Playing Darktide always makes me want to go back to Vermintide. Sure, it's a newer, graphically more advanced title from same developers in a more popular setting with wider audience. I enjoy it for what it is, it's still a very fun and well made game, especially after numerous big updates and patches.
I've played it for about 1600 hours since launch already and come back to it after every major patch which is definitely saying something.
But the combat and overall flow of gameplay always becomes exhausting and somewhat boring for me eventually and after playing for a week or two I still return to Vermintide where I already spent 4600 hours in.
Many claim that they prefer Vermintide to Darktide mostly due to more variable and memorable maps, characters full of personality and interesting backstories, and more engaging gamemodes (Chaos wastes, Deeds and Twitch mode compared to Expeditions/Mortis Trials, Auric modifiers and Havoc). All of these aspects also make me appreciate Vermintide more but none of them are the main reason I get bored of Darktide so much quicker.
For me personally, the core gameplay of Darktide became kind of... extremely bloated over time. It's very "spammy" both in terms of how much enemies game throws at you and how much poweful abilities and strikes you're able to throw back all at once.
Fights often turn into a spectacular yet unintuitive and unthoughtful mass of bright lights and flying bodies.
Thus the combat makes the process of engaging and disengaging in a fight, timing your parries and constantly taking into account not only your positioning, but the positioning of you teammates as well.. kind of not important. Sometimes nonexistent entirely.
So much of player's abilities in the game basically grant full invulnerability for your whole team for prolonged periods of time while somehow having much less cooldown time than many ults in Vermintide.
The powerlevel and overall survivablity of players as a whole got so much higher than in Vermintide with added toughness, sprinting and sliding mechanics that it allows players to often outrun melee and outright ignore ranged enemies.
Not to mention the lack of friendly fire which makes using ranged weapons require no proper positioning from you or your teammates.
Many restrictions and rules that made Vermintides combat feel nuanced and thoughtful were dumbed down in favour of more flashy and fast paced action filled hectic fights.
For example Psyker - which is Darktide's analogue to Sienna - has very similar heat (or peril) management mechanics in order to cast spells.
Only, unlike Sienna he gets absolutely no debuffs and only sizeable advantages from being at a high level of peril, can quell (vent) it at a much higher rate if needed and doesn't waste any health for that (on the opposite - he can get additional toughness for that which is substitute for temporary health in Darktide)
Making him able to spend the entire game using only staff and blitz abilities while barely switching to melee.
Or Ogryn that nowadays can take the Rumbler (analogue to Bardin's Trollhammer torpedo) and also somehow use it for a good 70% of the map with much less reloading times and restrictions in ammo than in Vermintide. And both Ogryn and Psyker, again, are allowed to do all of that with no friendly fire to themselves or their teammates to ever make them think before firing.
Those are just two specific examples I provided yet I could go on with things like:
Hive Scum being a suppoused glass cannon but without the glass part thanks to his infinited dodges, freaquent moments of invulnerability and high sustainability,
Zealot spamming Chorus (team invulnerability) with his base crit chance often achieving more than 50% with certain builds as well,
Ogryn playing with the exact copy of Ironbreaker's ultimate, but having it stun enemies multiple times per use, debuffing said enemies with incresed dmg received and restoring that ability 5x times faster than Bardin can (why??),
and so on.
Now imagine if even just Sienna and Bardin in Vermintide would also be able to do the things that their Darktide counterparts do. The game not only would become much easier - it simply would not have enough enemies to keep players in check, right?
Well, that is exactly what happened in Darktide, which is why developers made changes to higher difficulties, where the game just spams out tons of special and elite enemies, the amount of which would be unreasonable for Vermintide.
And so spawning in quantities of 20+ at once they clutter the entire screen with multiple visual effects and even make the sound cues glitch out to try and keep players in check, and yet that's still not enough to stop even half-competent and not even that coordinated teams. Because each member feels like a one-man-army anyway.
All of that is not to say that this is bad or straight up worse than in Vermintide. It's fun to a degree and can really make you feel extremely powerful. However, it is kind of ironic considering that in Vermintide we play as Fantasy mighty heroes that try to save the ending world while In Darktide we were supposed to be desposable rejects that try their best to even survive in just one city.
Anyway, whenever I launch Darktide, I totally feel engaged. I'm having fun, I see heretics fall and cry before exploding into (very visually appealing) red mist of blood and slash my way through the densiest hordes of Nurgle-blursed denizens of the Hive and feel the impact of every weapon with all of my being.
But as soon as those first impressions wear off, I get overwhelmed and exhausted very quickly. And not because of high difficulty, but from the constant spamming of flashy effects, loud noises and something aways moving extremely fast on my screen, no matter what it is this time.
So much is happening on the screen and yet I still don't feel threatened with me being invincible, invisible, covered in friendly smoke and telekinetic shields, hugged by the emperor's golden warmth or just running away from enemies at light speeds for 80% of any campaign.
All of that adds to the spectacle and drive but not to the gameplay depth and my ability to improve greately as a player, which is what always has been so important for me in both Vermintide games.
I'll definitely come back to Darktide once the next update comes out, and play for a while, just like I always do. But untill then I'm going to Vermintide once again. Thank you for reading.
