Only just recently bought the game and was really enjoying it until i tried to play veteran, solo is impossible unless you spend time levelling up all characters and matchmaking is terrible.
Why would you make it impossible to play alone and make people rely on matchmaking to progress? IMO all it does it make it unnecessarily problematic, why even have the solo option there when it is useless? Game is amazing but prioritising online play spoiled it for me a bit.
(Like i said only just bought the game so im new here , cant find any other threads on this topic and thought id share my thoughts, obviously really enjoy the game otherwise i wouldn’t bother commenting!)
Actually some people solo clear legend with bots. The way bots work is they maintain the items, traits and builds you set them up with when you play that character, and I’m not sure, but I think they may also retain the hero power you leave the character with.
That said, I’ve found a good way to find people to play with is to add people to your steam friends list if you have fun with them and you’re both interested in the game.
The best thing about your situation, if you keep playing, is that it only gets better. You could try one of the discords. Pretty sure BMI has some activity for the lower difficulties.
I think the problem lies with your expectations. This is very much a co-op game first, and the single-player option, while there, comes far behind. The bots are there more as placeholders for real people than as a complete team, and they’re that way on purpose. As others said, the best you could do (if you really don’t like playing with random people) is to try to find a constant group either through slogging through Quickplay for a while and friending good partners, or going to external sources for groups (like Reddit or any of the many Discord channels).
If, despite all this, you still want to keep playing solo, you do need (at least in practice) to level up and kit out at least three other characters. Do it slowly, changing your loadout, Career and character every few levels and it’s a bit less likely to feel like a grind. As a bonus, you’ll also learn what the different characters and Careers can actually do, and you may be able to utilize them better afterwards, especially if you do end up playing with others. As for kitting out the bots, there are more in-depth guides out there, but in general three points will help: A durable Career; a sniping-capable ranged weapon (like Crossbow or Handgun); and a simple-to-use melee weapon with well-defined patterns. If you’re on PC, you could also try the Bot Improvements mod (see the Steam Workshop page about that).
Try playing on Xbox where you won’t get anyone joining for long periods of time, and when they do it can take 5 minutes for them to join. You get to either hunker in place for 5 minutes or leave them far behind, all the while you’re a player down.
I actually prefer bots on Xbox to most of the players that show up. You’ll get a decent player maybe 1 out of every 4-5 players that join. And “decent” is a low bar consisting of not walking off by themselves and not shooting you in the back constantly on Champion.
This game does NOT belong on console imo. The current crop of console players are new and will, as you say, run off thinking only of themselves. Console players have a different mentality compared to PC players it seems (not including people who do both). If there was cross console play, this would be less of an issue, but since they are isolated from main PC gamers, they are SOL.
Solo is easier for certain careers than others - Slayer being the easiest imo.
As for matchmaking, I do agree it’s less than ideal - until you get to Legend difficulty. Most people who play legend are nice to play with, at least in my experience. (there’s always “that one” player though…) The nice thing about the internet, however, is you can always find people who share your dilemma and you can form a party/group to level up together.
@Doobiestfunk - As @Yzneftamz said, Vermintide is mainly a coop multiplayer game. Of couse that doesn’t mean that you can’t play it solo. It just takes a lot of hours and practice to get to the needed skill level.
But, if you decide to play it in coop more and you’re from Europe/Russia, I’ll be glad to kill some rats and chaos cultists on veteran with you. It would give you a little more room to make mistakes and learn without wiping and failing the map.