Some time ago I read a comment from someone (can’t remember who it was, don’t care for it either) that in the WoM Beta there had been several suggestions on how to make the Weaves harder without making enemies either super healthy or one-hit wonders even on stray gunner bullets. So apparently despite being part of the beta I never checked the forum. So I am curious as what those suggestions were or what suggestions you have as it is an interesting theme (and is not limited to the Weaves) mainly because people often say it is soooo easy but either don’t make suggestions or their ideas fell flat very fast because they overlook lots of stuff.
Act I - General Remarks
In order to make a game harder which is centered around fighting you have usually two options for the enemies. The first one is to increase their “offensive traits”, the second is to increase their “defensive traits”.
Textbook examples for “offensive traits” are:
- Increase enemy numbers
- Increase damage
- Increase enemy types
- Increase enemy movesets
- Increase enemy speed
Textbook examples for “defensive traits” are:
- Increase enemy numbers (yes, this works for both)
- Increase enemy health
- Increase enemy mobility
As you can see most of this stuff has been done by Fatshark. It may be a bit boring but most of it is just textbook design and normally people accept it as this. But not for Vermintide where the community goes bonkers for the stupidest reasons and most often ignore the definition of objective.
In general with increasing difficulty with or without textbook design creates a lot of potential design pitfalls:
- For example giving enemies more moves to make them more dangerous means nothing if everything dies with one or two hits. That is why this was never an option with the old (and new) Legend difficulty. Cool that you SV can do this 360° spin attack. To bad he got headshotted like 10 meters before even close enough for doing it.
- Increasing enemy damage makes some classes less favourable because it further decreases the error range.
- Just increasing enemy health will take away flow and tire the players down. Fatshark did circumvent this rather cleverly with the addition of the stagger buffs which (over)compensates for the increase in enemy health and opened more option in weapon choice. In addition it created a mechanic which only comes into place the higher the difficulty. Objectively seen, a more than elegant solution. It not only brought the disastrous 1.6 into a far better balance but also enabled future balance and difficulty changes to be done more easily. If just it hadn’t been overshadowed by bugs, lots of them.
- Increasing enemy mobility will mean you hit enemies less often. This can cause creation and people will scream bloody unfair like they have done for the Ungor’s which just gained the same mechanic the players had all the time: Dodging backwards and using weapon range to their advantage. It can also cause problems with higher pings.
- Increasing enemy speed will equally cause problems with higher pings. And people are used to the slow moving enemies from Vermintide to such a degree that every increase will be noted as unfair although it isn’t
- Increase in enemy numbers can and will cause strain on the pc’s. But it also leads to unfair situations because either you give the players to defend against such (and make them invincible no matter how many enemies you throw at him) or he will complain for “unavoidable” damage/situations
- Increase enemy types is a rather big pitfall. It doesn’t make sense to make more enemies if they do not add something new to the game. This pitfall has also been avoided by the introduction of the Beastmen as each unit had something unique and new going for them. Special thumbs up for avoiding the noob mistake of just spamming even more Specials, especially disablers. It just makes the game clustered in a bad way.
Act II - How to make Weaves harder?
So with the general remarks done. How to make the game actually harder in a (from the players perceived as) fair and interesting way? Some usual recommendations like more movesets I have adressed previously. So the question is what possibilities are there outside of the textbook choices. This is the point of the discussion and I welcome everyone making suggestions no matter how good or bad they are. However, I also invite everyone to point at flaws of the suggestion of each other in a constructive manner. Because overlooking something is like the easiest thing to do. As such I will do a beginning with some random, bad ideas. I think the main chance for the Weaves is that they are shorter than adventure mode or deeds and that they have the Weave mutators:
- For the armored Weaves (whatever Wind it was) make it so that enemies can only be killed by headshots. This would for some people make no difference as they aim at the head anyway. But it would remove the noob bodyshot kills of so many elites, especially with the ranged arsenal.
- Also for armored Weaves you could go the full co-op route and make it so that enemies can only be damaged from the back. So you would have to split the team into one side keeping them in check and engaging them and the other side killing them. This would allow to effectively cut down on enemy numbers and still provide the same challenge
- Make Weaves were the active and/or passive skills of the characters do not work. A form of reduction which will be most likely be thanked with backslash though.
- Cut significantly down on enemy numbers but make them high on health and give them new moves. As such the player is more or less constantly in a duel with stronger foes. This would however be a stark contrast to the horde nature of the game.
- For Death Weaves you could make immortal enemies. Something which does not die no matter how often it gets hit. An immortal Slave Rat may just be annoying, but an undying Gutter Runner? Or a Rat Ogre? I hope your team is good in running. A constantly present boss would also give again the chance to reduce a bit on enemy numbers.
- For Illusion Weaves you could make it so that different players see a different landscape (this being possible has been demonstrated in Vermintide 1). If this can be used to force them to use different paths I don’t know. You could also make random illusionary enemies which take no damage and cause no damage. It would add confusion. But it would … confuse people are they would mistake it with lag. Generally, I feel that Illusion Weaves have the highest potential for anything. Especially in telling us character backgrounds.
With this, I would like to welcome everyone again to make suggestions. Like I said, someone said there have been several suggestions during the July Beta.