The respawn points are too far from where you die and often beyond a jump so you can lose many boons and upgrades.
Edit: I’ll that you have also the case of the “Forbidden Trail” where, if you die at the end of the last part, you respawn very far back into the map.
Constructive criticism 101
I’ll answer just 1 more time for the purpose of the topic only. Your condescending and insulting attitude would deserve just some compassion.
Firstly, you actually CAN die because:
Secondly, “Two wrongs don’t make a right”. A bad game design choice isn’t made good by my mistakes.
Thirdly. Welcome in my ignore list.
Right, its a game. There are repercussions for dying.
I honestly dont know what to tell you.
I’ll just get back to my suspicion from last time we had the topic.
I think the respawn points are a side product of the random nature of the Chaos Wastes maps. As there are paths which are only present in one or a few iterations of the map, the game could mistakingly spawn there resulting in an unreachable spot (remember spawning on the wrong side of the river in Fort Brachsenbrücke).
As such the spawn points most likely have been reduced to areas which are present in all or at least most of the possible iterations. However, this also means that a 15 minutes maps may only have 2 spawn points at all which are pretty far from each other. With a more detailed navigation map this could probably be solved programming side. However, it would be a lot of effort needed.
All speculation of course.
Maybe a slightly more ambivalent take:
Dying in chaos wastes is more punishing than dying in adventure maps.
Good or bad, it’s inconsistent.
Here are the game design issues as I see them:
Mistakes should be punishing. They should make it harder to win. That’s like, a basic feature of all skill based challenges. Losing a piece in chess gives you fewer options. Running out of oxygen in subnautica resets progress a little. Dying in overwatch gives you a 5v6 and reduced ult generation ability. Etc.
Ideally punishment for mistakes should be part of the gameplay. This is where you get a spectrum.
2.1 Chess/subnautica: the game just continues, but you suffer consequences. Progress reset is a little boring in subnautica’s case but not egregiously so.
2.2 overwatch: you’re pulled out of action for like 10 seconds before you can start running back to the fight. Your teammates suffer your loss in continued play.
2.3 vermintide adventures: you’re 3/4 effective for at least 30 seconds and must face that challenge until rescue.
In team games like this the good consequence design happens for your teammates. 0.5 → 2.5 minutes of no teammate. It’s harder! But for the downed player the game becomes trivial. Just wait. Eat a slice of pizza, check your phone, Then, back to normal difficulty.
In overwatch the game is so fast paced that I actually relish the break sometimes, but it’s only like 10-15 seconds anyway and there’s a constantly evolving battlefield situation that I need to be analyzing.
So! Vermintide. In chaos wastes the consequence for failure is higher. In this there is good and ill:
Good: missing boons. Yes, it’s sad, but it’s good consequence design IMO. Is it too much consequence? Well, debatable.
Bad: mandatory timeout. Zero challenge for the affected player. The timeout can be ages in game time. 5 minutes? I’ve never measured. It feels like forever. 30+ seconds is at the threshold. Just enough for one horde wave and some specials . Two if the team is slow.
The ugly:
Basically seems impossible to reconcile these without discarding both. The timeout is how you lose boons. Maybe a coin penalty would be appropriate if the rescue points were made closer. Technical limitations of the map system aside.
Ideal - my pipe dream: player is shunted to hell and has to fight their way out before rescue.
But yeah the long downtime is very un-fun. Especially when it depends highly on where you go down. You can be waiting anywhere from 40 seconds to like a full map rotation. I accept the missed boons, though.
Thanks for the comprehensive and well thought post.
I concur with you and I want to point out that I’m not raging for the missing boons (even if it’s annoying, of course).
My problem is that many spawn points are very far from the dying spot that you lose a lot of shrines and , above all, fun for playing the map because you are forced to wait a lot. This is especially true when maps have some particular modifiers like +hordes or +specials.
Punishing mistakes is part of the gameplay, just like failure, but there’s a balance to mantain otherwise the punition is too excruciating and risk to remove all the fun.
Waiting 3 or 4 minutes to get rescued in a map which you complete in 15’ is a bit too much.
Spawn points should be nearer to the dying spots.
Otherwise we go back to the HoM spawning hell.
The ice boat level with the arena has instances of people spawning back at the arena despite the group being beyond that point.
Spawn points and Boss Chests need to be fixed / rethought imo.
Those chests are something else, I love when a Spawn pops in behind my bots going for that one on the cliff overlooking the lava on Cinder Peak and shoving them all off the ledge at the same time. Things like this and falling though the map when you use dashes/BW or Slayer’s ult and get stuck or die (at least when you die you can go back to the keep with some coins if you don’t have any way of self damaging) make CW frustrating, nothing like a run going south because the collision swallowed you and you can’t escape.