[Update #2]: Darktide's big Crafting and Progression update has now arrived with far more improvements than expected!

[Update]: Darktide's Update 1.0.25 has buffed Psykers, Ogryn and somehow even Veterans.

While Darktide's moment-to-moment gameplay experience is phenomenal, the endgame and progression systems leave a whole lot to be desired. Getting good weapons is extremely hard and mostly relies on random items from the hourly shop rotation, the upgrade system is still unfinished despite being promised for December, and some of the weekly missions are so grindy that you can't realistically complete them without treating Darktide as a secondary job.

In order to sort these types of problems out, as well as restore the community's faith in the game, Darktide studio Fatshark has now decided to undergo some rather drastic measures. Effective immediately, the studio will be suspending all work on seasonal content, new microtransactions and the Xbox Series X|S version in order to focus all of their efforts on addressing community criticism and getting Darktide to a much more stable position.

"Over the next few months, our sole focus is to address the feedback that many of you have," explains the brief developer update. "In particular, we will focus on delivering a complete crafting system, a more rewarding progression loop, and continue to work on game stability and performance optimization."

As far as my personal wish list is concerned, I would like to see three very important things:

1) Easier access to high tier gear

I'm perfectly fine with a bit of grinding in order to get the top tier items, but there definitely needs to be an easier way to acquire items that are just 'good'. I've played Darktide for around 150 hours so far and I've yet to find a single Thunder Hammer with solid stats & blessings. This, I'm sure you'll agree, is simply ridiculous for a game that's all about experimenting with different playstyles.

2) A balance pass for perks and blessings

One of the major reasons why so many weapons suck are the obviously underpowered perks and blessings. A bunch of blessings like "+5% reload speed after sliding" or "+20% damage on your first hit, and -20% on each subsequent hit" seem to exist purely to annoy players, and I would love to see those either reworked into something useful or removed entirely.

3) Mission selection

Regardless of what difficulty you play on, Darktide offers a very, very small selection of missions for you to explore. If you're particularly unlucky, it's entirely possible to end up playing the exact same maps over and over again without there being anything you can do to mix things up. Things get even more ridiculous if you want to do specific side quests like Scriptures or play around with interesting map modifiers like 'lights out' as all of that is just layers upon layers of randomness.

Naturally, there's a bunch of other things that need to be fixed or improved, so don't take this as any sort of definitive list. It's mostly just stuff that I feel would greatly improve Darktide's endgame and longevity without requiring an absurd amount of effort on Fatshark's part.

My little ramblings aside, the final thing worth mentioning is that Darktide will be getting a small update later this week. No exact details have been given just yet, but I'm expecting to see at least a couple of balance changes, performance tweaks and perhaps even the reintroduction of the various map modifiers like fog that were disabled a while back.

Whatever the future might bring, I'll make sure to let you know once the mysterious update goes live. Until then, have fun smacking around Nurgle cultists!