So whats the mode all about?
1.) Additional player agency for map modifiers - like LONG requested melee only etc ? No
2.) Roguelite mode that allows for new players to enjoy a run with oldplayers like UNIVERSALY loved chaos wastes? No
3.) Roguelite-LITE mode that chains together normal quickplay with stacking BUFF AND DEBUFFS, creating more reason to push ? No
4.) “PTR” like mode where specific weapon/talent/blessing changes are introduced for a map, for the army of autists to playtest and give feedback? (Like 20% attack speed for two handed melee weapons but 30% less ammo?) No
So, what is then? MANDATORYMINMAX turbo sweat fiesta mode, with cranking all numbers for enemies up - making GUNNER SURVIVE PLASMA HEADSHOT - where said gunners so much as touch you and you die.
Which will be finished by ~3% of the active player community (and from comments here and on steam, people who finished this are not touching it again)
Tell me, just out of curiosity
HOW many maps / BIG BALANCE updates / NEW CLASSES could have we gotten for the same amount of manhours than Havoc took?
probably 0 because those things take time and this doesn’t appear to have taken much to come up with, a patchwork quilt of all the modifiers they have and scaling difficulty from 1 - 40
first time?
the players that enjoy it are happy and those that aren’t can do something else
the game will continue to evolve over a period of years, have fun and good luck
I had fun playing through it because it was something new but I sort of agree that it’s objectively wasted dev time. I enjoy that the gamemode actually forces you to play co-op instead of playing rambo solo hero mode like how aurics work. That said, they could’ve achieved that in other, more long lasting ways, such as by introducing a new difficulty that’s actually balanced around playing together much like how cata felt in VT2. To achieve that they would first have to address all the obvious balance issues that completely trivialize the game, otherwise such a difficulty is not achievable together with variety (that’s basically what havoc is. Good luck without gold toughness and/or psyker!)
Oh also I forgot to mention, what I really want is chaos wastes. It’s so stupid how everyone can be telling Fatshark 24/7 that chaos wastes was one of the coolest things they added for VT2, and it obviously has a ton of replayability if the unlocks are interesting… but they’re just not even acknowleding it. Cmon, do it. It’s such an easy move. It’s like the crafting update, everyone liked it. Just do those things right away.
Well Wastes is a huge project on its own. We can’t even balance the 400~ nodes we have now and there’s an actual cost system in place. So 200 chaos-waste mode only blessings will take some time (especially if we want them to feel good like chaos wastes did before the chest overhaul). That is clearly a planned update though, what with Brunt being lost in the other hive. I could so see the story segway into that and having to meet up with him on foot.
Some people suffer a severe case of nostalgia. Cata never was balanced to be only doable as team. Handmaiden always was and still is a superior Loner Zealot. Shade was utterly OP when Cata introduced the new Talent Trees, as were many other careers down the line.
Even today the balance is plain worse than DTs. Currently, Engi is so busted that it turns a round of Cata into a walking simulator for everyone but the Minigun wielding Terminator. If you go from Update to Update you can pin point many times where this was the case. SoTT. Moonbow. Mace&Sword. BW’s Kaboom. Having a biyearly balance patch, if you were lucky, wasn’t helping either.
Not to the same degree as Darktide, that’s all. Darktide auric is quite literally a solo game for me at this point and I didn’t dedicate years of my life to it. It’s just that easy to solo the game. It feels almost balanced around a solo player. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a Havoc 40 true solo one of these days. Classes in Darktide are 10x more OP compared to the content vs how the OP vermintide 2 classes were. And keep in mind Darktide is a pretty young game, people did some incredible solos for Vermintide 2 modded difficulties but it’s less that the balance is messed up and more that the game has just been out for longer, years of practice will do that.
Engi hilariously only recently got buffed, after Darktide has been out, and the common sentiment seemed to be “oh great, Darktide balance in Vermintide” and kicking him from lobbies. Same with some of the other powercreep you mentioned. Tells you something about what the accepted standard is.
PS: It’s not nostalgia if I’ve played the game as recently as yesterday and the game is in active development competing with Darktide. It’s getting 3 maps soon! It got a cool gamemode just a little bit ago. Darktide gets repeated mistakes and content drought.
According to Strawhat, Havoc has been worked on or planned for a while, however I agree that it was a waste of development time.
In my opinion, Havoc’s additional modifiers should have been introduced to Auric Maelstrom, to further develop that mode, rather than inventing a new game mode that potentially excludes certain players.
The reality is that getting to rank 40 Havoc is not particularly difficult. I got there yesterday, and I’m not a turbo-sweat.
It’s all about class/build stacking, a feature I’ve personally loathed since I played Mythic Dungeons in World of Warcraft.
Havoc has relatively little replayability and missed the mark on what makes tide games enjoyable by copying the worst and universlly disliked features from World of Warcraft.
He is right tho. While turbosweats might enjoy the artificial difficulty Havoc brings during the release honeymoon, lack of proper matchmaking and poor balance pretty much make this gamemode DOA.
If only party finder could be used to create custom lobbies where you could select any map, difficulty and modifiers… Nah, that would be too good, can’t have it.
