I already find myself sometimes just quickly logging in to check the shop, when I not actually have to play right now. To make matters worse, it is starting to crystallize out of this mess that the best gear is acquired through consecrating an item with as low a starting rarity as possible (ideally grey) and as high as starting rating as possible, because of how stat distribution works.
It is also a gamble every time you consecrate, which means what the progression system now boils down to:
Check the shop every hour.
Farm crafting materials and credits.
Buy grey items with high rating.
Spend your crafting materials gambling with the upgrade system.
I’ll be doing the same on the 29th unless they come out with anything to address the situation. Literally ANYTHING would be enough, but given the way they’re handling comms right now I doubt it’ll happen.
I do love the core gameplay. But honestly I could just keep playing VT2 at this point. So I really don’t know if I want to commit to the roller coaster that’s going to be darktides development over the next couple of years. Im passionate about the game, but the level of frustration it’s development patterns engenders probably isn’t worth the hit to my mental health
+1 for being able to change scopes/attachments, wouldn’t even care if melee weapons got nothing but for the love of the Emperor please let us fiddle with at least optics
Someone in the Steamforum brought up a good point. Why is there a lights out mission modifier when only one lasgun has flashlight as special? The ogryn dosesnt even have a weapon with a flashlight attached to it at all !
This is how you know that FS doesn’t play their own game. Their decisions might make sense from developer pow, calculating how much time progression or crafting should take, but they never experience the frustration that comes from these numbers.
Why can’t all weapons have flashlight? Why does one type of upgrade get 3 functions why the other one the same random reroll everyone despised?
What made the mdecide not to use the anathor crafting from WoM and then you just play maps for crafting material? Why is there a need for this much RNG?
Yeah I convinced my friend group to just refund and go play Valheim instead for a while, generally positive reception.
Not being able to sprint in Vermintide 2 felt jarring and there’s the obvious step down in graphics but revisiting it reminded me there’s so many things that eventually landed in the right spot after years of development time and culminated in Chaos Waste design philosophies.
Chaos Waste being a positive skew favoring player power and fun¹ over pristine balance.
Enemies coming from intuitive pathing and not spawning out of fücking nowhere (read: out of bounds behind a door), with far more personality and ample time lag from announcement of enemy appearance, to engaging the party, to using its attack. Lich goes: Global Audio Cue → Teleport + Audio Cue → Dodgeable Disable. Stormer goes: Audio cue chanting → visual green circle area of effect → tracking tornado. These threats don’t silently appear and demand to be dealt with, which has a time and a place for general ranged/melee threat elites but not disabler elites.
Player agency in map choice and enemy layout in CW, it’s called risk reward². If you want the double vet boons, you play a harder map. This isn’t even loot, this is just temporary progression tied to a game-mode. The reward is within the game system itself because as players we already have a common goal and guarantee of reward for reaching the end of the run. The emperor can shove his gifts up his ass, not like there will be much to shove considering half the runs are lootless.
Having the scoreboard as a metric to be able to compare my performance after finally unlocking M&S on Kruber from the DLC, turns out my performance against horde ended up being better but I didn’t want to give up my elite killing potential in pugs without a BW or Javelin elf. I now have information to make an informed decision. I flame people anyways during runs I don’t need to wait until the end, the entire team knows when someone is playing like dogwater, if we survived to the end then I stop caring because we finished and someone else or myself adequately covered for their weaknesses and they may have had strengths elsewhere.
My gameplay doesn’t feel like shlt being shoved around by range mobs, sliding in reverse because I have no toughness, not needing to unintuitively treat my THP as irrelevant because of chip damage, and the best part is the garbage dodge cd nerf already was sent out in VM2 and completely shut down by the community who knew better because they apparently play the damn game. Go figure, maybe we don’t overhaul the entire dodge system because of the Combat Knife being an outlier.
There’s so many more comparisons but honestly I feel my breath is wasted and I’m running out of autowalking trips to pick up copper ore. I have more satisfaction airing grievances about this game than actually playing it but Valheim deserves enough respect to play without diverting my attention.
The biggest thing I missed was player progression and equipment rng rolls. Mind you, I love being a hamster wheel on the rng stat grind. I play ARPGs for hours on end just to find something shiny to use that has like 1% more dps, but I need more than a shop refresh an hour. I need a respectable amount of loot - not necessarily good loot or upgrades - that is awarded as a result of my actions. All in all fatshark seems to just be riding the hype of good aesthetics and the warhammer 40k background. If only the same amount of love can be shown in the gameplay system as the environments and lore-friendly details. Footnotes below for the definitions of one or two items the dev team forgot after 4 years of developing Vermintide.
¹ fun
/fən/
noun
(1) enjoyment, amusement, or lighthearted pleasure.
“the children were having fun in the play area”
² reward
/rəˈwôrd/
noun
(1) a thing given in recognition of one’s service, effort, or achievement.
“the holiday was a reward for 40 years’ service with the company”
We have to grind currency to get weapons on a rotating hour timer we have to grind mats in levels which requires even more time to upgrade items from the store with a chance of maybe capping their power ya know the randomization of numbers oh and weapons to have random stats to there’s no perfect anything we will have to settle for good enough until we have spent a more than a nominal amount of time no lifeing a system that could be better were it not made longer with random numbers sure I can pick my secondary but I can’t weight my dmg or cleave or even guarantee my power number hitting theoretical max I have to hope it does.
Why can’t we just have the WoM weave weapon system already
Does anyone like this random roll grind stuff? To this day it remains the most painful part of VT2, the fact that you have to sit there and reroll for 7 years to get the combo of stats you want, why not just port over the PERFECT system which is the weave weapons?
I adore the Tide games to bits, but it’s certainly NOT because of grinding weapons endlessly to finally get a few reds. The gameplay is so, so, SO good that it becomes such an incredible shame that all the systems surrounding it are utterly horrible.
Dev: “Hmm. Why did you love it?! Oh I know! Based on our in-study date: your favorite part of Vermintide was rerolling for hours on end to get a small 0.00001% of bonus stat modifier.”
Player: “…”
Dev: “Terrific! Let’s make this part of our next game. People LOVE to grind in such mind-numbing banal fashion! Our numbers say it is so!”
Player: “…”
That’s what this post reads like. Someone who completely misunderstood why people played or even enjoyed Vermintide for the many hours they did. I was optimistically hoping that this crafting update would change my mind about refund and I’ll buy it again to experience the signature 40k weapons, at the least; but alas, it isn’t so.
I’m not clear on if I’ll be able to take the amazingly good items I came across in the 200mk zone and upgrade them to max, or if I should just store them so I can rip their traits later.
I’ve been playing more Deep Rock Galactic again recently (I started fairly early in the Early Access Phase and play on and off since) and I’m constantly blown away by how well the crafting and progression and unlock systems work without nearly as much RNG, grindy, angst.
The assignment board is a great way to lock in making progress towards tangible rewards/unlocks. Collecting resources from missions loops back in nicely with weapon upgrading and customization. Ability to buy cosmetics with in-game currency/resources. The “season” system rewarding the player with steady progress towards unlocking unique seasonal cosmetics. The mission selection system is awesome and dovetails well with assignments. The ability to freely customize your gear loadouts and save different “builds” for your characters. It’s relatively quick to level up characters, letting new players jump in and start playing on non-beginning difficulties pretty easily. The variety of in-mission tasks and objectives. It’s such a breath of fresh air. And DRG has steadily grown its base number of concurrent players over the yeas, whereas VT2 has steadily fallen in base numbers outside of massive spikes from free giveaways/weekends. I wonder why?
Fatshark seems to want their games to be a game-as-service and the “only” game their players are playing, given the grind and RNG-levels. The result is that it’s a huge turn-off to more casual audiences, IMHO.
