Vermintide’s banter is the best written in the genre. There’s a reason you see so many ogryn’s called Bardin or Okri, or Vet’s called Kruber and Zealots called Saltzpyre. But there’s nothing similar to that in Darktide.
You can hear hints of a deeper characterisation with some of the lines left in - real backgrounds that adds depth and personality to some of the personalities.
The psyker’s history as Atoman police before their betrayal, the zealot’s ‘rigged’ trial, the Kruber-esque loose cannon veteran. It’s depressing the more you discover about them through their incidental interactions because you know you’ll know never see the real story.
Please bring it back. If it was gotten rid of for gameplay purposes - there’s still enough voices available to up the limit to 2 classes per match (which also makes for better matches imo). If it was gotten rid of for MTX purposes - naming the characters and choosing their appearance doesn’t clash with nature of what may have been written.
if anything besides our characters voices contributed to their personalities it would be a step in the right direction. even small stuff like voice lines would be a much welcome implementation. but id really love to even see gameplay affected.
Imagine you could take an alternate route because your ogryn was a dredger and could Sniff his way through poop tubes. idk the possibilities are endless if they implemented characteristic based gameplay mechanics.
though i’m not even 100% the game will even survive at this point.
After playing the game for a long time I wonder why they even bothered with that whole background selection part of character creation.
There isn’t even a way to look at that on your character or another’s. They were just meaningless choices that have no effect on anything. After your finished creating its like its all discarded and gone forever.
Its such a shame too, when I first booted up the game and was greeted with that character creation, I really enjoyed it, thinking these choices would have some type of effect. The options available were cool and well written and allowed quite a varied amount of back-story to be created.
But it all turned sour when I realised how meaningless it was. the next three characters I created I just selected the default option for everything and decided on the voice I liked. I didn’t even read the other options
The thing is, maybe there is something meaningful in the choices that impacts at least the spoken lines. But it is just so painful to test that I don’t care to find out.
currently id be comfortable saying there is 0 affect from those choices besides voice selection. 300+ hours… though the majority of that is looking at the map hub/item shop waiting for it to change. i think i’ve been disconnected due to inactivity more than logged out or switched characters.
I look at it the exact opposite way around. Having customizable characters gave the game an expressive quality that Vermintide simply didn’t have with its premade characters. If anything I’m annoyed that some of the voice performances then steamroll your ability to imagine your own character. Especially the psyker voices all have very strong personalities written into them.
I’m not into this whole banter and premade character thing. I’m more of an RPG player who likes making their own character.
The key question would be how many different characters of the same class have you tried. Because I just levelled one character per class and didn’t care to even create another one.
And, well, I said it elsewhere and many times, but the character banter in VTs has been the very soul of the games for me so I feel very strongly like the OP.
thats unnecessary. you just need to play. ive played with plenty of people using the same voice as me. ive had 3 vets in 1 game with the same voice. they never say anything different. the odds of us all picking the same background and voice is probably very low. unfortunately, they arent rare. they just dont exist.
I think its worse that female characters don’t even get their own lines, they just sat them down in the booth with the same script the male VAs did. They’re even more scuffed in the character creation with almost no hair styles, and cosmetics that were made for male torsos only (or no hair psyker hoods). Its just so unbelievably unfinished to where it was worse than doing nothing at all. But not liking this means I wanted waifu characters or something stupid according to the ugly women character creator fan club.
Especially the banter, its 100% canned responses that have no flow in the conversation or relevance. Psyker: its so cold here Cadian Vet: no its not be quiet. Wow that is some deep cut stuff. I’d rather hear Ogryns talk about their feet hurting, which is at least funny well-performed low effort writing.
The fact we can choose our gender and voice is a HUGE immersion + for me. In many ways, it’s more important to me than having the 10/10 VT2 banter. I disliked having to play as Kerillian and Sienna sometimes in VT2, but the class variety and banter were still incredibly well done, so it wasn’t a dealbreaker in playing them. I strongly prefer playing as a normal-ish guy in games, and if I’m forced into playing a gender or personality locked character that I don’t enjoy, I’ll just pass on the game regardless if the core gameplay is 10/10 - from MMOs to ARPGs to Looter Shooters.
I can probably list at least 10 other objectively material core aspects of the game that negatively impact overall immersion ahead of the current offering of voicelines/story-telling/character customization issues. Here’s a few I guess: lack of weapon attachment customization, lack of classes, buggy specials like dogs, broken audio cues for snipers, lack of NPCs in mission objectives, lack of things to do in the Mourningstar, lack of emotes and communication-radial options, lack of map&biome diversity, the state of the crafting system, being unable to change your voice/background after initial character creation (had to recreate my Psyker to change my voice), etc.
I’m not enjoying the custom characters myself. Vermintide had such great preset characters with solid chemistry. You have to get pretty lucky to hear good banter between the custom characters here. I feel like I can count on one hand the times I’ve heard banter I liked in Darktide and I’ve played for hundreds of hours. And all the options for background they make you select when you make your character don’t really matter. Sometimes if a character has a connection from their background to something being talked about they add the equivalent of a “haha yeah!” response. Meh.
The voice actors of Darktide did an amazing job, but shuffling all of the possible custom characters into interesting dialogue hasn’t worked so far.
My ogryn was born on mornax (mining planet), was a mining thrall as a child, a miner as a youth and his defining moment was a mining accident. In my whole play time to 30 and another 20 games, never heard one mining related voice line.
It could’ve worked, but they weren’t willing to put in the effort to characterise them well enough. The personality of your character was supposed to be defined by your lore choices, but there just aren’t any voice lines referencing it.
Well not that it would’ve improved the characterisation by that much. An occasional quip about being a grox prodder isn’t exactly “character”
Too much effort, so they dropped that idea but left its corpse in the game.
I’m conflicted. I do like what they were going for, the voice variety is nice and the VA’s have done some great work, but I have heard very little meaningful dialogue.
Many mentions of interesting exchanges or anything story related here has made me scratch my head, I might get one slightly deeper exchange per mission if that, most of the banter is complete hogwash.
Maybe it’s more of a problem with how dialogue lines trigger than the lines themselves?
Also really miss the banter in the hub, Lohner was a welcome cheeky presence, really compounds the mourningstar’s emptiness.
I agree, i really liked the banter between the VT2 characters and how you could notice the shift in the characters personality as the game continued to evolve and new voice lines were added.
But on the other hand, i am pretty sure that the voice lines in DT will be expanded on when the dust settles and things have been fixed and straightened out.
So while i miss listening to the dwarf and elf argue or sienna ribbing saltzpyre, im not too fuzzed about it as i expected this character creation thing would strip some of the interaction and personality out of the game.
In the past interviews Fatshark claimed there are thousand of voicelines because of all those different combinations. I don’t hear that amount of variety. Also I assumed all those different character background info will be used for the voicelines, except Cadia, I cannot remember any other background being mentioend at all. Occasioanlly you get a line which MIGHT be related to your background, such as the bodyguard line from Ogryn.
Honestly, I don’t actually agree. At first I did. On first blush this seems true. But having gone back to vermintide for a bit I actually find the various voice packs as or even more characterful than they are in vermintide at times. Personally I’m quite attached to my characters.