got to see how the game works when everyone is firing on all cylinders. Then I queued up again and got 3 level 5s who didn't bring their flashlights again. Edit: Then I got 3 level 30s speedrunning a mission on the easiest difficulty, haha.

[Matt Defis]

I'm still playing and a PUG group on PC will get through Heresy most of the time I find.

[NecroMorrius]

Steam or Gamepass? I was going to try both as an experiment but I forgot, it's two different pools. I'm assuming it's down to a small player pool, there's usually only 3-7k players on Steam. I've been mostly playing on malice because I figured anything higher would be a death sentence, and during malice I'm encountering loads of very low level players (<5) who don't seem to know what they're doing. I know level isn't an indicator of time or skill, it could be their 6th character for all I know, but their behaviour suggests they haven't learned the basics yet. It's a really mixed bag. I wonder if paradoxically I ought to increase the difficulty level to see if it increases the average player quality. I'll give it a go. Ironically the last time I played I dropped it to sedition and picked a low engagement zone to quickly finish a mission for a challenge, and was matched with 3 level 30s who were speedrunning too and demolished the boss in 3 seconds.

 

I'm hoping people come back to it, it's in a much better state now. Why they didn't just wait a month or two, or release into early access for a little bit, I have no idea. But sounds like the usual studio/management interference. 

[NecroMorrius]

Nah, 4 Heresy missions in a row with exclusively level 1-5 people and bots. Absolutely fucking impossible. I did see a single level 30, but we had two bots on our team. Interesting that matchmaking is almost always instant whether using quickplay or selecting the mission, so it can't be putting much effort in.

 

Just for kicks I queued up for another low intensity, lowest difficulty mission and got... 3 level 30s who blitzed through it in ten minutes. Really strange, but oh well. 

 

Edit - and again, three times in a row, in both directions. 3x easy missions populated with level 30s who absolutely rinsed it, 3x heresy missions with level 1-10 players who die in the first encounter. My guess is that the economy is broken to the point that all the high level players are running low level content at 10x speed rather than high level content.

[Matt Defis]

I'm playing on Steam, can add me if you want Yswr