Heyo Everyone,
We’re back again with another dev blog for the Unlocked and Loaded update coming on September 26.
This time, we’ll be talking about the new QoL feature coming to Darktide: the Party Finder (formerly mentioned as the Group Finder).
In this blog, we’ll discuss where the idea began, what features will be included, and how we will continue to build it with player feedback.
Shout out to Jonathan, the Game Designer in charge of bringing this to life, for sitting down for an interview to give us the scoop on this upcoming feature.
Where Did the Idea for This Party Finder Come From?
The answer to this is two-fold. First and foremost, Darktide is a co-op game. It’s meant to be played with others. But right now, a player is a bit limited in forming a team. A player can either use the Mourningstar, or their friend list to form a party before starting a mission. It is too random.
We’ve noticed players using third party places to find parties, such as Discord, Reddit, the Fatshark Forums. This increased even more from the Path of Redemption update because players wanted to group together to work on penances, etc.
Our goal was to provide a place for players to find other like-minded players within the game. For whatever content they wanted! Maybe it’s hardcore grinding, casually trying Auric (without worrying about being flamed), etc.
Further, we wanted to improve the overall social aspect of Darktide in general.
What Features Will Come With the Party Finder?
This will be an evolving feature. Right now, players will be able to find like-minded players based on four criterias: Game Mode, Difficulty, Language and assorted Tags to define what the group is about.
- Game Mode
- Adventure
- Maelstrom
- Special Assignments
- Difficulty
- Sedition
- Uprising
- Malice
- Heresy
- Damnation
- Auric - Heresy
- Auric - Damnation
- Language
- English
- French
- German
- Spanish
- Italian
- Portuguese
- Polish
- Russian
- Cantonese
- Mandarin
- Japanese
- Korean
- Assorted Tags
- All Welcome
- Quickplay
- Casual
- Hardcore
- Contract(s)
- Penances
- Power Leveling
- Grinding
Building the Party Finder Together With Players
Earlier, we mentioned this would be an evolving feature. When we were planning this feature, we came up with a lot more tags and ways to form a party. However, we are working towards building Darktide together with players and inviting them into the conversation. We could’ve added 200+ tags, but we didn’t want to add clutter which players might not engage with in the first place.
Instead, we want to optimize this feature together with players. We wanted to start with this solid base and invite everyone to tell us how we can make this feature work better for their gameplay style.
As players try out this feature from Sept. 26, let us know what tags you’d like us to include. Would you like a tag for only certain classes? (We saw someone ask if you can do an Ogryn-only team. This is something we could implement on a tag side.)
We’ll be looking out for and we’ll be collecting feedback on this topic from launch. Feel free to tag me (StrawHat) or create some threads to consolidate the feedback so it can be passed on to the team! (To set expectations, it’s likely that not every suggestion will make it into the Group Finder but we’ll do our best to include the most requested features.)
OK, that’s it for now! Hopefully everyone understands our goals for this feature and how we’d like to build it up together with feedback from the community. This way we can continue to make Darktide the best it can be for players.
Until next time!
– The Darktide Team