And that is the question I am asking for. If for example the Grail Knight DLC gets a positive receiption wouldnt it mean that the people are okay with the direction? You are often talking about the billions of Warhammer Fans playing this game. Personally, I don’t see them in the forum. I think the majority is here for the gameplay and okay with lore bending (no matter how painful it might be for more strict Warhammer Fans). And even when it gets a mediocre reception we have to look for the reasons given. Because knowing this community a lot of them will be: “Should have been free.” “P2W” “Too Buggy” etc.
And (no offense meant) a lot of the ideas you post are awful from a gameplay and development standpoint. Forum posts also stress over and over again that the roleplaying Elements in the game are not favoured. Vermintide is not a toleplaying game. Never has been, never will be.
Also a lot of your informations are “incomplete”. War of the Roses was shut down by Paradox Interactive. Because this has been mentioned a lot in the Vermintide 1 Forums, FS went out of their way to explain it to us. Paradox literally prohibited FS (the developers) to do any further changes and bug fixes to the game (ignoring that bugs shouldnt be there in the first place). But that these two games have been plugged was publisher decision, not FS.
A lot of the negative WoM reviews are from the initial buggy phase and because people bitched about combat 2.0 in the WoM DLC. Among other stupid reasons.
The Drachenfels Maps are NOT copied. Only a section of them. For the first one it is at best 30 %, for the third one it is maybe around 50 % although a lot of details have been changed. For the second map I don’t know if there is even one familiar part.
Versus was Maybe announced to early. But just to answer a part from the Steam Forums. Versus is not a DLC. The plans are for stand-alone (although I will not rule out them changing their opinion/strategy, would be unwise though).
Personally, I like WoM and combat 2.0, so for me the game has improved over the last two years (minus the pre-WoM Phase which I found more than mediocre).
Well, meh!
Can’t say I like the explanation.
So Kruber is a noble brettonian son, which is lore bending but not breaking, but also the probably weakest Grail Knight in the lore.
Let’s hope that at last the Gameplay is better than the lore.
Well you wont see a lot of the playerbase in this forum, most of the ppl i know don’t use it and if you look at the numbers About - Fatshark Forums 846 Active Users in the last month is not a big number, if they even wrote anything (don’t know if “active” requires writing anything). I have no idea how many ppl actually play the game atm but regarding steamcharts it’s somewhere above 8k, and that doesn’t even count in all the players who left the game already (which, for me, is ~90% of my friends i started the game with), so let’s say you have quite optimistic ~10% in the forums. So you shall better not take anything written here as a representative opinion.
And if you ask me, that’s no wonder, since ppl like @Baron who have a problem with smth. come here and say what they think and face a wall of white knights, as always. But those are just my 2 cents regarding the situation in the forums…
As for the new career this post is not changing much on my opinion about it, but hey there is no need to buy stuff and we know anything about it yet except that it’ll be a Grail Knight, just kinda dissapointed at first sight but that might change, I dunno. I’m just sad since none of the things for Markus (well… the hats) I really enjoyed even if Markus is my most played with >+500 level and it seems like this will not change.
Of course it is only a part. The game has about 50k - 100k active players and most just play without caring much. But if you take the Steam Forums (developer bashing for fun) as an example then most people with strong opinions usually post them.
And I see it otherwise. Forums are most often just developer bashing based on half-baked informations. Forum here is miles better then Reddit or Steam and yet you still have a lot of it. Everyone is to a certain degree critically for different reasons, so I don’t get the White Knight comment because nobody acts like that (on an overall scale, of course for separation sections you will always have people pro and con, but that is not White knighting, that would be to defend the game unconditionally which we don’t have in the forum). Most often it is otherwise that if People say that they are okay with something are called fanboys or similar.
We have to wait for the actual release. I still think the majority is here for the gameplay and accepts lore-bending to a certain degree.
Thanks for the explanation! So, Krub is a descendant of a brettonian knight, and the Lady blessed him for doing great deeds. This might be stretching the lore a little, and I’m sure the more diehard lore fans will object to some of this, but it’s fair enough for me. Not more of a stretch than some other careers, at least. (Okay, maybe a little.)
But now I’m just very curious for the gameplay of it, and if GK Krub will be wielding the imperial illusion weapons (which I suspect). Still apprehensively excited…
I think that the player numbers VT2 had closer to release were composed of fantsy fans and warhammer fans. And as they realized that despite having RPG elements, it was not an RPG, they left. Not all at once, but slowly trickled out each time FS put out something that wasn’t the way the fans envisioned it. Thats a disconnect. Of course it isn’t why everyone left, but its a fantasy game and WH is iconic so the original playerbase definitely had a big chunk of those people.
WoM didn’t do badly because it broke the lore, the disconnect there is that FS thought most people wanted a challenge. They read the forums, saw the elitism, tried to deliver based on what must have looked like a majority. But the people on the forums are a vocal minority. To elaborate on what Unskinner said, most fantasy fans just want to relax. Last thing they’re going to do is jump into the toxicity of something like a steam forum. But we got a good look at their numbers when FS’s challenge DLC was met with overwhelmingly negative response; most people didn’t want the challenge amped up. At the end of the day cataclysm, ranked weaves, and the difficult end event of Dark Omens are something that the majority of players are going to have a negative experience with. And the fact that FS took a lot of unnecessary liberties with the lore meant that the diehard warhammer fans who still played, the people who were really excited for beastmen - even they couldn’t defend WoM.
At the end of the day, I can even accept a little lore bending if it means gameplay quality is better. Warhammer lore itself has evolved over the decades, and things that were lorebreaking in the early iterations became cannon later on. But I don’t think that GK’s skillset offers a unique enough playstyle from what Kruber already has to justify such a big lore abnormality. They had much better options for a class that added more and fit better. I think GK was just a bad choice across the board.
I’d personally argue it was the absolute broken state the game was in the first 3 months.
Did we already forget the ghost swings on nearly every melee weapon? Or how about leeches teleporting on top of you doing 20-50 unavoidable damage to you? Or how about hitting level 20:s meant the game lost nearly all of its challenge because of how broken the early temporary health was back in the day?
These are just few examples even ignoring the absolute mess that the balance was in (hello huntsman 1 shotting bosses) but i would say that, more than anything in the lore is what caused people to lose interest in the early days.
Obviously lore does play a large part in players minds but the absolute dump in playerbase simply cannot be explained by few lore bits.
I agree there were multiple factors, but I think it was a bigger percentage than most people realize. Vermintide 1 & especially 2 came out as World of Warcraft’s massive playerbase was experiencing a huge decline in players. At WoW’s height, a previous Warhammer MMO was released by the company that made Dark Age of Camelot, which was the main fantasy MMO prior to WoW. A large percentage of warcraft fans know that Warhammer and Warcraft have a good amount of overlap in fan appeal, so fast forward and I think a lot of those people saw an online warhammer RPG in VT2 and jumped in. These people were getting older and didn’t have quite as much time to sink into an MMO as they used to, but VT2 did a good job of capturing the feeling of running a dungeon with a team. The main reason Warcraft was losing its playerbase was because they started ignoring their own rules and making up the lore as they went along. So when fantasy fans come to VT2, get into the lore if they hadn’t already, and then see the same problem on top of it catering more toward left 4 dead fans. Yeah, little by little, they left.
FS could have done a little to keep a lot of those people, but instead went in the same direction they did with VT1. I think that backfired on them because when you add light RPG elements to bring in RPG fans, you’ve got to expand on those elements if you want to keep them. FS didn’t, so over time that playerbase trickled away.
As far as things being broken. FS never was especially good at balancing things. After Huntsman wrecking bosses it was Shade, and now its Bounty Hunter.
Ironically that game is quite well balanced. There is few things that need tuning but overall you dont have CLEARLY better class or clearly worse class.
In all honesty, I don’t understand people who are even reading or looking at the Steam reviews. If you want to get proper info, just watch independent channels on YouTube, and after a couple of videos you will know if you want to buy something or not.
Because Steam reviews are directly from players, you can see playtime and if they’ve gotten the product for free. Of course there will be troll reviews, the onus is on the person looking at those reviews to draw their own conclusions from them.
That’s correct, but the system is stupid… just look how Doom Eternal reviews got bombed just because of the anti-cheat system in the multplayer. You have a game with an EPIC single player campaign, and the game’s reviews are getting bombed just because of the multiplayer part?! That’s just idiotic.
It depends on how you approach them. Just looking at the score doesn’t help you. You have to read some of the reviews (usually the ones NOT on top).
For example if I buy a game I often read some of the negative reviews with the question in mind: “Would this bother me?” You obviously have to circumvent troll/fun/rant/pointless praise reviews. The system has the information you want to know, just have to take some minutes to look into it.
Had I checked Vermintide 2 during WoM release my though would have been “What is wrong with this community?” because a lot of reviews where uninformative insults or just placed wrongly.
As for player decline: Depending on game and timing a decline of 70-90 % of the initial playerbase in the first few months is “normal”. There are very few games which manage to keep high player numbers and while we all wish for success it is kinda unfair to always compare to the top, bright shining examples. The usual gamer attention span nowadays is just a few weeks.
The main reason Warcraft was losing its playerbase was because they started ignoring their own rules and making up the lore as they went along.
As someone who has played WoW for many years, I can assure you that the overwhelming majority of players that left the game wasn’t lore related at all. They introduced a lot of time-gated mechanics and made loot super RNG to the point where there is no such thing as “best in slot” gear anymore. So you could work as hard as you wanted to reach an end game with a character but never end up reaching it because you were at the mercy of the RNG stat rolls on every piece of gear that existed. The game became more about you did “well” in the game and got to do endgame content because you were lucky enough to reach that far and not so much that you were skilled at a class.
These, among other things, were why people left the game and not because of lore. Lore for the most part has been pretty good. This game from the start (Vermintide 2), was pretty much advertised as another left 4 dead game except taken place in the Warhammer universe. That is where most of the appeal came from as many people loved the type of game l4d was and a lot of people loved the warhammer setting.
Honestly the careers are kind of “what if” stories and some of them make a lot less sense than others.
Kerillian becoming a Shade? DAFQ…even the handmaiden career is sketchy AF considering how the 3 elven groups treat eachother.
Bardin having a Ironbreaker armor just conveniently stuffed into his backpack? Or sent by Okri? Did he run back home to fetch it before running back to ubersreik in time to get caught by the rats with the other 4? ?
Saltz becoming a bounty hunter after falling out with his order as a result of being too much of a heretic slaughtering zealous fanatic? That order does not have anything called “too much/many” when discussing the cleansing of heretics&chaos minions aside from when mentioning any number of survivors above 0.
Kruber happening to be the descendant of some Brettonian knight turned political refugee and got the good lady´s favor due to being too good at decimating chaos minions? Far fetched but actually less BS than some of the rest.
Can’t wait for Dan Mersh’s lines. A Brit playing as someone who is trying to speak french. His past as a comedian will come in handy i suppose. Like… please, give us a sneakpeek of them. Pretty please?
Another idea: would it be possible to have one of the voice actors do a stream with Tim and the gang? That would be seriously awesome!
We also need more videos of the voiceactors performing in general, just sayin’…
