I like the game but I really do not like where it is going and also that it is not going anywhere in things in which it should. Here is my full review, I hope I can change it back to positive one day.
(+ Bardin and his weapons
(+ good combat and music
(+ good lore
(- things are locked to events and if you miss them you will never get a chance to have them
(- no modding support
(- cannot pause the game even in a sigleplayer game
(- a lot of gamebreaking bugs even after many years
(- not matching and mostly ugly cosmetics and not even one black shield
(- bots still do not work as they should even after many reworks
(- you cannot complete previous seasons of weaves
(- nothing to do with shillings
(- the game often tries to force you to play things you donāt want to play
(- you canāt start single player Quick play or Weekly event
(- rewards for daily logins like in some stupid idle game
(- separate currency for Versus
(- bomb rats
(- beastmen archers
(- blightstormers
(- elf
$40 / 2667 hours = $0.015 per hour of entertainment. Is there any other product in your life with that kind of return on investment? I think you may just be done with the game. I have around 1200 hours in Vermintide, havenāt played it in over 6 months and donāt think I will regularly ever again. I love it to pieces, but Iāve āfinishedā it. Theyāve supported it since 2018, 6 years of mostly free updates, maybe its just time to find your next passion?
The problem is, many of those hours werenāt entertaining. Many times Iāve started the game expecting to have fun, but ended up disappointed, angry, or just plain sad because of the things I mentioned. I like the game a lot, but it just has a lot of bad things that could be easily fixed, but nothing has been done about them for years and instead more bad things have been added.
No game is perfect and the longer you play the more youāll notice the imperfections. Up to you how you handle them: You can accept, laugh, work around them. Or, you can fixate on them and your vision of āhow the game should beā and let it drive you insane until you hate the game instead of loving it.
Hoping you can take a break and come back to it with a fresh perspective.
I understand how you feel; the game is getting stale for me too. Iām at well over 3000 hours, and Iāve gotten a lot of enjoyment from it, but it does get pretty old seeing things I have little interest in, like Versus, come out while there are countless problems that have been left unaddressed for years.
The lack of matching cosmetics is a small one, but after so many years, itās kind of silly that the game has so many issues that have gone unaddressed for so long, despite many players, new and old, having gripes about them.
Hereās my list of negatives in no particular order:
3000+ hours and still havenāt quite cleared out the content you can buy for silver shillings. I make real money faster than I can get in-game currency and so I have all the premium cosmetics, and I usually buy them immediately, but I think Iām a few months of gaming away from getting all the silver shilling purchases, and I simply donāt play that much anymore.
Lack of modding support and poor implementation as a substitute for many modded features like numeric UI and Crosshair Kill Confirmation.
Crafting resources pile up to no end, with no use for them.
I now have all the red Veteran Items and every Veteran Skin for every weapon, but at one point, I had to re-roll orange weapons and spend 20 minutes slowly churning out 10 blue dust to 10 green dust.
Limited Inventory Space. Even after clearing out all my Deeds and deleting them, I still have such a small inventory that I canāt have more than maybe 10 more Veteran weapons before itās 100% full, and I still havenāt finished getting Veteran weapons to have one for every build.
Broken Weekly Events like Bomb Rats and Ranaldās Surprise, where bots blow players off the edge, and itās especially broken in the Chaos Wastes where there are too many ledge cheese spots and cheap deaths.
Weaves are dead, and none of my friends are still playing this game like they were a year ago. Iām not capable of soloing past a certain point, so I had to give up on them.
Stale and/or dead talents on careers that are too niche to be worth it most of the time or just plain not great and not fun.
Niche or Crappy Weapons. Even after the ābalance update,ā thereās broken stuff like the weak garbage Repeater Pistol and then broken garbage like the Griffon-Foot Pistols. Some are okay but leave you too vulnerable, like the 1H Axe and Crowbill, which lack cleave in a game where you constantly fight hordes.
Non-Matching Cosmetics, and this is such an easy fix. I could pull open the texture maps for the surface of the helmets, and easily within a few hours, make matching helmets for all the armors. Normal Map, Specular Map, Bump Map, Emissive Map, Metallic Map, Environmental Mapāmost probably donāt need to be changed except the Diffuse Map, and itās as simple as importing an existing modelās Diffuse Map into GIMP, duplicating it into layers, changing the colors for layers to a new color scheme, merging parts of the layers, and exporting it with a copy of the model. Voila, new matching helmets. How hard is that, Fatshark? I do it in an afternoon when modding other games. Of course, it needs to be integrated into the game as a reward, and thereās probably some back-end stuff, but they add new cosmetics and wonāt fix the old ones.
Useless Weapon Traits. The weapon traits are Swift Slaying and Opportunist for stagger breakpoints, and then sometimes Parry for niche builds. The rest are pretty trash outside of maybe a few very niche builds. As for properties, I donāt think anybody seriously uses damage reduction against one type of enemy, even in a niche build.
Terrible Chaos Wastes Boons. Thereās been a lot of work on the Chaos Wastes, but somehow they keep missing the mark with boons. Itās now a bomb fest with bomb boons everywhere. For some reason, they made some boons that lead to powerful regen, health, and cooldown combos more rare, but they didnāt change them to Veteran-tier boons or put them in the right category. They still have team-killing trash barrel boons that are too situational to be worth it. Right now, Dwarf Ranger can still obliterate everything after an Altar of Strife and Morgrimās Bomb acquisition. In fact, all the bomb boons favor that one career specifically and Engineer. The boons to traits everyone once praised have made it so that I havenāt once gotten Mananās Tempest in over 100 games, and I donāt expect to ever see most of them again because thereās a fistful of mediocre traits nobody gives a crap about, and youāll see them 90% of the time.
Versus matchmaking is a hot mess. They drew in hundreds of new players with Versus, and they donāt know how to play at all. They get put up against teams of people like me with thousands of hours. They have a ranking system, and it takes a lot of hours in Versus to get a higher rank, so generally, the higher ranks are better. The bare minimum would be to try to match players of similar rank, but now there are so few Versus matches because I think the new players were driven away by getting crushed constantly. I saw one level 1 Sienna player just repeatedly overheat, go down, and then quit within about six minutes. The lobby often clears and turns into a revolving door for the losing side, and so most of the time, Iām joining a match already in progress where my side is losing as I queue by myself.
I agree with everything you wrote but this. I have exactly the opposite problem: Almost 50k shillings and nothing to do with them. I would gladly buy even one red dust for 1k shillingsā¦
I agree thatās a problem, they should offer red dust or something to do with it, and all the useless crafting supplies. I havenāt focused on the kinds of activities that get silver shillings. You have less time in the game than me, and somehow have them all; to me, thatās impressive. You must do a lot of regular weekly events and weekly quests.
If they added the missing matching helms and armors to the shop, or more unique weapon skins for more variation of shield/weapon combos with some expensive fancy ones, then silver shillings, then Iād probably start collecting shillings. Right now, Iāve got all my favorite cosmetics, and I donāt enjoy farming coin.
For me, as a player with 6700h playtime the negatives are :
badly implemented numeric ui
no implementation of well tested and highly requested bot ai mods
bots which are chasing specials with melee weapons (sticky bots mod would help)
no new weave seasons/cant reply old ones
no new interesting deed modifiers, or adding existing modifiers to the deeds
no craftable deeds
limited inventory slots
Game modes which split the community further
locked rewards behind certain game modes
every further patch makes missing sound cues reoccur
Overall it is a very good game and i dont think that it deserves a negative review, we are just saturated. Even modded realm becomes boring with its difficulties.
Thats why i want my craftable modifiers somehow, so i can craft my own maps. Modded is only about C3DWOWNS+ and dutch spice, which feels like always the same after a while. There is not much next to it. Thats why i want to be able to craft my own experience at official realm. Maybe even with lobby browser activated or even quickplay and an option where players can tick the different modifiers which they want to join at quickplay.
Iāll add Iām tired of friendly fire and team damage. It doesnāt enrich the game play experience, itās just a nuisance. It also triggers things it shouldnāt like Gromil Armor and certain Chaos Wastes boons.
I have my list of negatives (for Adventure mode), number 1 & 2 are the things that drive me crazy, especially 2 (am i the only one?).
Uneven terrain, lots of debris and trash on the ground that makes movement and dodging not fluid. Easy to get stuck and die, unless you memorize every map detail. Map design is focused on looks, instead of gameplay.
Visual clarity is bad, all enemies blend in too much (in a fast paced slasher thats not ideal for gameplay). And it becomes abhorrent on maps that come after Helmgart: like trail/tower of treachery and karak outdoor maps. Grey colorless slush. For context i set graphics on Low except textures.
Beastmen have poorly telegraphed animations for attacks, and minotaur have ghost range, really hard to strike him in the back (when he is focused on ally), and he is doing insane pressure, other bosses are not even close.
Temp HP generation is a feast or famine depending on weapon & thp talent. No alternative to swift slaying trait in 90% of cases, base attack speed is too low and feels awful. Swift slaying builds with reliable proc are strong, but require excessive clicking or a macro. The game is lacking slow, methodical playstyles with a proper reward.
Assassins flying through the crowd to pounce. Blightstormers, rattlings, globadiers attacking from way too far, its a melee game dammit. Packmasters creeping through the crowd, requiring certain ults or bombs to counter, little margin for error.
Mini-boss fighting is weird, in a vacuum is boring, with a horde - often a really high skill check on map knowledge where not a single mistake is allowed, which would be fine if the maps were better for movement (see point 1). That, or you take boss killers who anticlimactically nuke them in seconds, the discrepancy in boss damage is too high.
I wouldnāt rate the game negatively, its a mixed bag, when the design aligns the game shines. Nobody develops melee like that (so many Souls-likes nowadays). And the teamplay, brawling vs hordes and elites side by side - is very cinema. Canāt criticise infantry and elite enemies design, its that good.
A negative review with 2667 hrs is only justifiable in my opinion if the game is harmfully addictive. You are just done with the game. Learn to be okay with that.
I would counter and say the map design IS focused on gameplay, and the uneven terrain & obstacles are a big part of that. It requires situational awareness to not get stuck somewhere; furthermore, you can use those obstacles and uneven terrain to your advantage when kiting enemies.
I notice this on some maps but playing on higher graphics settings helps a lot. As does the quality of your monitor. I was playing on a crappy old one for years and finally got a proper gaming monitor a few months ago, made a huge difference.
I feel you big time on this one. Iāve always hated the swift slaying meta build and almost always use other traits, but itās so much harder to make other builds effective at higher difficulties. The margin for error in timing and positioning is so much smaller. That does make these other builds more challenging which is more fun for meā¦ then every now and then I switch to SS build and āwow, this is cheesy easy nowā.
TBH this is the reason I fire up Vermintide 1 from time to time. The combat is slower, more methodical, and feels infinitely more complex as a result.