Purpose of the Grind

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Feedback
1

With Winds of Magic releasing this month, the topic of grinding (either leveling or crafting/loot) in Vermintide 2 has made a bit of a come back. I wanted to revisit it again as well as it seems this mechanic is pretty iron-bound to Fatshark’s design philosophy.

Bias Warning:

I am very much against the current grinding systems in place. I find it takes away from the main feedback loop that I play the game for (A.K.A. running missions). I can’t even begin to estimate the amount of times I sat in my crafting menu re-rolling stats (even on reds), thinking I was close to just pressing ESC > Quit Game. It’s an aspect of the game I consider a complete liability to player enjoyment.

Despite that, I wanted to try and compile a list of pros/cons to try and help make the conversation organized so we can discuss and maybe (if we’re lucky) try to get an understanding of why Fatshark chose certain decisions about Vermintide 2’s game design and if that philosophy will continue into the future of DLC/Expansions or if it might shift.

If anyone would like to add to either side with bullet points I’ll be happy to update the OP to add them with credit.

Pros:

  • Helps situate new players to the main game-play loop without requiring theory-crafting and robust customization.
  • At one point, high-level players were required to play lower difficulties (assuming this was originally to generate mentor relationships) to attain crafting material (no longer applicable with dust conversions).
  • Customizing your play-style (min-maxing). **This could also be considered a negative if there isn’t enough variety to make the min-maxing feel worth the time investment (I.E. ARPGs like Diablo and Grim Dawn are drowning in variety).
  • It also allows getting used to the new Talents, Careers and weapons one-by-one without getting overwhelmed and to more naturally find the ones that suit you well. (Yzneftamz)
  • It somewhat encourages trying out the other characters and new setups, as you get new stuff and eventually max out your first character, even more so if you want to make your bots better too. (Yzneftamz)
  • There’s advantage to having a progression system, but I think VT1 did it better in many aspects. You start with some basic gear, and get better gear from doing content. (BizarreSalp)

Cons:

  • Takes (sometimes significant) time away from the main attraction.
  • Time invested may not feel worth the reward (I have counted upwards of ~2 minutes to re-roll a single trait before, using modded crafting menu with instant re-rolls).
  • RNG can and will inflate the amount of time investment required for no positive trade-off to player enjoyment. What are players getting in return for this? It’s completely one-sided like casino house rules to screw players over using statistical mathematics. I suppose an argument can be made for cosmetics, but… why?
  • Grind is required if you want to play at your maximum potential. You obviously don’t have to do this, but I always feel like I’m screwing my teammates over if I don’t- you never know if that +20% health may have saved a clutch or not. Break-points are also potent variables in this.
  • New players are required to level up at least one character to 30 to play with high level friends. If they want to try a new character they must do the same. Legend players privately inviting low levels is the exception, not the rule. Difficulty choices have historically always worked fine for FPS games.
  • Meta will always cause specific setups to be considered optimal. An alternative for this in a game that isn’t drowning in variety is to make some properties/traits baseline to the character classes and generate unique traits for weapons so it’s more difficult to ascertain the objective benefit or liability of any particular weapon as they can behave drastically different depending on the context.
  • It is just stupid, like I craft weapon after 2k hours in the game and I get some 297 crap, than 299 crap than 298 crap item… before I finally get 300… than I have to go and scrap those 3, which takes some more time so I don’t have mess in inventory… it’s just irritating and should not be there at all. (flisker)

TL;DR to Fatshark: What is the reasoning to go down a fairly grind-heavy leveling and crafting system in this game and what were the benefits of such a system from the devs’ prerogative? Are there any discussions internally about possibly changing that to a more streamlined experience in the future?

Cheers.

5 Likes
2

It seems to me that you’re considering the crafting system part of the grind, while I at least think it’s quite separate and should be treated as such. They do have some common ground though, with item Power acting as a bridge between them.

As for the actual discussion, I think I’ll start with something about my personal experiences. When I started the game, I had enough to explore and learn in the game and I jumped between the characters enough that the character leveling didn’t feel like a grind really. I can easily imagine that if you do the (more typical, it seems) approach of leveling one character fully and then moving on to another it can feel a lot more grind-ey. It allowed me to get to know the characters, Careers and Talents little by little, without overwhelming me at any point. As an added bonus, it did the same for the different weapons - while I had experience in most of them from VT1, not everyone has that advantage, and a lot of them had also changed since then. I could just try the new weapons as I got my hands on them through Crafting or loot.

The Power was a bit different. It still didn’t feel _really_grindy to me, but at some point it turned to more getting my Power up to reach a level where I could (effectively, at least) try the next difficulty. I think I also reached the characters’ max levels way sooner than I reached maximum Power, ehich meant again a bit more grindy feeling to that. Still not huge, though, as jumping between characters (and learning to play better) still kept it relatively fresh.

Now that I’ve followed three friends join the game later and starting to raise their levels and Power, it all feels a lot slower. Looking from the sidelines, it feels like it’s taking ages to reach high levels on a character and the Power to move on to the next difficulty (yes, I know the glitches to bypass the difficulty limits - I consider that mild cheating, and annoying to do regularly). I don’t know how they feel about it, but I could ask sometime, I guess. It has seemed though that the pace us more experienced players have given them have produced some problems of its own - jumping down the deeper end of the pool with your friends isn’t the easiest way to learn to swim (though it could be fun at least for some). I’m not sure if they have enough time to take in all the new stuff (how new Careers, Talents and weapons work) while trying to survive on Champ and later Legend with us, especially with their low Power and lack of Talents making their survival even more difficult.

So, as the first extra point (and the most important point, imo) to the Pro side: it also allows getting used to the new Talents, Careers and weapons one-by-one without getting overwhelmed and to more naturally find the ones that suit you well.
Second, it somewhat encourages trying out the other characters and new setups, as you get new stuff and eventually max out your first character, even more so if you want to make your bots better too.

I think my first point is better looked at from the counterexample: If there were no leveling whatsoever and everything was available from the start, new players would be completely overwhelmed by all the options and mechanics. What character and Career to use? What weapons to use? What do I do with all these Talents? Wtf do I do with crafting? And how do I actually play this game in the middle of testing everything out? I remember playing several games where that was exactly the problem - too many things to learn and to choose from too early on, especially combined with some complex mechanics (that this game has).

So all in all, in my opinion, there are significant reasons for the leveling approach to exist, and it’s good to take things somewhat slow, but it can be a bit too slow. Allowing slightly faster leveling would help (though I’d say more frequent double EXP weekends could already do a lot for it), and so would more frequent Deeds for that extra loot to get your Power up. After all, that’s been the only use for our group’s Champ and lower deeds for quite a while now…

2 Likes
3

I think you’re right, that there’s advantage to having a progression system, but I think VT1 did it better in many aspects. You start with some basic gear, and get better gear from doing content. I’d kind of love to see Power removed, and have items just have a set power; orange-tier weapons could be the equivalent of 600 power, for instance.

2 Likes
4

My guess is, they think that it is the thing that increases game longevity/player retention, but fail to see that it is not the case with VT2. This is not WOW.

And I doubt they would say something like that openly so… answer to that question is most probably not coming :smile:

It is just stupid, like I craft weapon after 2k hours in the game and I get some 297 crap, than 299 crap than 298 crap item… before I finally get 300… than I have to go and scrap those 3, which takes some more time so I don’t have mess in inventory… it’s just irritating and should not be there at all.

And that is just one dumb aspect of this along many others.

5 Likes
5

I’d love for weapons to just have consistent hero power, but I don’t think having it bound to rarity is a good idea - that’d force newbies even harder to prioritise orange/red gear while levelling.

At least atm anything under an orange can still have decent hero power even if no one at max level is going to want them for lack of traits, if blues and under didn’t even have comparable hero power they’d be even more junk than they already are.

imo once you hit 300 you should only get 300 hero power gear, nothing under. It’s just annoying to get gear that’s under 300 even if you only lose out on maybe 1 effective hero power.

Really the whole gear system could use a rework from the ground up, the items you get are utterly forgettable in Vt2, but as Yzneftamz said, while related that’s another discussion in and of itself.

Back on the topic of the leveling grind, I think it’s good to have to level to around 25-30 at least once as for me at least that’s when I started going into Legend, but after that it’s pure tedium and playing with friends who’ve only recently picked it up and want to try all 5 characters it takes even longer to get to that stage. In addition, on certain careers a large part of the way they feel comes from their talents.

I also have friends who leveled one or two careers to max and refuse to level any more as their hero power is so much lower comparatively, which makes the other characters feel weaker to them. Sure, they could drop to Champion to level, but going down a difficulty is boring to them, so they don’t.

A radical solution would be to have one level for all characters, not just careers, but I don’t see FS going that route, so what I instead propose is this: any character at a lower level than your highest level character gets a considerable boost to their leveling speed, proportional to how much higher in level your highest is. That way it cuts down on the grind to catch up on other careers but still requires a decent amount of time spent learning the ropes.

3 Likes
6

This could be another solution, yeah, but I think I’d scale it differently. I think that either giving a flat bonus (double or triple EXP) after the first character is fully leveled until level 30, or tying the bonus to the number of characters leveled up (say, a 25 to 50% bonus per character at 30), similarly limited to reaching level 30, would be my choice.

1 Like
7

I considered that at first but the problem there is that pushes people towards beelining with one character to that level and only then going for another.

2 Likes
8

Something like this would be a pretty darn good middle-ground. Anything that boosts XP gain for your non-maxed classes would help get a lot of people invested who may have been turned off half-way through leveling.

I believe even WoW had a system like that in place at some point due to realizing people might get easily bored of the same progression. Leave the training-wheels aspect but accelerate it when you’ve already proven you can handle the big leagues.

1 Like
9

VT1’s endgame loot situation felt better, but the progression system as you’re leveling up was pretty terrible. I think most people just don’t remember that part because they played it a long time ago. I played VT1 after VT2 and leveling was a terrible chore. I’ve finished everything in the game on NM and am at a point where I want to do Cata but can’t really with bots, and there are still a bunch of weapons that I’ve never even tried, because Ranald never gave me one. And most weapons just sit with their properties locked because I don’t have the dust to burn on unlocking them. The loot drip is painfully slow and a ton of content is locked behind it. VT1’s progression sucks compared to VT2’s. (And it must have been even worse in the pre- bounty board days.)

The one thing that I do like a lot better about VT1 progression is that you don’t have to level each character separately.

4 Likes
10

Oh, absolutely the way you get weapons was bad in VT1. The one red weapon I wanted, the XSword, I still have never gotten!

But . . . the actual weapon progression itself, of just having simple tiers, was very intuitive and easy to understand. Power is an annoying system that doesn’t really add much except a mild feel of power creep. Getting rid of that, and tying damage to the weapon tier itself would feel better, I think. We can still have characters level and get talents, which is satisfying enough.

Combine VT2’s loot chests and the ability to craft any weapon type from a template with the tier system of VT1, and you’d have the best of both worlds. Would this be the best system ever in a game? No, not hardly. But it’s all proven stuff within the game series.

1 Like
11

Honestly, this is pretty close to what I’d recommend; the same goes for @Yzneftamz.

In the past my thought was that you could get +1% experience gained for every level in a character at-or-beyond 30. Or maybe just +1% experience gained for every level in a character! Either would do the trick.

Even for those folks who don’t care for any one character too much and spread their levels evenly, you’d still have +50% experience gained even if all characters are at level 10 (assuming the latter).

In the event of the former, you’d have to get individual characters to 30, but that still means that the players who’ve played to Bardin 30 (+174) could easily clean out the achievements/progress for the characters they dislike, still leaving them feeling accomplished but trimming the grind considerably.

@BizarreSalp, I’m surprised you dislike the power system; it really doesn’t change anything in the end. While leveling, however, it does encourage you to use your strongest equipment which tends to make you wield weapons outside your comfort-zone. This, in my opinion, is a huge bonus for the newbies to the game; it helps them expand and play the full experience Vermintide has to offer as opposed to just sitting with the 1 weapon they’ve tried for the entire game.

2 Likes
12

This topic was automatically closed 7 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.