Hello, it’s me. You may know me from such rants as the Back to Bögenhafen thread, Twitch Mode Improvements thread, the more popular “Can we get rid of +20% health and +33% curse resistance already?” thread, my more recent “Let’s fix the crafting system to be kinda like the Weaves” thread, or the Back to Drachenfels feat. Geneviève Dieudonné thread.
I was originally going to post a longer thread, but I got bored writing because it’s not a fun topic to write about comparatively. This thread is also harder for me to write than the other threads with suggestions for fixes and enhancements, because this is a lot messier of a problem for me to wade through, in my opinion, because I have to avoid focusing on bugs or overall issues with 2.0. Those are way higher priority than the Winds of Magic fixes themselves, and they’re not within the scope of this post.
The other big issue with this is that I really don’t like Winds of Magic itself that much because the current iteration is really hard for me to look past to see the beauty and potential behind, unlike Bögenhafen or the Weave-crafting system, so I don’t have the advantage of appreciating something and looking to find ways to improve it by leveraging its current potential. I also run into the issue of not wanting to fundamentally change the expansion to the distaste of the (minority?) group of people that seem to like it.
I’m going to briefly touch on what I like about the Winds of Magic DLC, my main issues with the Winds of Magic DLC (primarily the eponymous game mode), and how I think to tackle the issues.
Also, as an aside, the correct term for Winds of Magic (WoM) is “expansion”, according to Fatshark, but I’m going to call it a DLC because I’m lazy and it’s content that is downloaded. Also, it’s annoying because the DLC is called “Winds of Magic” but the game mode is also called “Winds of Magic”, so I’m going to write “Weaves” when referring to the game mode so that I can separate the two clearly. However, that’s not correct either because “Weaves” are the maps themselves, but whatever. I’m rolling with it.
What I like about Winds of Magic
- Dark Omens is pretty good. It’s a decent map to introduce the Beastmen with good dialogue and atmosphere.
- The new weapons are pretty good.
- The Weaves are really pretty. The art team did a good job on making things look very nice.
- There’s no books so that can be refreshing if you don’t want to watch a quickplay elf repeatedly fail a Grim jump or die off by themselves because they went for a book during the middle of a horde.
… there wasn’t really much to say there. Again, uhh… it’s hard to write about this stuff for me.
What I dislike about Winds of Magic
- The “expansion” package being very large means you can’t pick-and-choose what content you want to pay for, so you either buy all or nothing for $20.
- Winds of Magic requires you to purchase the DLC if you want to play the Weaves, period.
- Winds of Magic makes you pay for a higher difficulty, Cataclysm, which you can only select in your queue by owning the DLC, which reduces the quickplay pool.
- Winds of Magic is marketed as an end-game content DLC, due to the difficulty offered by Cataclysm and the later Weaves, but it resets your progress to put you on the same playing field as new players when approaching the Weaves.
- Beastmen are super duper annoying sometimes, but I’m not going to touch on this again because that’s tricky to say if it’s a 2.0 issue, a bug issue, or an inherent design issue.
- A lot of the dialogue gets repetitive because they seem Weave-specific and there’s only eight Weave types. Pretty here, isn’t it? It’s somewhat like keep-specific dialogue where you’re hearing it so often and repeatedly because you’re going to the same keep over-and-over again, much like you’ll go through several Weaves of a specific theme in sequence, hearing the same dialogue.
- Weaves have a separate progression system that isn’t really separate because you benefit in WoM by playing the regular game, but not vice versa.
- Weaves lack incentive to replay them by not offering Essence when replaying, so you’re stuck at lower Weaves if you wait too long because no one will be queuing for them.
- Essence lacks meaning beyond progressing through more Weaves
- The progression ladder and the Weaves feel arcade-style, but that seems in direct opposition with the progression system of the Weaves themselves.
Okay, those issues were kind of scattered and disjointed, much like the entire DLC, so I’m going to need you to bear with me a bit. Your specific issues may differ from mine.
How I would want to fix Winds of Magic
Alright, a few of these are actually regarding monetary issues, so I’m hesitant to suggest them because that stuff is tricky, so bear with me about the money business if you just want to skip to core gameplay suggestions.
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Split Winds of Magic into two DLC packs, each costing $10.
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Children of Chaos Campaign Pack. Ignore the communist-sounding initialism, it actually just seems like a decent name. This pack should include Dark Omens + Beastmen + 5 weapons
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Winds of Magic Game Mode Pack. This pack should just Winds of Magic. This is the primary focus of what I want to talk about.
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Compensate owners of the original $20 pack somehow, since they really feel more like early-access buyers to an unfinished expansion anyway. This will help calm down the people who played the expansion beyond the refund window and are salty, as well as calm down anyone who gets mad if you fundamentally change how the DLC works when they already liked it (~35% positive reviews on Steam right now).
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Maybe expand on the Children of Chaos single map campaign with more maps in a separate campaign DLC later down the road, so it grows in value. Maybe super-duper pinky promise that early supporters get the new maps for free if you want to charge a separate price to fund two more Beastmen maps.
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Maybe give a neat portrait frame like Skull-Sworn as an “oops, sorry, thanks for being an early supporter”
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Maybe extend the refund window for people not interested in certain content if their accounts’ achievements demonstrate they haven’t experienced their money’s worth of content. Like… if you’re on Weave 1-15, I’d say that speaks loud and clear that you could be entitled to a refund on WoM if you’re not interested in it at all at the moment. It’d be a nice gesture of good faith.
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Remove Cataclysm from the expansion and put it in the base game. There are several reasons for this:
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Cataclysm is tightly interwoven with stagger and the 2.0 balance patch as its main contributor to difficulty, which is why many of the Winds of Magic (negative) reviews are tightly tied to stagger.
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Cataclysm doesn’t really add much value to the DLC anyway, due to only catering to a small fraction of the playerbase and also not having any meaningful rewards associated with it. (Also shut up in the comments saying “derp i only bought this for the weapons and cataclysm how can you say there’s no value”, that’s totally missing the point)
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Add meaningful rewards to Cataclysm. C’mon, what the hell? I don’t really care or want it to have an increased red drop rate so that you farm Catavaults for reds, but it needs some more pizzazz. Maybe stratify red illusions to be different from Champion/Legend and Cataclysm vaults by tweaking the RGB value on the glow. Maybe add some actual damn hats that can drop from non-commendation chests based on difficulty. Add cosmetics (skins, hats, frames) in-line with the existing rewards on Champion and Legend. If beating 100 maps on Champion gets a hat, why not the same for Cataclysm? If beating all the maps on Champion/Legend give skins, why not Cataclysm? Why not have more portrait frames? Why a lot of things? I think it’s because your art team spent too much time making Weaves pretty so you ran out of time to do stuff besides Commendation Chests…
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Queueing for Cataclysm being tied to DLC ownership drastically reduces the quickplay pool of the difficulty dramatically, one of the biggest problems with it and the Weaves themselves.
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It allows you to change and add higher difficulties more easily, since the apex difficulty isn’t directly tied to DLC ownership. Face it, developers usually suck at their own game and can’t predict what people can accomplish. I bet by next month there’ll be true solo Cataclysm runs by people with a guitar hero controller, so Fatshark may be scrambling to get Cataclysm II and III into the base game as well. Kinda like how Overkill added the Death Wish difficulty with a bunch of cool stuff, then they had to add One Down, Crime Sprees, and Death Sentence to up the ante. Speaking of which…
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It’s actually kind of just scummy in general to charge for a difficulty at all. I get that you’re thinking of it from a WoW perspective of expansions with raised level caps, but look at one of your competitors/forerunners, Payday 2. They added the Death Wish update only six months after the game was released and it was free. While having similar issues of being “damage sponges”, the difficulty also added some cool new mechanics that changed up the maps and enemies based on difficulty, so it was a lot of work that they did for a free update. They, of course, couldn’t predict how hardcore their players were, so they had to add One Down (later becoming Death Sentence) and up the difficulty even further, also for free. Then they realized some of the mechanics in their new difficulties were cool and wanted more people to play them, but the spike was a bit too dramatic, so they also added Mayhem difficulty as a bridge between Overkill and Death Wish. Talk all the crap you want about Payday 2 and Overkill Software, but they did some things right for sure.
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Remove power progression from Weaves. If it’s an arcade ladder designed for people who have finished the game, but we want to normalize the difficulty so people don’t have advantage based on their loot, just normalize everyone to the max power level, not to level 1. Unlock all the weapons for use in the Weaves and let players experiment freely. This has a multitude of benefits, as far as I can tell:
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Your friend who has played less than you can hop in and play the higher Weaves, assuming they’re ready.
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You can replay Weaves with a different loadout very easily, since you don’t need to level up a weapon to make it usable.
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We’ve already done this halfway by sharing the Amulet of Ashur and Athanor level globally. Don’t do a half-measure. Commit to it fully. Either have a grind or don’t.
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Rework the Weave ladder system to not be a set list of challenges. Make it more like the “Crime Spree” game mode in Payday 2. Rather than stealing it from Diablo, steal it from Payday. Heck, maybe you can poach some Payday 2 designers from the Starbreeze office literally 10 minutes away to help figure it out. Some key points to make it interesting.
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Weaves scale from a higher difficulty as the base-line. It’s demeaning to level up through Recruit if this is marketed as an “end game” game mode. Crime Sprees had some minimum level of Overkill (aka Champion) as a baseline, we can set a similar starting point here… maybe Veteran if it’s really an issue for the playerbase. Point is, I want to skip ahead.
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Weaves are not a set ladder, it’s an endurance mode to see how many successful runs you can chain together.
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It’s a choose-your-own-adventure that scales indefinitely, not limited in scope based off the limits of how many Weaves Fatshark can churn out for a season
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Rather than progressing through one linear chain, you can choose one of three random missions to progress. Crime Sprees in Payday let you choose between 3 missions: stealth vs loud or long vs short missions. We can similarly let players choose to stick with the Wind they’re currently running (maybe limit it to 3 consecutive runs as an anti-grind mechanic) or choose one of two other random Winds. This may help alleviate me from noticing the same dialogue from playing the same Wind 5 times in a row where Sienna and Kerillian wouldn’t shut the hell up about gold wizards being set aflame. You can kind of see the idea where you’re choosing between three missions in Payday 2. Do a similar idea with choosing between three Weaves…
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Allow players to quickly chain Weaves without going back to the keep unless necessary. Like an arcade ladder. Re-add the “Vote for Next Mission” screen from Vermintide 1 to facilitate this. No power progression means you should only need to change your loadout if you’re weird, no time wasted to sink into leveling weapons. KEEP IT MOVING FAST. MAKE IT QUICKER THAN QUICKPLAY.
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You cash out your rewards when you give up progressing further in the ladder to “bank” your high score. So you’re not adjusting gear each time, you just cash out your rewards when you’re done progressing.
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You can pay some currency (Essence) to skip ahead in the ladder to start from an interesting baseline. I can pay to start a Crime Spree from certain difficulty stepladders or pay even more to pick up where my highest score capped out at. It lets me skip ahead in my arcade mode to where I want to play, so I can control the difficulty based on what I’m feeling.
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Here’s a brief overview of the inspiration from GeneralMcBadass, a content creator who made a lot of Payday 2 content as well as Vermintide 2 content. Obviously it shouldn’t be a one-to-one copy, but the idea kinda carries from it as an arcade mode where you chain back-to-back short mission segments to progress through an indefinitely scaling difficulty with various mutators added on to make the difficulty get even harder as it progresses through the arcade ladder.
- Incorporate Essence somehow to be a cosmetic currency as well as the arcade tokens for playing more Weaves. Like an arcade, you can use your tokens to pay more or you can take the tokens to cash them out for prizes. Perhaps this is the tie-in to Lohner’s Emporium where I can buy special cosmetics (ie: Weave-Forged weapons) by paying for the DLC and cashing out my Essence. You could even add DLC-specific sections to the store for owning any DLC, with base game owners only having access to purchasing base-game, non-DLC cosmetics from the store (as well as probably earning less Essence by not being able to host).
TL;DR
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Winds of Magic is bad because it’s a big DLC instead of two smaller DLCs, so you’re stuck with all or nothing, so I tell people to err on the side of “nothing” unless they’ve got lodsofemone… also Killing Floor 2 is fun.
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The “Children of Chaos” campaign pack ($10) could contain Beastmen + weapons + map(s). Also I totally stole the name from someone else who said it first, since it matched lore. Speak up if you’re the one who said the phrase first on reddit and I’ll edit you in with credit.
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The “Winds of Magic” game mode pack ($10) should just contain the Weaves game mode and some more stuff to do with Essence like DLC-specific cosmetics
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Compensate people somehow who supported the original $20 Winds of Magic expansion as a sort of retraction/apology since people are angry. Give them some extra loot for being early access supporters to this unfinished mode and/or extend the refund window to cover more, because of how grindy this DLC is.
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Cataclysm should be free also it should have more rewards associated with it. It barely adds value to the DLC from a wider perspective, since it’s catering only to a small number of people. Don’t make it into a red-farming difficulty, however, just make there be more unique cosmetics to earn like…
- Skins for beating all 13 Helmgart maps as each career
- Frame for beating all 13 Helmgart maps as every career
- Frame for Vanquisher of Chaos on Cataclysm
- Stratify red illusions’ RGB values like Bogenhafen, making Cataclysm illusions have a red glow instead of blue
- Make hats drop from map-completion chests based on difficulty, like special hats from Cataclysm/Legend/Champion each idk.
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Remove power progression from Weaves. It’s an arcade game mode that has a weird grind to it, which isn’t arcadey at all. It’s an endgame difficulty mode, but it resets you back to zero in leveling. It’s dumb and I’m sorry if you like it for some reason.
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Make Weaves random and more like Crime Sprees from Payday 2 so that it’s a weird, separate arcade-style mode that ramps up the difficulty beyond the current game while still being accessible to players that just want to mix things up from the base game.
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Let non-DLC owners participate in the Weaves by joining their friends or being in a pre-existing lobby that switches to that mode. Still require the DLC to host it or quickplay queue into it, so that it’s consistent with literally every other piece of DLC content in the Vermintide series because why the hell is it like this.
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Make Essence into a currency option to buy cosmetics in Lohner’s Emporium since it’s less hyper-inflated than the other currencies like dust, since it’s been out for less time. It’s still kinda inflated already though, whoops.
TL;DR of the TL;DR (Conclusion)
Winds of Magic could actually be not bad. It’s very misguided but I think the idea at its core, a separate arcade challenge ladder with mutators and without books, isn’t too bad. The execution is just botched, in my opinion. Right now it just comes across as a weird grindy thing that I don’t like, when it could just be a cool, quick ladder mode that you challenge yourself to progress through.
Sorry if you like it right now, maybe I’m missing some stuff as to why it’s good or you just have really bad Stockholm Syndrome (get it? ha).
I just don’t get how I could realistically recommend $20 for Winds of Magic when you can get the base game and the other two DLCs on sale for $20ish. It seems silly to have this big monolith expansion pack that has a bunch of very loosely connected things that have very little connection to each other. It’s a bunch of ideas going in different directions but none of them seem finished. It’s a hot mess.
Anyway, this post was very stream-of-consciousness and perhaps vague in terms of how it came across, since I can’t directly relate it to the game mechanics and I’m sure as hell not re-installing Payday 2 to gather footage to try and explain it, that’s a lot of effort.
The point is, this should game should strive to learn from Payday 2, not Diablo 3. Also, Simon Viklund (composer for Payday’s sick soundtrack) retweeted Martin’s post about Vermintide 2, so we need to get him to come in as a freelancer to drop a sick collab track with Jesper Kyd somehow.
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