so i’ve accumulated almost 3000 hours in both vermintide games. I count both these titels among my most favored titels in the last decade and found fellow gamers i reckon to be among my best friends, in your games. so to say i enjoy your games, would be an understatement.
but the expierence never truly was perfect.
I’m not as delude to say that you’re supposed to make a perfect game, considering how subjetiv that is, however i think your next entry in the coop hordeshooter genre could be way more enjoyable if you consider what your community has to say!
the overall gameplay loop is fantastic but i feel like the framework around it is often not…
Userinerface:
1.1: CHESTS: ive probably opend thousands of chests and probaly wasted dozens of hours in a screen that looks fancy the first few times and then just becomes utmost torment, so for the sake of your longterm comunity leave these kind of animations out, or atleast give us the otions to skip them. (the “spacebar” speedup thing is nice to have but not enough!)
1.2 CRAFTING: the crafting system is not fun to use rerolling 10,20,30 or more times to get what you want is just frustrating and nothing else, also the recources are kind of useless. i basicly have infinite of any kind & only mattered in the opening lvling phase of the game where you would constantly swap weapons anyway and the crafted stuff became obsolete.
my suggestion: there are weapon parts, "stock, receiver, short & long barrel, grip, automatic feed/single feed etc. and if the player wanted to craft Charakter 1’s sniperrifle he would have to insert corresponding parts in the blueprint.(and maybe sacrefice a item of equal tier) these parts would be additional drops → quests, and specific weaponparts would drop in specific levels as additional reward.
for example: the group plays level “Sewers” and would get their random reward and always a pistolgrip.
1.3power lvl:
get rid of the whole power lvl system, its super unrewarding for these casual player who just want to play a few rounds and whoops their cool exotic is obsolete because the powerlevel is higher,
items should be a fixed value like in V1, and if there has to be a scaling component it should be hero only, the hardcore gamer like me, dont care, and just grind through as fast as possible and the casual gamer feel betrayed that their cool shinys get obsolete over time so in the end everyone loses
1.4 stagger mechanic:
to this day im not entirely certain why the stagger mechanic got introduced and even with 1600 hours in V2 i barely know how it works. its written in such a convoluted way that makes it extremly obscure what the best perk is with what weapon and wich of perk choices are of highest value to me.
sure there are certain cases that are no brainers but others are just purely speculation, not to mention that the inherint desing leads to certain weapons to be far far worse on certain careers,
if your career does’nt feature “assassin” playing a single target weapon like the axe becomes essentially a burden… stagger mechnanic was a terrible attempt to make weapons viable
lets talk about the gameplay,
2.1: Tasks:
Many tasks and objectives are plain and really boring in terms of gameplay (not narrative). brachsenbrücke:“press 20s E on this cannon” ,athel yenlui: “press E as long as the cricle turned and 2 lines are in line” festering:“pop a bunch of buboues while the other have fun” these are just thing no one wants to do and in random groups often prolong the task because no one does em.
how to solve? simple make these tasks fun! how? make them small riddles where players can compete who can solve it faster.
alien swarm had this system where an engi would hack a door and and the rest defended him and a good engi would be faster at his task wich in return meant faster progression → reward for players!
(check it out its a free game and quiet fun :p)
2.2 torches:
i dont know if theres gonna be something similar but i gonna touch on it anyway.
to provide light to your group someone has to bite the bullet, carry a torch and has to suck at everything.
does it click? yeah again no one want to carry them (especially in rando groups) its just no fun.
how to fix? just make these op everyone wants the op weapon right?
2.3: career releases:
first off, both careers are quiet fun and uniqe. good job!
but the way they got released made it impossible to play the game without a group, if the new and shiny content can only be played by 1/4 players in a full group thats a problem, i get that your restricted in production capacity but from player perspective i’ve stopped playing for 1& 1/2 weeks
2.4: books:
i would consider this a minor problem but the fact that sometimes books are placed in a way that a single person needs to walk an extensive portion of the map again is just anoying.
garden of mors first grim comes to mind as an example.
a better design are those were a group would have to walk an alternate path like in casle drachenfels where you after obtaining the key would walk the long pathway to the grim. the big difference? you walk with your entire party and its not backtracking.
So thats what i wanted to add from an player perspective of the game,
i might add some things later.
i tried to stay away from balancing monetisation and things that required alot of work.
i hope you guys from fatshark consider one or two things from my list
keep up the good work!
I think this is a must need for the most dedicated fans who spend a lot of times having with with the game. Maybe even add a “open 5”, “open 25”, “open all” button that just skips the animations and takes you straigh to the reward table. This would be a huge improvement already and doesn’t take any work to do.
While I didn’t really like the crafting system in vermintide I was glad there was a way to craft legendaries outside of trying to play the ridiculous odds. Waiting 20 hours before getting a legendary just to see that it’s a charm and not a weapon sucks. What I liked about the weapon system is the reroll mechanic that allowed you to alter the stats without grinding your ass off. Really really helpful for players who have in them what it takes to beat Legend difficulty but just need the right tools. An undergeared character kills the progress. I kind of like your idea of having specific parts drop at specific places but honestly I can’t make up my mind if I’d prefer all weapon parts of a specific weapon to drop on a specific map or just a single piece. Probably a single part since it increases the replayability and you’re not stuck on a single map when trying to get all the parts you need.
Like I said earlier I agree wholeheartedly with this. I’m not a big fan of starting to gear up my character from scratch just because of this system. For me personally it’s better to have a skilled player be able to play Veteran difficulty on all characters without having to grind for gear just because a lasgun with numbers not big enough won’t deal any damage to these enemies here. I think you should reward highly skilled players with greater rewards and not punish them for trying to accomplish something others can’t so easily.
I can’t agree here. The stagger and flinch animations are a huge part of the series. If you hit an enemy first it is only normal to see him flinch in pain or fall to the ground (unlike some exceptions like berzerkers). It adds lots and lots of weight to the weapons and satisfaction to the system. How do you make a weapon punchy? With a loud bang/thud that fills the room slowly, make the enemy flinch or even knock them back (bomb/saltz skill) and even have the boss to stagger, cover their head with their arm for a second to protect it or just have them take some time to recover. You also had enemies like berzerkers who are far less likely to flinch when swinging their axes in rage and also even chaos warriors that you had to fight against very differently dancing around them with dodge mechanics and attacking while they’re recovering from a heavy attack. Those special enemies you couldn’t just stagger with a well placed hit and sometimes that is exactly what you need to make combat more interesting. That is what makes the Vermintide and also many other games so satisfying to play. Seeing enemies reacting to your blows. Previous games in this series execute this almost flawlessly. I think that if blunt weapons staggered enemies for longer and made them flinch more (nothing ridiculous though) it would help them to stand off against cutting weapons that are made for dealing the highest dps.
I think all of us can agree some objectives were lacking and not very fun. While I dislike the hold E to fire the cannon I really liked for players to either risk their lives when not working together or actually have one person carry the cannon ball while the rest defended him (just like in your alien swarm example). The nurgle pimples you pop while others waited were meh. Maybe have just a few of them and have the team DPS it. If you deal enough damage in set time after hitting the first attack you break it, if you don’t cooperate an elite enemy spawns from it (all of this while in scripted horde attack). Now you need to communicate, work as a team, you can try to risk the fight having the players defend you or perhaps have someone take a flamethrower ask ogryn to take a big swarm-effective chainsaw while the rest of 4 players damage the objective. Now that’s cooler. I heard the developers are trying out splitting the party for some objectives so there’s that.
Blackouts in Darktide will be countered with flashlights. No need to switch your favourite weapons for a torch that is not fun to play with. Just take your gun out and show them how it’s done.
The one thing im curious about is how a blackout would work. Will you have generators to power the map back again or will it go away on it’s on after a while. Because while you can have a melee and a ranged weapon just like in Vermintide you also need to decide what is going to be your swarm-clearing weapon and pick your single-target weapon. What if a swarm comes during a blackout and you only had a sniper rifle you took for countering big targets, and the player next to you has a plasma gun that takes couple of second to recharge after firing. Well, since these are the ranged weapons with flashlights you are basically dead. Either try to kill poxwalkers one after another with those guns while being inhumanely outnumbered or switch to melee and pray to emperor that you’re going to hit something and hear a sound. Since you’re a long time Vermintide 2 player you and the developers should understand this example. Imagine entering the mines and pushing the cart with explosives, get to the dark section of the map as bardin with a crossbow equipped. You can kill one target per 2 seconds (reloading). Now elite rats aren’t bad neither is a patrol but imagine a swarm of even slaverats. The damage of your weapon doesn’t matter because it’s firerate that is needed here and you can’t even block or shove the swarm with that thing. Same thing with the torch map with ranged weapons and not melee one.
Aw man I totally agree. I just really wish they introduced more characters and not add just more careers to the existing ones. Unfortunately it takes a huge amount of work to have all the new dialogues put into a new character. I’m not talking about simply about mission specific “oh wow that enemy is big” or “i dont like this place” but instead think of all the dialogues between the characters. Now you need the new character to reply to other character’s jokes, talk with them, mock them and react if they’re in danger or if they hit you. On top of that you also need to update ALL the other characters with new dialogue mentioning the new one. They all again need to react each time you shoot them and mock them when you do stupid stuff lol. Suddenly you understand why it’s new careers updated into the game and not new characters made from scratch.
Of course it’s not impossible. If Fatshark had a character pipeline saying okay, each character needs some dialogue here and here but also mocking other characters in 3 different options, congratulating characters in 2 different ways, asking them to stop with the friendly fire 3 different ways, have them make jokes about some other characters too. They also need original characters to mention the new characters so that they don’t feel out of place/like air, you name it. If they had this pipeline (which makes all those things seem way easier to complete) and the game did well I could see them sell new characters for 20$/16€. I would absolutely buy a techpriest that could could equip two melee different melee weapons or someone other that would be interesting and gamechanging.
The puzzles were amazing, the parkour felt weird and out of place. If we had books in Darktide i’d prefer them to be stored in a bonus objective location such as a monster lair or a traitor guard camp. Or perhaps you would have to overload the generator that would open a metal gate with a book behind it but they it’s dark for a portion of the level. The system with books was really fun at least for me. I loved to make decisions on the fly like “-are we going to take a second grim?” “-no way this monster is going to trash us”.
sorry i wasn’t clear enough, with stagger mechanic i mean’t the perks they added around 1.5 (i think?) that every career has at lvl 15, not the fact that enemys stagger
also you got many great ideas maybe you should suggest something yourself
That’s okay hahahahah, thanks for explaining!
I’m actively posting when I have free time. I try to limit myself since there isn’t a lot going on on this forum and I want to give others a chance to speak their mind. I will be making a character DLC thread and also a ranged weapon one. You can check these out after im done writing them.
About crafting: There’s two things about V2 crafting that need to be acknowledged and not repeated.
RNG was the first. The second is currency. The Weave Essence currency they tried added a layer of fat to the much praised Athanor Forge. Because of the nature of the Weaves, Fatshark was forced to add a huge amount of Essence gain so players can upgrade quickly and once all upgrades possible are gained the essence has no purpose but to accumulate forever. There’s probably no happy medium with crafting currency that doesn’t hamstring casual play and promote the wrong kind of grinding.
If Darktide still has the same kind system of traits and properties (which I really hope not), then acquiring better crafting props should be either time dependent, combat dependent, or a mixture of both.
Ex: Want to get 5% attack speed? Take 1% attack speed and play long enough to level that prop up. Want to get Swift Slaying? Complete some challenge to unlock it for crafting.
With a system like that you can make it as difficult or as casual as you want. You can make unlocked traits/props available for all weapons, lock it to all weapons on one character, or lock it to weapon types, or just one weapon at a time.
Because the best kind of grind is to just play the game.
