This is an idea which many will probably react against but I feel that I should post it anyway. And the main reason is that this isn’t an RPG but an skill-based action game, so I think that VT3 should streamline even more towards it.
The thing is that except for the banter, having actual named characters serves no purpose to the game. There’s very little story in the game, little non-combat interactions and in my opinion this restricts the game more than it adds to it. That isn’t to say that named pre-generated characters don’t add to the game, just that in this kind of game it don’t add as much as it restricts.
What I would suggest is thus simply that players select a career, select or create an appearence, create your own character and play it without it being fixed to a pre-made character. Banter can be done by selecting a personality for this purpose to the character and they banter with each other depending on what personalities are present.
Pretty much every mechanic currently in use in Vermintide should be portable without much fuss to an arrangement like this.
And perhaps most importantly, new careers, weapons etc. can be added pretty much as FS makes them. As long as its in the lore, there’s nothing holding FS back from implementing new stuff. That could mean wizards of various winds, warrior priests, (ugh) vampires, Bretonnians, Ulricans, Dwarfs and Elves and you name it, to play.
And there’s even a lore reason for this. Lohner can banter with Kruber about Kruber “drilling my lads”, as in Lohner’s lads, and that could easily be taken to mean the characters in Vermintide III. A rag-tag bunch of warriors taking on the Skaven and their Chaos (presumably) allies in the End Times.
I like the U5. Their personalities and banter adds hilarity and flavour to the game. In VT3, I’d like characters with defined personalities. Whether that’s 5 or 10 characters I don’t care. What i don’t like in VT2 is classes - they are too restrictive and make party composition too predictable. Rather than having defined classes, I’d rather each of the U5 have their own specific skill tree that allows you to mix and match different talents, restricted weapons, passives and ults so that a Kerrillian player can be a Handmaiden or Waystalker or Shade if they like or a hybrid class - HandStalker, Shady Maiden etc.
Right now, the ults and passive are really what define classes. Most of the talents really just provide the illusion of difference. The level 5 and 15 talents only serve to restrict weapon choice on certain classes (no 1H axe on RV or dagger on Unchained because of their lack of access to THP on kill and Smiter). The majority of the other talents are just repackaging the same thing - is damage reduction on headshot versus charged attack, or attack speed on push versus striking 3 enemies, really that different? It’s all the same crap. Make me make a real choice: make me choose between increased attack speed OR damage reduction OR a restricted weapon and let me mix and match passives and ults. There would be fewer talents overall, but the permutations of talents, ults, passives and weapons would increase and my choices would actually have meaningful consequences.
The cynic in me thinks that Fatsharks likes classes that have ever more defined and restrictive roles because they make a nice DLC package that can be sold. I’d rather have the freedom to craft my own Kruber or Bardin and spend my money on meaningless cosmetics or maps.
But the Ü5 make this game! Without exagerrating, I’d claim they are some of the best written and voiced fictional characters in any medium. They are suprisingly nuanced, layered, and believable personalities with interesting and deep interactions with each other. They could easily be caricatures, and based on the game / Warhammer setting one would totally expect them to be that, but instead somehow the writers and voice actors completely avoid that and make them feel like real people. That’s amazing! Vermintide’s main point of attraction is the gameplay, but without the amazing environment, art, and characters it wouldn’t be half as popular. Or half as fun! Vermintide without the Ü5 and their interactions just wouldn’t be Vermintide anymore.
If one would need to make a Vermintide with customizable and un-personable characters, the Ü5 and their banter should still be heavily featured during the maps, at the very least. But I absolutely feel that it would be lame anyways.
Vermintide is a rather unique type of game. The things that make it so great aren’t features often found in other games. But reversely, a lot of the things that feel bad in this game, are the things that seem to be imported just because other games do them as well! Level-up and hero power system, because that’s what RPGs do? That only hampers fun. It’s a roadblock for playing what you want. In this game it’s nothing but completely artificial extra content to level up characters and unlock classes. (Remember the inane “level cap increase” in WoM? Uuuurgh…) In RPGs that works because those tell a story about a hero’s journey and power progression, but Vermintide is about player skill instead of character development so it feels out of place. And it makes gameplay balancing needlessly harder as well. And what about RNG loot? Because that’s what all those popular MMOs and Diablo-like games do, so it must be a good mechanic, right? That too is completely out of place in this game. Not getting the weapon you want to play without being able to do much about that is absolutely demotivating, and cool cosmetics mean a lot less when they are distributed by random chance instead of by completing an engaging challenge. RNG loot works in some other games because the thrill of the reward and unending hunt for more is a core component in those games’ gameplay loop, but the core component in Vermintide’s loop is improving your skill and completing a challenge, so distributing the rewards with RNG is completely out of place here. And I could go on.
So, why that seemingly off-topic rant? Because I feel that introducing custom characters in this game is exactly the same sort of thing. Putting that in this game just wouldn’t fit like it does in other games, because Vermintide is just a different type of game. That stuff is brilliant in Skyrim, but I feel it wouldn’t add anything to Vermintide and only take away an important part of its soul.
Also, you can still roleplay with premade characters.
I would, however, be open to a game that will allow us to customize the appearance, career, race of the existing U5 for a more interesting experience.
Imagine a sexy Mexican Witch Hunter Kruber. (fyi Saltz does offer the witch hunter job to me in the game so don’t you dare yell at me for my career choices!)
I would love to rock a sombrero and drink a Jose Cuervo neat.
I think the idea of @Slayerkin is actually not bad at all. But what will not work is the change within the Vermintide franchise.
For this form of a melee oriented action game you simply need a new game. Personally I still hope for a kind of mix of Escape from Tarkov with the melee of Vermintide and a kind of Zombie Survival Game. I think that self-created characters would fit better into such a game concept. And I finally wanna have a zombie game with good melee that is no walking sim!
I would suggest doing a Vermintide ̷v̷i̷e̷t̷n̷a̷m̷ Lustria edition, the campaign of markus wulhart in total war warhammer 2 is really fun, would be nice to see Wulhart’s hunters as playable characters.
Just my two cents.
