I want a Lustria campaign either as a paid VT2 expansion or part of VT3. I’d like a Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now-inspired campaign - you start at an Empire coastal trading post that looks somewhat familiar and move up river in search of (Colonel) Kurtz who has gone in search of a powerful artifact spoken of in local tales that he thinks can save the Empire from the Skaven incursion. The further you travel the less familar things seem - the jungle gets denser, you discover ruins of an ancient Slann kingdom (with Aztec-inspired arcitecture), encounter Slann/Lizardmen enemies an their alien magic, and finally discover an ancient wrecked spacecraft of the Old Ones that has been engulfed by the jungle vegetation. Inside, behind a multitide of devious traps, you will find what you seek. This would scratch that “opening scence of Raiders of the Lost Ark” itch.
i would like to see vermintide 3 to be pretty much the same as vermintide 1 but with better graphics, different enemies, and more maps.
thats what 70k players/hour wanted and why the game sold like hotcakes when it came out.
but vermintide 2 is not even remotely close to vt1. the characters have super powers, in order to challenge these gods the devs had to throw everything at them which created a buggy game with hyper-density, phantom swings, silent specials, etc. but lets be honest if every special got his sound the game would sound like a pinball machine.
vermintide 2 is a parody of what it should be and the payoff for fatshark is that the game ‘as is’ right now only interests about 3.5k hour/players. it took everything good about it from vt1 that the fans loved and decided stuff didnt matter and instead it tried dumbing that down while also integrating in what was cool from games like diablo. it failed and missed the mark badly for both genre and lost everything that makes both DIFFERENT TYPES OF GAMES special because it tried to combine them.
so when it comes to vt3 i hope the devs drop stupid ideas like
- paywall difficulties and enemies,
- super powers
- versus
- microtransactions
- pay for characters classes
- obnoxious animations
and instead goes back to the basics that drew the interest of 70,000 people PER HOUR.
i love your ideas! thanks for the response!
i had very limited experience with vermintide 1. you make great points though about devs trying different things, but needing to maintain the integrity of the game!
well the first game was VERY tactical with great care given to how every move, swing, block, etc had some risk and consequences and the game wasnt very forgiving of mistakes. in fact one of the screens even told you that if you ran off by yourself you would die alone.
the second game abandoned ALL of that and became very much a diablo like hack n slash. wade through swarms of enemies laying death and destruction all around you with a super power to extract you if you get into too much trouble.
fatshark even admitted it realized it was slowly transitioning this way and in a few posts basically said there isnt anything wrong with diablo. which missed the point entirely.
there is nothing wrong with being a realistic tactical combat game.
there is nothing wrong with being a hack n slash game.
but you can NOT be a realistic tactical combat game and also be a hack n slash. the two are incompatible. the devs REALLY need to stop flirting back and forth while keeping a foot between each of these two styles and just make up their mind and go whole heartedly in that direction.
the realistic tactical combat players arent interested in a game where you have god powers and are able to defeat scores of enemies on your own whilst running ahead of the group. they all got sick of it and quit.
the hack n slash players think its boring to stick together, they find it boring when the screen isnt full of enemies, and any attempts to make the game more tactical are met with yawns.
you cant keep both groups happy. when you try you lose both groups.
thats why there are 3.5k players an hour now and the game is having problems making money.
this isnt rocket science and im not the first to say this, its been said since since release. the mutters increased to shouts around 1.6 and by 1.8 had become mutters again. the part fatshark didnt “get” was that the reason it quieted down is because the people screaming just left, not because they were ohhhh so happy.
If I have to pick between tactical and hack 'an slash I suppose I would pick tactical. But I will admit that I didn’t really experience the difference between 1 and 2 so dramatic.
you dont notice the difference between the levels of power in 1 and 2?
what is a “challenge” in 2 would completely overwhelm and destroy ANY group, no matter how good, from vt1.
lets try a different approach. im an author. a mcgruff is something that exists to further the plot. thats the only reason it exists. its a literary term.
an example of a mcgruff is the portal in vermintide 2. why does it exist? because instead of being stuck in one city or one area it allows the devs to send our U5 to anywhere instantly. thats the only reason it exists. it allows a semi plausible way to send our heros around the world.
our heroes all have the equivalent of thor’s hammer. unstoppable charges. turn invisible. taunt all enemies to you and force hold their attention. but normally a mcgruff exists to advance the plot and then is removed.
how does turning invisible enhance the plot? short answer is that it doesnt. not at all. so therefore why precisely is it there? after a few seconds thought its forced out as an honest “there is no good answer” or a mumbled “because”. these super powers dont advance the plot, period.
therefore what do they do? well, they increase the power of our heroes. which means that in order to challenge them you need to increase the numbers of enemies on the map. which leads to other problems such as hyper density, phantom swings, lag, etc.
course correction one would be to cut the “power” of our heroes by at least one third. at least.
then run experiments and see… what can i cut off the screen and still leave the challenge identical. then cut some more power. and repeat. keep this up until our heroes seem strong but not gods and that the game is still exciting and that there is a constant series of battles. this was the original sin of vt2.
all of vt2 problems stem directly from this single issue —> the devs gave each player thors hammer and then decided to try to challenge them instead of properly scaling the heroes as heroic but not gods and then building the challenge to suit that. no need to have super powers. no need to have hero power. so where do i hope vt3 goes? learning from the mistakes of 2.
You mean MacGuffin, i assume?
That’s a commonly used term, you don’t have to be an author to know that. 
Thing is that people like to play as a (super)hero. I can’t resist it either, most of the actives feel very satisfying. Games like Overwatch, LoL, Apex Legends and now Valorant just prove that this is what people like, having those active abilities. I wouldn’t expect FS to step down from this clearly marketable approach. And stripping down all that stuff like you described it wouldn’t be an evolution, it would mean a step back to V1.
I mean, V2 is modest in this regard, really. Have you played Chaosbane? The Waywatcher there is shooting arrows like the demon hunter in Diablo 3 is shooting crossbow bolts, dozens at a time, being able to do so within the first hour of playing. That is ridicolous and unneeded and could be cut back.
When i reached like 1k ish hours in v2 i got v1 because i wanted to test it out, and to be honest, v1 is boring, slow paced and actually kinda easy. V1 was more punishing if you made mistakes tho (atleast for me cus no heal traits yet), also bombs and enemies felt more impactfull. In v2 you are correct that 1 skaven rat is not the same as a skaven rat in v1, so like the equivalent is like 1 skaven rat for 10 v2 ones. V2 is more fun for me personally, there is a feeling of ‘chaos’ which after playing v2 for a while, v1 everything felt easier in terms of size and i didn’t get that feeling of ‘osh€t’.
I don’t think they made the current amount of enemies you get in a map just because invis exists. As invis negates those anyway, so they could add 2000000 enemies and i would just go invis. I do agree that invis doesn’t enhance plot at all, maybe its somewhere in the lore that those careers could turn invis, or be sneaky, which would then make sense. Otherwise idk.
Maybe the devs had all those extra enemies designed and made the game, and then designed the hero’s talents and abilities, how can you be so sure they designed the hero’s talents first and then the enemies? Also careers have been getting balanced, same as weapons. So i think they are pretty happy on where the challenge lies.
I agree with jayjay aswell that going back on what makes v2 great and going more back into the direction of v1 would be a step back, but if you like more tacticall, less enemies but more impactfull, kind of game then that’s fine.
Like what jayjay said is true aswell, players like to feel like superhero’s. I think thats what makes v2 so popular aswell, apart from other things.
I did the same. Don’t forget that the Inn loads up muuuuch slower. 
I did it multiple times: at times it felt incredibly easy, at times it felt much harder.
Sure there’s way less enemies, but there’s no way to customize your character to turn every weapon into a blender. A 2h axe is really unwieldy in the first game, and you need so many pistols shot to kill a single stormvermin.
I’d like something inbetween the 2 games, but if had to choose, I’d probably choose verm 1.
Besides, its marketing was so much more honest
User experience was a couple of notches up from VT2 there as well.
You could argue about difficulty. I didn’t have all the best gear yet and rolls. I have also not tried the last stand type of gamemode in v1, so that might be really difficult. Also gotta keep in mind that i most likely got carried by v1 veterans, but i didn’t feel like i was being carried, in v2 i can tell.
Difficulty might be the same but its a different type of difficulty, it’s way slower. I like the fast paced, kinda, feel that v2 has (also prob cuz a newer game), also the high numbers of enemies, more variety in enemy types (v1 is always the same, takes away alot of replayability for me atleast, in the beginning). In v2 is also feel like a superhero, in v1 less so, you could say more realistic.
Maybe if i played v1 before v2 came out i would of played it alot as i couldn’t compare, but after playing v2 for a while it just feels weird to me and slow. Ofcourse you have to keep in mind i didn’t play it untill ‘endgame’ (not all unlocks, best gear etc). But i could see why players like it and i could see why players would wanna see some more of the v1 side be implemented in v3, but i’m personally not a fan. (Ofcourse depending on how much of v1 they bring over)
auto correct on a phone and old eyes :))
maybe.
except the devs themselves, via community moderators and patch notes, etc say no.
you are seizing on just the invisibility. it’s not just that superpower, it’s ALL of the superpowers.
fatshark created careers which provided buffs and talents aka superpowers.
then fatshark tried to balance the game in serious ways.
the patch notes provide an illuminating look into how difficult they found it to balance the game with these powers in it.
to me the single most striking point of the look into the devs mindset is that they admitted the characters were overpowered, that they didn’t know how to challenge them (until roughly patch 1.6 and again in 1.8 where some mechanics were changed), and that their approach of throwing evermore at the characters to challenge them was creating yet more problems (hyper density, phantoms swings, silent Spawn, etc)
and yet
the devs never once considered thst the game could be every bit as challenging if instead of scaling the enemies up one just scaled the heroes down.
im not saying 1 is harder than 2. im not saying 1 is better than 2. I am saying that 1 and 2 are so different thst they aren’t even really the same genre of game. I suggest that 70k players an hour wanted something different than the 3.5k players an hour currently playing. I would further suggest that with 70k players an hour fatshark had great sales and was making oodles of cash whereas with 3.5k/hour they cant really afford to keep investing time/resources into a project that can’t/won’t pay for the work being done. we can go into the numbers if you want but any further monies sunk into this game by fatshark is sunken cost fallacy because their expenses for doing so > money recouped via sales or mxt. but if they don’t continue the work they lose players. hence the game is in a death spiral right now and there is no escape.
so I’d suggest in vt3 to not repeat the mistakes that led to vt2 going from one of the hottest games in the world to a death spiral.
I mostly agree with you, I’m curious about the number you ran though.
Did VT1 really have 20 times the players VT2 has, 2 years after release?
70k/hour is what vt2 had shortly after release and 3.5k/hour is what it has now.
vt2 was, for awhile, one of the hottest games in the entire world.
oh ok. but, while I think FS has made glaring mistakes and it’s set in an aweful direction, it really is unfair to make that kind of comparison. the majority of players in any game just browse through games casually. consider only 36% of the players have finished skittergate on recruit.
A fair comparison would be with players in VT1 2 years from release.
No, it didn’t. Which is one of the many errors in his explanation. 70k is the PEAK player numbers for Vermintide 2 right after release. So he is comparing average numbers now with peak numbers at release. Correct comparison would be average release (~ 30k/h) to average now (~ 3k/h), so the player loss is about 90 %. Comparison of peak numbers comes to the same result.
Then he is saying the player loss is due to the misssteps of Vermintide 2 in comparison to Vermintide 1. However, player loss is normal for most games. For this let us take a look at a larger, more polished game in similar price range: Monster Hunter World
https://steamcharts.com/app/582010
There we have an average of 185k/h at release and about 30 k/h now. Player loss for that game is 84 %. The statement made here by me is that a huge amount of player loss is absolutely normal for most games. Of course, there are exceptions for this with games which build up over time. Most of them are older (like Payday 2 or CS:GO) which profitted from the growth of Steam itself and there are even newer examples. But they are the exception and taking them as point of orientation is simply unfair. Even something hugely popular like PUBG has a player loss of 80 %. The attention span of most gamers simply isnt longer than a few weeks/months. So anyone who believed that the release 30k/h would stay is simply delusional.
That said, the player loss of Vermintide IS higher. Most of this also came in the first months and it is safe to say that bugs are the most likely reason why this happened. Because it launched with many bugs and still has some of them. It is also safe to say that it has nothing to do with the gameplay changes from Vermintide 1 to Vermintide 2. Because if 30k/h people would be interested in playing a game like Vermintide 1, they would or would have play/ed Vermintide 1. Reality though is that Vermintide 1 never reached more than 4.5k/h players.
This says nothing about the quality of gameplay (if Vermintide 1 or 2 is the “better” game). However, it tells us that the Vermintide 2 formula is far more popular.
In addition, after the weak gameplay from before WoM has been replaced by the improvement of Combat 2.0 the player numbers increased and stabilized again (although the last month looked pretty bleak). So there is growth potential. The game is currently not in a death spiral but it can crash easily. But it can also grow further. Furthermore, probably somewhere in the next 6 months, the standalone Versus game will be released. Independent if it is long-term success or if it will receive horribly reviews, Versus will be a financial success at release (pretty sure this will be the case).
Vermintide 3 is still far away if it will ever come. But is is safe to say that gameplay-wise it will be closer to Vermintide 2 if it wants to be financially succesful. They have to cut down on the bugs. That alone will solve a lot of headaches…
Could you do the same for Vermintide 1 - realease to two years later?
I agree with you, I’m just curious.