Leaving this link here in Fatshark’s living room. As a long-standing follower of the subreddit, the frustration speaking out of the comments is alarming. There have been sh!t posts and mindless rants in the past on reddit but this is something else.
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One thing that post forgot to mention is mods. There are games from decades ago that still sell for no other reason than people can mod them in amazing ways. But Vermintide 2 has had terrible mod support and I think that potential has been squandered more than any other part of the game.
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Looking past the “eccentric” wording characteristic of Reddit, I’m inclined to agree here. The game isn’t going in a great direction. Instead of just sticking to what they are equipped to do and what fans want, Fatshark is spending too much time and resources on projects like Weaves and Versus and it’s really starting to show.
I personally am of the opinion that Fatshark wasn’t/isn’t able to accommodate the large amount of players that came in with the release of the second game, and is trying to please everybody rather than just stick to any kind of cohesive vision. Countless content producers, be it in games, music, or whatever have all fallen for the same trap.
The lack of TLC was evident even in the pre-release beta, but there was potential for improvement, especially knowing how committed Fatshark was to improving VT1 and expanding on what players wanted over its lifecycle. That commitment now just seems… gone. If they really want people to keep playing and enjoying their game at this rate, expanded mod support is crucial.
I still play Vermintide 2 sometimes. It’s a fun game.
As a sidenote: I see comments saying things like “Deep Rock Galactic has devs who put in effort” and things like that. Just remember Fatshark was once like this too. Just leaving that out there, interpret it how you will.
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Whats really depressing, is that you could search these forums for “state of the game” and get the exact same complaints going back sept '18, and further.
There is no change in the methods FS employ to do things. If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you’ve always got. Broken ptches and glacial content releases.
Please don’t come here and say they’re an indy company - there’s actually over a hundred people working there at least. Independent doesn’t mean small.
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“We don’t do what players want we do what they need.”
The words of a dev that couldn’t be any further from both.
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Thanks for bringing that reddit thread to my attention.
Just another reason to love Deep Rock Galactic: Rock and Stone!
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Yeah… While I’m still having a lot of fun playing and do so pretty regularly, there are many things about the development of this game that make me shake my head. Ever since pre-launch I’ve argued in favor of Fatshark, giving them the benefit of the doubt and trying to keep the mood around here positive. Fatshark isn’t perfect but it was always obvious to me that they were genuinely passionate and trying, and Vermintide 2 IS fun as hell. Heck, I was enough of an advocate to be accused of white knighting and being paid by FS and the like… but the entire mess around pre-WoM beta and the release was enough to finally break what faith I had.
The gameplay being amazing is what has always drawn me to Vermintide. As many have already said, the visceral, incredible feeling first person melee combat system is simply amazing, haven’t found another game like it. Sure, the graphics are cool and the characters are awesome and so on and so forth… but it’s the combat gameplay that keeps me (and many others) hooked. If you took all the fluff away and distilled it down to just the combat, think something like Superhot, I would still play that solo for many hours. And somehow, amazingly, it seems like Fatshark doesn’t realize that is what makes this game so unique and fantastic. Major problems with the combat (the CORE OF THE GAME) go unfixed while they sink tons of time into the Winds of Magic expansion. Don’t get me wrong, I feel like WoM was a good idea on paper and still has potential but was just poorly implemented… but why? Weaves are such a drastic departure from the Vermintide formula for awesome. Combat overhaul came as part of weaves but due to trying to cram so many things into one huge DLC that was botched and took weeks of patches and frustration to get better. And it’s still far from complete in my mind, there’s lots of little annoying bugs that break immersion, cause me to eat damage unfairly, and that kind of thing. Not enough problems that I would be hyperbolic and declare the game “broken” or “unplayable” as many like to do… but enough that it really drives me up the wall after awhile so I have to take a break and play something else.
The bugginess of patches, DLCs, hotfixes, I mean come on, every update… how? How are you constantly bringing back old bugs from YEARS ago? I’ve read some excuses about the codebase being really complex and all these different development branches for different things being based on different points of time in the main branch and all that, and I don’t buy any of it. I work as a software developer and I would have been canned years ago if my results were that bad. There are plenty of good source control tools out there, no excuse for old bugs coming back in like that. And don’t even get me started on testing, we all know by now that not many people at FS actually play the game, or at least not very much. That’s fine, I probably wouldn’t want to play a game I spent that much time working on either, but for crying out loud get some regular testing going! There’s dozens of people on this very forum that would test stuff for you in a special beta branch if you asked, like you did on the last BETA test - that was good!
The last test branch and combat update was a refreshing change of pace and I hope that FS continues in this direction. I’ll probably continue to play regardless, I am lucky to have a few IRL friends who play and we like to hang out and have a few drinks and stab the rats, so even if the online population dies I’ll still be able to have some fun. That would be really sad though, and I’d dearly miss the QP shenanigans that only this game can create.
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Felt like adding my two cents in. The development choices Fatshark has made has been questionable. For example, weaves. Why make this a separate feature from the base game? Why not make cata missions have weave modifiers (lightning, thorns, etc) Why not add “weave mode” into the regular game? i.e. add random modifiers to missions if opted into in matchmaking.
Screw the amulet and rewards, throw all that out. Itʻs not transferrable to regular missions so whatʻs the point? It just further divides the already small community.
I donʻt care about the lack of cosmetics, or additions of new classes and what not. My main concern is that they spent all this time developing weaves when we couldʻve gotten 3-4 new maps, new gear (actual usable gear), new factions (beastmen were a fluke on launch), or even just comprehensive balance changes. But instead we get a weave mode that hardly anyone plays.
The formula for Vermintide 2 is simple: great combat + fun maps + meaningful progression = fun. Thatʻs all you need. I donʻt get why they didnʻt just focus on those three things in terms of the base game instead of giving us a fancy separate mode. Now theyʻre working on versus? Itʻs a nice afterthought, but improvements to the base game should be made waaaaaaay before stuff like this.
Anyway, thatʻs just my opinion on the matter.
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They actually explained in length why Weaves mode was made.
They saw that adding maps (which requires a lot of work) alone don’t make the end game worthwhile for a lot of player (players declined heavily in 1 despite all dlc adding maps and weapons “what players wanted”). So “just sticking to what player want” DOES NOT FACTUALLY WORK (as proven by Vermintide, the 1st one).
So they wanted to focus on a mode that bring a replayable end game content with weaves. Replayable because they were to changed with every season. And end game because you can focus on the next weave with some “automatic upscale” of ennemies/modifier/specials/etc…
Cata missions having weave modifiers would have not been a great idea as it would be actually unattainable for a good chunk of the base. Deeds 2.0 could have used it though.
But the fact that this is on shortened map, is, I think, a good idea. On a normal difficulty (like near weave 50+ when you don’t sleep while playing anymore but you’re not being one shotted by invisible archers), weaves are actually a good experience. Issue is later, where you are forced to make your way through countless bugs, or situations that are kinda boring to begin with (like being one shotted as a tank, or divide your damage by 2).
Lack of replayability was not really the issue there (despite claims, having made through 120, I was pissed by a lot of stuff, but not the lack of replayability), but it could have been, indeed, randomized.
The ranked part is probably the thing that kept weaves from shining as an end game tool.
There’s, indeed, a lack of transferrable reward, that could have been solved a bit by actually making the weaves skins transferrable (via challenges), or other stuff. Cosmetic or meaningful.
On the “actual useable gear”, I don’t really understand, as all weapons done are actually useable. And we do kinda know that new faction don’t require level designers work that much so you can’t really convert less work on maps to another new faction.
Now, on your formula for Vermintide 2, what do you mean by meaningful progression ? Because once you’re maxed on reds, there’s no meaningful progression anymore.
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100% agree. I am starting to think FS struck gold by dumb luck instead of by design and didn’t even realize it since they are now just digging up mud.
Exactly. They don’t have a lead developer worth their salt in place. Any dev who calls themselves a profesional would fight every day to put code control in place. I think the place is now something like booking.com. No profesional wants to end up with such a code base without any tools for quality and version control in place.
Mine left after realizing how long the grind and bad the loot/crafting system is.
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Nothing they ever do will work because the foundation is broken. Players aren’t leaving because they didn’t want what they wanted after all. They are leaving because the core issues with this game have remained unaddressed from the very beginning. Every update is a promise of things getting better, and then finding out they are worse instead.
No host migration/dedicated servers, an insulting loot/crafting system, a completely pointless grind towards hero power, no QoL features whatsover and the mods that provide them being broken after every update, and a software development lookinga game of whack a mole on bugs. (bugs being developer errors, call it what it is.)
No matter what they release it won’t work. But by giving the players what they want, they at least would be doing one thing right.
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Well, besides host migration and dedicated server (which the often quoted as an example of a great game Deep Rock Galactic also don’t have), the loot/crafting system was kinda better in V1, and there was no pointless grind. It didn’t stop the drop.
That does not mean thoses QoL should not be added. That means this was not the priority focus for factual reasons. (not being the main focus, again, does not mean that this should not be added, that only mean this should not be the priority)
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It wasn’t dumb luck I don’t think. I haven’t seen him post on here in months, but as far as I know Ratherdone is one of the devs behind the brilliance that is this game’s combat system. He was always one of the ones to chime in on details related to how weapons behave in the game, among other things.
It’s a shame that poor management decisions have overshadowed the genius of this game.
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Then they should stop everyone else getting in the way of this person.
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I cannot agree with this at all. “Endgame” content is basically by definition endlessly replayable. Static weaves are the complete opposite of endlessly replayable. (Yes, they can change the weaves every season, but the content isn’t even end-game-y enough to last for a month, much less a full season.) But QP maps with added difficulty modifiers – which they already had – are totally replayable, which is why many of us have put thousands of hours into the game.
Also, weaves have a ton of problems.
- Essence grind runs completely counter to their stated goal of encouraging experimentation to complete static challenges, as you cannot experiment with different characters/weapons if you only have one set of upgraded weapons.
- Essence rewards (which are a bad reward) drop to almost nothing when you replay a weave. That’s right, this is “endgame” content that actively discourages replay. How does that make sense?
- The only progression/reward for completing weaves is unlocking the next weave – but there’s a finite number. Finite, non-replayable content is not endgame.
- Winds sequence is tied to difficulty. Thorns, for example, is either Recruit or Cata+. Only two specific winds can be played on Champion, and only two on Legend. (Yes, all can be played on Cata+, but weaves are a bad endgame as already stated; this is part of why they’re also a bad midgame.)
- Virtually nothing ties back in with the main game mode.
The leaderboard is stupid but if weaves were good, people would still play them & just ignore the leaderboard. That’s not why it’s a dead game mode.
I don’t think this game even needs “endgame” content – that’s basically all the game is to start with. It just needs content. Instead of weaves, I would have suggested adding more ways to play the normal game & more meta- stuff to do between maps:
- Winds are (mostly) great. Add them as modifiers in adventure mode.
- Deeds 2.0. Make them craftable with scrap or something. Or just let people pick deed modifiers when they host a map.
- Add nighttime maps year-round.
- Add A Quiet Drink year-round.
- Add cosmetics (and other customization – emotes, additional options on the chat wheel (maybe even voiced?), furnishings/pets/etc for the keep, alternate outfits for Lohner or Olesya) & some way to work toward them. (Lohner’s Emporium sounds like a good idea; hopefully it’s implemented well.)
- Add special meta-quests on existing maps – hidden items, event triggers like Gutter Runner’s Stash, items to carry from A to B, etc. Things like lighting the bonfires for that one seasonal event. Just any type of meta-quest to guide players into specific sequences of maps.
- Add new Okri challenges on existing maps. And not just counting stat challenges like “kill 100 rat ogres on map x”
- Add community events. (These often do end up being counting stat challenges, but more importantly the common goal is just an excuse for people to play together.)
- And add maps! Standalone adventure maps, multi-map new “campaigns”, smaller maps, anything! Just keep them part of the core game mode.
I do understand that making new maps is a lot of work, but there’s a lot of other stuff on that list.
Again, have to disagree. At endgame, re-rolling was less annoying because you could lock the properties and spend dust rerolling the values (which couldn’t decrease), so your item never got worse while you were rerolling it. But actually getting the items in the first place was terribly tedious. There are many weapons I never even tried at all. In V2, endgame crafting is an annoying time sink, but the leveling-up process & acquiring decent weapons to at least play around with them all is a lot more accessible.
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I’m not defending weave replayability, I would prefer them randomized. But I only pointed that replayability wasn’t their actual main issue there. Or even an issue at all until the others issues are solved.
We certainly do not have the same definition of end game content though. But, as it is not your main point, I’ll skip this 
Which I, indeed, pointed either here or during my various posts on the issues and I was not alone (beta or not, essence being one of the point, lack of rewards for the main game).
This is their main issue, and this is what didn’t work with V1. They spend too much time on a new map, and they can’t shorten that time. Which is why they tried weave.
Agree about loot. But doesn’t change crafting part. Quests also made the chase better. But the important point is that thoses QoL additions didn’t bring players back, or didn’t improve the retention as well as they would like. So they had to try stuff. New stuff. Weaves are one of thoses tries. And focusing on improving it rather than forgetting it could actually provide a very good mode, when it will be done well.
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@Froh, I feel like you missed the part where I said
Also, weaves are new maps. They’re not full-length adventure maps, but they are still levels that require overall design & lighting & tuning etc. And I didn’t say only make new full-length maps. These remixed maps are fine, but they shouldn’t be a completely separate game mode.
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Thoses are shortened real maps. Which means that if you make them for Quick Play and not in a separated mode, you’ll have inconsistencies on the length on the map (which already exist to some degree, but I guess you’ll get the point) and the experience itself (which will kinda confuse new players).
Now if you’re speaking about essence itself. I don’t think this is a bad system at all. I would see this system in the main game, rather than not having this system at all in the first place.
How did this not work for V1? It was still selling DLC and had a solid player base right up until V2 came around.
It didn’t work for V2, not because of the maps, but because of all the glaring and unadressed issues the game has.
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But that shouldn’t matter. And any “problems” that might cause have easy solutions.
- Maybe people want only longer maps or only shorter maps? So let them apply a filter on QP, but keep it one shared queue. (The critical part here is the option to queue for everything at once – adventure maps, short maps, night maps, deeds, twitch, etc. – this is what keeps the matchmaking functional and doesn’t split the community. Some people just want to play and will queue for whatever people are running.)
- Maybe people just grind short maps for loot. 1) So what? and 2) Adding the meta-quests that I mentioned to guide people to specific sets of maps counters the incentive to just grind the fastest map.
Also, this “problem” already exists. You can rush through Screaming Bell in 5-6 minutes; Skittergate, The Pit, Horn of Magnus, and many other maps are at least 3x as long.
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