I now have a bit over 60 hours into the game And have over 300 hrs in vermintide 2. At this point I want to go over and review my thoughts and experiences with the game.
First I want to go over what I like about the game.
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The character creation is pretty good and has a good number of appearance options.
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The gameplay is excellent, I think they did a good job of integrating more ranged combat and ranged enemies into the VT2 formula, and made it sufficiently different from VT2 so it has its own feel.
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Although a bit lacking in number, the maps and environments are beautifully designed and detailed. I regularly find myself stopping to take in the view during matches.
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I like the variety and feel of the weapons. The addition of the different weapon Marks is really neat and helps with a problem I would run into in vermintide where I would like a melee weapon but dislike part of its move set, it also helps increase verity of weapons which is great. I love the addition of the randomized weapon base stats. Although this can make it a bit frustrating when you don’t get high rolls on the stats you want, I really like how it makes each weapon feel even more unique. It probably doesn’t impact gameplay much but I like the feeling that my Heavy Sword is a little different from the everyone else’s.
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I like the the number of weapon blessings and that you can get multiple on a weapon. I also like how impactful many of the blessings feel and how they have noticeable effects on gameplay.
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Although few in number, I like the classes and that they all have a different feel and gameplay style, I also like that you can bring multiple of the same class into matches as opposed to in vermintide 2.
Now on to the things I don’t like/think could be better.
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The game should have been launched as early access, with an apology from the start. Much of the backlash fatshark has gotten could have been avoided if they would have done this. Not really fixable at this point, but for future reference.
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The game seems to be suffering from a serious case of what I would call RNG poisoning. The weapons/gear in the shop are random, the weapon/gear rewards for the weekly contracts are random, the weekly contracts are random, the missions, the mission modifiers, the secondary objectives, and the mission difficulties are all random. RNG can help replay ability but at a certain point it is just needlessly frustrating.
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At a certain point the game kind of stops
rewarding you for playing it. Because the shop is random and on a timer at a certain point you end up with a pile of dockets and nothing worth buying. This encourages people to just long in and check the store for what they want and then log out. -
Crafting is still not in the game, I know you are working on it, but seriously.
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The weekly contracts require a huge amount of time. It is common to see contracts like “Complete 25 missions” or “kill 10 monstrosities” at level 30. It generally takes about 25 minutes to do a mission. That means you have to dedicate a minimum of 10 hours to the game in a week to complete many of these missions. A lot of players aren’t going to have that much time to play, and they shouldn’t be penalized for having a life.
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There is no way to play the mission you want on the difficulty you want. I am not exactly against the random missions and modifiers but it is a problem when it is taking some people who are regularly playing the game months to get to play a certain mission because it simply is never available when they are playing.
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Some of the classes need a bit of balancing, this is something that I am sure will come with time as takes a while to fine tune things, but still needs mentioning.
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Some of the weapon blessings do not feel nearly as good as others and should probably be buffed a bit.
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The character back story pretty good, but doesn’t really seem to have any effect on the game experience. Which is ok, but it feels like it could be more.
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There could be more content in general, more maps, missions, mission modifiers, classes, and free weapon and character skins/outfits would be awesome.
Finally I would like to list some suggestions that I think would help make the game a lot more enjoyable.
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Have the emperor’s gift reward be given after every mission and have its quality be based on mission difficulty. This will give some reason to run missions even when we already have a pile of dockets.
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Either lower the difficulty/time requirements for the weekly contracts or increase the amount of time we have to complete them, or completely get rid of the timer and just have it give a new contract each time you complete a contract.
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Double or even triple the number of available missions at any given time, or even better take and divide the hive city into 4 or 5 sub zones and tie each mission into a specific zone and location.
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Add more missions and mission modifiers. It would be cool to see modifiers like we saw in some of the vt2 weekly missions things like “all roaming enemies are replaced with more powerful elites” or “some enemies randomly explode on death” etc. there is also lots of missions that could be added, a couple defense missions where you just need to defend a key location for a certain amount of time would be pretty cool, or you could have some missions that take us outside of the hive into the wastelands beyond.
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In some of the warhammer 40k table top rpgs, your home world and back story gave you minor stat boosts and negatives. Perhaps that is something you could implement like have characters from hive worlds get +5% sprint speed but -5% toughness or something, then you would feel like your back story actually matters. That could be a balancing nightmare, alternatively you could also add some more voice lines that specifically mention character back story details. emphasized text
I think that mostly covers what I wanted to talk about. I really like this game and hope fatshark will continue working on it, because it has the potential to be so much better. Hopefully this is helpful and makes sense. Feel free to comment with suggestions or disagreements on my thoughts and views.