I’m sure many of these things have been brought up before by others, but I thought I’d lend my voice to the discussion as well, just in case it helps. Since I figured it’d be less than ideal to post about every little thing separately, I thought I’d just mash my feedback into one post.
In general, the game is carrying on from Vermintide in that it is insanely good fun at it’s best. The combat is still extremely satisfying and rewards skill, and the watercooler moments come thick and fast. Few things in gaming are as exhilarating as finishing a particularly hectic run on Legend.
The game does, however, have lots of little problems that when piled together form a pretty sizable lump of irritation, at least when it all goes wrong at once. Here are the things I think are problems, organized roughly by category:
Weapons
While weapons generally feel excellent, the balance is still pretty wonky. Probably 60%+ of weapons feel extremely underwhelming on Legend, and if I’m honest, even on Champion. Related to this: the abundance of armor, discussed further down.
Big weapons: This should probably be it’s own section. I don’t understand why we need movespeed slow when swinging. The fact is, a weapon swinging slowly is a huge disadvantage. Incidentally, this is why historically there was no such thing as a slow or heavy melee weapon. But, I get it, this is a game, we have to balance somehow. But: slowness is such a massive weakness. A weapon that is slow needs big things to make up for it, and doing slightly more damage per hit or hitting more targets is just not enough. Almost all big weapons also have severely limited dodging (which in itself is a HUGE hit to effectiveness) that I just do not understand why we need to be slowed down when swinging as well. It just feels awful. In general, I think the whole balance between big and small weapons really needs to get looked at.
The one-handed axe feels awkward compared to how it felt in game one, on account of it being slower. I’d rather Fatshark had kept the absolute one-target-per-strike limit on this weapon, and kept it’s speed. It was probably my favorite weapon in all of V1 because it was very powerful in the right hands, but had a significant and distinct weakness. Now, with it being slower, the fact that it cleaves slightly more really doesn’t make up for it.
The Greataxe on the other hand just feels clunky. I think it’s to do with how slow it is to get the block up. In the first game, block-cancelling worked really well on this and it felt incredibly satisfying. Now it just feels like the weapon doesn’t do what I’m telling it to do. It’s still fun, just not as fun as it was. I’m hoping Fatshark removes the silly block speed slowdown.
The RNG-ness of it all
You obviously need some level of RNG in levels. Otherwise, you could just reduce everything down to a number, and that would be no fun at all. However, I think the difficulty of the game is currently way too random and down to luck. One run might be fine, the next run you get 4 chaos warriors, 3 specials and a horde when you are trying to navigate the house early in Screaming Bell.
The thing is, there’s fair challenge, and then there’s this. Having the game throw a boss and everything else in it’s arsenal at you when you are stuck in a horrible place for fighting and can’t really do anything to change the situation does not feel like fair challenge, it feels like the game cheesing you. There are still boss spawns that are absolute garbage, like the one in the barracks in Righteous Stand. Just because someone can occasionally squeak out a victory in a situation like that does not mean it’s reasonable.
Bottom line: I wish the difficulty was more steady, instead of sometimes having absurdly easy runs, and sometimes the game just deciding that the run is over.
The Absolute Deluge of Armor
This I think is in large part responsible for the ubiquity of what weapons we see in higher difficulties, particularly Legend. This has nothing to do with difficulty, and everything to do with the fact that it makes non-AP weapons just feel like they are not worth bringing.
I’m glad the difficulty isn’t just “slap a damage and health modifier on everything”, and I think nastier enemy compositions is the way to go, but there has to be another way, because right now, it’s severely limiting the pool of truly viable weapons. Maybe have less armor, but more non-armored elites to make up for it?
Rewards
Seriously, I’m just gonna say it: lootboxes from Champion should not be able to contain whites for level 20+ characters. I mean, come on. Same way that Legend boxes shouldn’t contain greens.
Skins & Thin(g)s
I get that everybody and their grandmother is having a prolonged hissy fit about hats and outfits (which incidentally I don’t understand. It’s a first person game, you can’t even see the cosmetics 99% of the time. Why is everyone freaking out?), but what I’d really like to see is more weapon skins. You know, those things that we stare at for most of the game. There’s so much more that could be done with them!
Anyways, that’s the feedback I can think of right now. Thanks for reading.