How do the Developers intend for this game to be played?

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Gameplay Feedback
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I was going to wait until the big season 2 patch to make this post, but my patience is just running on empty.

When I bought this game in March I almost instantly fell in love with the gameplay. Probably the best melee combat since Dark Souls, and it’s CoOp Multiplayer to boot! The game was basically tailor made for me to love, I understand there were rough spots before then regarding different balances, but I absolutely adored this game up until August. I bought the first 2 DLC just to throw more money at Fatshark, I didn’t sign up for the beta to try out WoM because I considered it to be an auto purchase, I had absolute faith in Fatshark.

Then 2.0 happened and everything about the combat I loved changed.

Why?

What was wrong about how the game was played before that it needed a complete overhaul? Are the developers happy about how it is being played now? What are their intentions with the game? There has been a lot of talk about “features” and maps and cosmetics. None of those will fix my primary concern with the game which is I no longer think the developers and I agree on what FUN is.

Prior to 2.0 I had a decent list of complaints about the game, but they were things I would have liked to see changed, they rarely ruined the fun of the game.

Crafting was terrible, Deeds needed to be not locked to private lobbies, Blightstormers are Utter BS, and that was about it.

A relatively small list of complaints, and not gameplay related.

Now my list of issues is much longer, and all the old ones are still there. Enemies surround you more restricting movement, enemies take longer to kill and with the stagger system I do not know how many hits it will take to kill a given foe, Temp HP is MUCH harder to come by (almost impossible for certain classes), enemies act faster than I can reliably perform actions (not sure if this is due to their AI changing or the enforced input lag that broke weapon swapping)… I could go on, but these are just off the top of my head and listing them is honestly depressing.

During what I now know as the 1.6/1.7 era I felt the gameplay was Perfect. Did the developers hate it? Dodging around hordes and carving them up was fun, and it took me a very long time to acquire those skills. Was that playstyle counter to the vision of the developers that they felt the need to remove it? It feels like the game enforces rigid roles and builds and is hugely restrictive to what is effective in the higher difficulties. Is it the developers intent that combat is more role-based and less anyone can handle everything so long as you play well? Is it a deliberate change to move from a fast paced action combat game where everyone could act independently and support each other to a slower and more restrictive and deliberate pace where everyone has to act together and is dependent on each other?

I’d really like to know what the vision for the gameplay is. Bugs are a thing that happens in video games, I accepted a bunch of them before because the gameplay was sublime. I can’t play for long stretches of time anymore because I just get frustrated too often and it’s not outweighed by the massive fun of slaughtering ratmen.

Ultimately what I’m most disturbed by is the Decisions made by the Developers to change how they want their game to be played. So how do they see the game? What did they see in their playerbase that led them to conclude we were having fun wrong?

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Since we all know you will never get an answer from the devs.

I’m going to dump here that I agree with you but:

I certainly wanted the game to be harder - via additional difficulty level (Hurray for the paywall)

Dodging around hordes is ok and part of the game. Reducing the dodge window was the right call as it was way to easy before but the other tweaks (like enemies always tracking when they start an attack) I don’t know (and that is part of the problem many many things got way more complex than necessary)

This annoyed me a bit (on the highest difficulty) but didn’t actively need any tweaks since it is more of a symptom that your highest difficulty is too easy when most players can act independently for about 80% of a match.

The talent rework was a nice try. Some things were really good but it didn’t really nail it.

And of coarse the pinnacle of unnecessary and convoluted mechanics that makes the act of actually tuning a build a nightmare (not that it wasn’t a clear not ok before).
And it probably kills game balance for ever since I sincerely do not think that anyone would have build that if he knew that he would need to study his game full time afterwards to get anywhere.

Since you mentioned that you didn’t participate in the beta you might not know that FS basically ignored all feedback and didn’t communicate at all aside a select discord group that they ignored too…

I have dropped the game about 3/4 in the beta and might give it another try once WOM is on 50% sale
(I’m not gonna go lower than cata after all that time asking for it)

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Whatever they saw, it doesn’t matter, because it’s clear as day that they haven’t seen the real issue: it’s the QOL issues (bugs, crafting, grind, no host migration, etc) that drive people away, not the gameplay. If they had fixed these, but left the gameplay untouched, they’d have a rising star of a game right now instead of a dying one.

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I mean QOL is super important but the game will still die without new content, so I understand why that’s a priority for them. The problem to me seems to be how much time they waste breaking and refixing things. Doesn’t seem to leave much time for much needed QOL changes around also trying to get new content out.

They haven’t figured out how to release stable patches in over a year and a half of the game being out though so it’s hard not to worry they’ll forever be playing catch up and lose too many players before mythical crafting/deed reworks ever come around. I dunno but the game definitely does need a lot of polish, so I really hope they find a way to manage their resources better.

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The really infuriating thing is that it really looked like they knew what they were doing and got on the right path at the end of V1 life. Heck I would go so far as to say they were one of the top gaming companies around.

They started out V1 in a buggy state that had similar problems as V2 does now but they gradually worked on it and it showed.
They even dropped a DLC and FLC to promote the new game… 2 new maps and they must have worked on V2 as well… A lvl of effort I cannot imagine they are capable of doing anymore.
V1 as you can buy it now is a very polished game even if you don’t own any dlc.

But with V2 they first showed that they didn’t understand the few core issues V1 had left; RNG loot and RNG crafting. A new game was the perfect opportunity to fix such things. Instead they went all out with the RNG crafting, kept the RNG loot basically on the same lvl but different and added a progression system that does little more than keeping players away from the real game where they can finally hone their skill and feel good for it.
They actually managed to shift the game play towards a more spamming director without utterly breaking it (thank god). I do prefer the old game play style but V2 diversity clearly made it more interesting.
V2 as you can buy it now is very very meh.

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From the looks of it, they don’t intend for it to be played at all.

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Some of them could have been combined, to conserve dev time.

Take the Athonor. If it was tied into the main game crafting system in some way, BAM! New content, AND a huge QOL upgrade (crafting, rng and grind, all at once). Their decision to keep it completely separate is inexplicable in light of how big of an improvement new crafting would be.

Instead, we get to grind in two game modes instead of one. Frikken insane.

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The athanor was built into a completely new branch of the game, that had no history.

This is why they cannot really insert it into the base game. Too many of us spent too many time already, grinding. How do you compensate people with 2k+ hours playtime and a few hundred piece red item collection, if you put in a system where new players can have their red weapons the way they want it without endless rerolling in 50-100-200 hours? Not possible. And seeing how many people here are bonkers for loot, there would be a huge uproar if they did that.
Actually they scr*ewed themselves with the athanor, because it will be a eternal demand to do it, but they just cannot deliver.

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Literally everybody would love it if they changed it so weapons mechanically worked like the Athanor, and cosmetics were earned seperately. Even people with hoardes of gear.

I have well over 1000 hours in this game and I have all weapons for all careers red with duplicates (1-3 copies for each weapon) with enough extra copies and dust (red and otherwise) stashed away to craft at least a dozen reds or more. And I would not mind it one bit (rather love it!) if FS changed it so that weapon power is done with an Athanor-like system.

You could let everybody keep their cosmetics, and compensate people for aquired dust and weapons in some way. Free not-quite-essence on the not-quite-Athanor would be obvious.

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That just means they have insufficient creativity. I came up with a way to make it work back during the beta, without changing the base game, without removing the RNG crafting, but still adding more options and giving benefit to Weaves and Base maps at the same time.

-Athonor unlocks using essence.
-Once unlocked, athonor works on ALL gear.
-None-Weave gear requires dust to craft. Dust price would be very expensive (1 or 2 hundred per property)
-Red gear would be very cheap to re craft - like 10 dust per property. This keeps it’s role as the best gear to reroll stats on.

There! It does nothing at all to people who don’t buy the expac, doesn’t take away anything they already had, gives access to new crafting for those who do buy, preserves the existing loot rewards, and makes both game modes feed into each other instead of being a completely separate grind path. There’s even a niche left for the old RNG system, if you want to pull slots and gamble on getting the rolls you want much cheaper.

I will never believe the “it couldn’t be done” excuse when it clearly could have been done, they just didn’t go to the effort to figure it out.

You mean like the various uproars over the dodge changes, the enemy HP buff, the stagger system, the separate grindfest, or the return of year-old bugs? Somehow I don’t think community uproar is something they give a rat’s severed hindquarters about.

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It was kept in the Weaves to tempt people to move to the weaves. Remember FS thought this was going to be THE end game and people would move from the adventure maps to the weaves en-masse.

Once it became clear that the weaves were a damp squib, everything is thrown into sharp contrast. IF everyone was in the weaves, there’d be lees complaints about;

New maps,
Grind for Reds/Properties/Rerolls
Matchmaking would be much better as there’d be loads of people doing all kinds of weaves,
Having to rerun the same tired old maps
nothing “new” etc

BUT the weaves were received very badly, and so the problems are compounded.

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My system does that just as much; you still need to do weaves to access the unlocks. I figured it was just greed, to force people into buying the DLC, or laziness because they didn’t want to re-do old content. Not trying to push my pet idea, I don’t care and that ship has sailed, I’m just trying to demonstrate how easy it would be to accomplish all the goals at once instead of locking them in separate game modes. The ease of coming up with a good concept just shows the magnitude and wastefulness of their failure.

And that’s the comical bit, and goes back to the OP’s title question. Expecting players to abandon the game they know and love for a completely separate one with only a superficial resemblance was always a fever dream in someones mind. Maybe they WISH that would happen, since weaves have much lower dev time investment, but that’s just not Vermintide, and not something that ever had a chance to actually happen. If they accounted for customer expectations like a real business does would they would have known that.

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Athenor only highlights how Fatshark ignored old issues with the base game when it came to Update 2.0 / Expansion - which brought about a ton of new changes.

Crafting still sucks.

Certain Traits/Modifiers need to be changed or buffed.

Heroic Deeds / Weekly Events need to be changed or improved on.

Lack of VT1 Bounty Board making it difficult for players to get what they want instead relying on the RNG loot system which isn’t that great in itself.

Zero Crafting Sink when it comes to certain resources. Eventually once you grind for hours and acquire a ton of red items you will have a massive stock of resources that you can’t do anything with - bit of an oversight.

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This one is amazing, like you gotta love it, when mob is doing nothing, you start swinging with slower weapon and he rekts you in between, while you can’t even block :smile:

Anyway this kinda of sentiment is getting more and more common, maybe we could get some response to this post @Fatshark_Hedge ?

I also found 1.6 Onslaught much more fun than Cata 2.0, and I do like cata horde compositions, new faction, lil bit more hp on enemies etc, but the combat changes screwed everything so much, that old 1.6 ONS provided significant more fun than this, since the combat wasn’t such a pain, we had no attack buffering issues, temp hp actually worked, no insane running attacks, no ultra long range attacks and so on.

Was dodge too strong in 1.6 ? Yes, but that could get nerfed by 40-50% without compounding the nerf with increased tracking and the runnin attack insanity. It also feels like range got increased or something.

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You gotta love a running attacker running past you, just to make a 90° turn at the end to hit you anyway. Not dodging is actually better, classes with movement buffs simply walk out of reach of attacks…

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Well not if you have horde of mobs chaining runnin attacks on you ! :laughing:

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I don’t know if they intend for it to be played. Closing in on three months since I last booted it up; I’ll wait for a crafting rework and when I know the AI director doesn’t booboo half the time and beastmen don’t detract from the overall experience.

I recently replayed VT1. And when I played that while VT2 was going to be released, I only thought it could go upwards but I was sadly mistaken. A lot of lessons were forgotten and I’m absolutely clueless about what could’ve happened. Must’ve been something internally.

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Not a single gameplay-related bug fixed since open beta? Netcode pre-dating the first Unreal Tournament? Every major patch introduces at least one new bug that causes major issues with melee combat (specifically different forms of taking damage from nowhere or registering attacks that didn’t land on you) and one horde-related? Missing assets (something something mauler) and places to get stuck on your first second in 3 different maps? Promises not to change old difficulties, promises of dedicated maps, promises of new cosmetics and new free content?

They didn’t intend this to be played at all. Just buy the game and never launch it again, while Fatshark feeds you false promises that even they admit were lies… uhm, I mean… “statements that are no longer true” and overpriced asset flip microtransactions. You can do QT for them and pay for the privilege, just don’t expect your opinion to be taken seriously.

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Simply got steered in a bad direction.

They shot for endgame and also tried to include a series of constantly asked for features before addressing base game issues (dedicated servers, in-game content that’s been locked since release, ect.).

Then their endgame died on arrival.

Now they’ve been in a cycle of apology. 14 hotfixes since release, promises of free maps, promises of new careers, they were forced to completely drop or roll back on their plans for the seasonal endgame because the whole competitive grind just didn’t work.

And probably a dozen more things I could rant about.

Fwiw, I still like the game. Legend is still fun at max level and I like most of the talent changes (ty single programmer who was in charge of that).

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Dodging with Kruber and a Executioner sword wasn’t strong at all. They only needed to nerf ELF and Saltz, they had insane dodges on some weapons. Nerfing it overall was a big mistake.

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