How gameplay roles impact behavior & utility = better gameplay

i would love the new hordeshooter darktide to be more focust on teamplay again!

when we play Vermintide 2 its safe to assume that when you played Quickplay
you had days where every time your team consisted of only squishy heroes lacking any frontline presence, nor would anyone change his kit to fullfill the needs of the team?
or a bunch of players all rushing and zooming around seemingly thinking they are invincable only to end up on the defeat screen 2m after?
why is it that these habits seem so much worse than it was in Vermintide 1?

comparing the teamplay aspect of vermintide 1 and 2 there are alot of differences. I would argue that V2 got worse in that regard, alongside the communication between players. in vermintide 2 players seem to be way more distant and less likely to communicate discuss strategies etc.

  1. its hard to deny that the quickplay feature is partly to fault for a more distant and less cooperative playerbase.
    the way players are shoved together and not knowing who is gonna be in your team and not knowing what careers or equipment is picked, on top of that. Oviously leads to a more self reliant and “jack of all trades” playstyle

  2. add the nature of humans, to greed for green circles and lying to yourself that running ahead and killing roaming elites is somehow benefitial to the team…

  3. careers that outright support selfish play, typicly loaded with dmg up for themself without giving anything significant back to the team.

so how do you ““fix”” these problems?
would have vermintide2 been a better game without quickplay?
hard to tell, even more so considering that its questionable on how big of a problem all this is
maybe im one of few who feel this way

but i do have some ideas on how to achieve a more teamplay orriented game
(( note that this is obviously speculative on how darktide is gonna be somwhat simmilar to V2, for this im gonna assume that Darktide has both careers and activated skills))

(if darktide gonna have some form of abilitys)

  1. ability cooldowns: overall ability cooldowns in V2 are too quick. these abilitys should be powerful but limited. taking on a powerful enemy shouldn’t be a Press F simulator. and should be conserved for times of need.
    ----a suggestion would be that your couldown rate is tied to proximity to your team. the closer you are to your team the higher the soldiers composure, and therefore he can focus on his most powerful skills.----

(if darktide has careers)

  1. in V2 your career choice only impacts on how you kill & survive enemys, and there will always be the meta career that happens to be better in the meta

i would love a more utility focused aspect to the characters that opens up the gameplay loop
in a similar fashion to deep rock galactic, where the dwarf chosen impacts not only the killing but also the traverse of the map (but not to that extreme)
— suggestions would be:
mechanic/ technician: repairing fixing lights, hacking, opening doors and different (faster/safer) paths.
priest type: getting help from the faithful citizens of the hive for extra ammo and usables, having acess to chapels for holy relics (that could benifit the team for the map or increase loot at the end or something)
guardsmen type: could build fortifications at certain anchor points of the map for additional cover or heavy weapon inplacements.
prepper: setting traps and mines in choke points and weld entrys shut

im aware thats unlikely that all of this is gonna make it into the game but this is mostly intented as
inspiration

3 Likes

Some interesting thoughts in this, although I agree only to a limited degree.

While Quickplay certainly emphazised wildly thrown together parties it is probably also part of the reason the game is still so active. I wasn’t exactly ealry in VT1 and had already big problems with finding parties.
And especially on higher difficulty, while still few change the career, people tend to stick together and cooperate and communicate more. (Admittedly that only really starts to show Legend+ but before that is a cakewalk either way)

The greed for green circles is also not quite as bad there and in my first successful legend runs I was content carrying my weight, green circles or not

Although I would not be sad to see the people who just run ahead without thinking beeing punished harder.

The cooldowns in V2 are mostly fine imo (if you ignore things like headshot chaining bh and similar cheese) I am quite okay with often used abilities but they should be careful about ‘push button to instantly add humongous damage’ abilities

The careers are certainly something where one could turn a few bolts and screws, but free (i.e. character and not class based) team composition also offers a lot of freedom to try out some tactics (and if there is enouch team cohesion it’s not as if you >need< a tanky character)
While I support the notion to give every character/class seomething unique, they should proably not overdo it or some careers might be the meta and people might feel forced to play them
(and setting mines, while potentially a good alternative for bombs or an interesting ability, would probably be a not so interesting class focus)

1 Like

Quickplay in V1 was the same for in those ~110 hour as in V2 so idk it can be timezones/events/regions etc

But the other part about characters having unique interactions in maps (more acces to consumables through hacking and opening rooms etc) I wanted in V2 from start

1 Like

do you really feel that way? for legend, if i had to make a guess
i would say in 9/10 games the only things written is "hi"at the start and “gg” at the end.

and talking about players i would guess that about two out of nine players i encounter (every 3 games) play team oriented, four play passivly (pinging and staying close, but not more) while 3 play outride detrimental to the team (this could mean not picking up supplies even tho they would only had to move 2-5m, not sharing healing, rushing ahead or throwing around blames)
im not saying they do this ill willed but these actions still do have a negative impact.

so i have to disagree strongly to the claim that legends starts to get more cooperative
cata gets better that i can support but still not to the point that players put the team before themselfs. a thing i felt was more present in V1

well yes totally true but whats the point of tanky heroes if they are not needed and less fun to play?
i would love them to go back on the entire “this is a tank” and “this is a DPS” career sentiment and solely focus on utility. similar to deep rock galactic, in that game a team with every 4 dwarfs present
is vastly superior to any team with dublicate class due to the nature of their utility abilitys, but that game is way different and it would be impossible to archive a equal ratio of utility usefulness.

i would love them to add some subabilitys that enhances the usefullness of said character beyond their combat specialisations.

well i thought it as a character speccific not so much a career specific thing (that would be alot more work depending on the amount of careers)
also it wouldn’t change anything from their normal combat kit its a sub ability meant to be used while out of combat, imagine it as a preperation phase before a huge wave of enemys, this characters ability would alow him to weld certain entrances shut narrowing down the aproach of enemys and funnel them into said mines. more than that would probably be too impactful.
that was the whole point of that praragraph of mine, utility out of combat-> another layer to gameplay to give characters strategy, teamplay and less press F to onshot with 15s cd)

but yeah certainly not perfect and would need definitely some adjustments :sweat_smile:

Yeah, actually that pretty much is my experience. While many players are quiet and of course there is the occassional dawdler or rusher that get him-/herself killed (and then often ragequits (xD)) if you actually start talking with them it works quite well
Seen it a few times on champion but it’s more common on legend
Well, this might also be a bit a factor of different perception and luck with what players you get, so there is not much we can debate about it

I think the tanky heroes are actually much fun to play (and help a little getting into the speed of a new difficulty)
But the game is effectively a melee focussed looter shooter, so I think, while having those classes it is good that they are not needed to be successful (and luckily tanks deal not less damage then others :P)
I don’t exactly know what you mean by subabilities but lergely I agree with this part

That actually makes more sense

I remember a game on steam (f2p, topdown shooter, multiplayer, class based - forgot the name though) that had characters with skills like that, it was a lot of fun but I believe this could be hard to implement in an ego-shooter, but done right it could be fun
I also remember from the game that welded down doors could be bust open after a while (especially from some of the bigger enemies)

sound like alien swarm :wink:

yeah my suggestions were mostly to inspire a new perspective not something set in stone,
basicly adding a layer to chacters that give them utility, not based on how hard they can kill stuff.

Might have been Alien Swarm. The game couldn’t keep me for long but had a few good ideas here and there

I like the quick play in VT2. It mostly works well. You occasionally get a bad team or an unbalanced mix of careers, but overcoming this makes the game more fun.

I generally find the the level of communication to be really good using the chat wheel and text if necessary. I absolutely HATE games were somebody is on the mic. They mostly talk way too much and obscure the my ability to hear audio cues needed to play effectively . Add to that that half the time their mics are so bad or their accents are so strong that I can’t understand what they’re saying then mics just make my whole experience of the game worse.

I’m all for the game requiring more cooperation as long as the communication with the chat wheel is effective enough to achieve it. Also, the bot AI needs to be sophisticated enough so that all difficulties can realistically be achieved by an excellent single player with bots. If Fatshark try to make a game for pre-made teams of 4, like they did with weaves, then I expect Darktide to fall flat on its face - I definitely wouldn’t play a game like this.

I like your suggestion about the DRG-like character abilities so that each team mate can interact with the maps differently.

I would prefer to have single characters with unique and varied skill trees in darktide, instead of multiple classes per character. I also think ults are a bad idea that just allow players ‘get out of jail free’ cards that trivialize difficulty spikes. The game would be better if you had to cooperate and actually have some skill to overcome particularly nasty spawns, instead of just pressing F.

If Darktide is a ‘shooter’ then I hope it has way more sophisticated shooting mechanics than vermintide 2. I hope that all careers. and particularly range-focussed ones can utilise cover and other aspects of the map topology to be effective (with maybe a zip line). The invisibility ults of RV and Huntsman just show how unsophisticated range combat is in VT2 - it’s just lazy and requires no skill from the player. Similarly, pyro and waystalker ults are just lazy ways to make ranged careers effective. Having civer mechanics and giving range focused careers the ability to carry more ammo, different types of ammo, and specialise sights and other gun attachments woild be far more interesting than a one dimensional ult on a short cooldown.

Not to mention the guys which sounds settings make them pop up suddenly enough to give you a mini heart attack

One time I was glad about that though, so I could leave the enchanters lair with the guy who was high as a kite AND drunk on legend before getting my hopes up.

I actually like the different classes per character, shows more facets of their personality and ability.
And I agree that Ults should not be a ‘one button problem solution’ but in general I think they add to the feeling of the game

1 Like