Well, while most of ideas are good and reasonable, there are some questionable decisions.here by a developer.
Weaves
People have been asking for more ways to play the game, we wanted to bring a new game mode to life. We believe that Weaves, with difficulty scaling, a shorter in play time mode will push you to try new weapons, careers and tune your gear differently, and then keep tweaking your kit depending on the weave you are trying to beat.
Each weave is curated, meaning all elements within them that would normally be random in the base game are no longer. This causes the weave game mode to feel like more of a puzzle the higher difficulty you reach, making you question “what should we do and how should we do it in order to solve this?”.
Weaves are unlocked sequentially, completing a weave unlocks the tier above it. The intention then is to make each Weave progressively more difficult to a point where even our most stalwart players can not complete them. The endless challenge provided by the weaves comes from this scaling difficulty. Towards the top end of the leaderboard we fully expect players to be learning every detail of a weave to be able to complete it, and in doing so move onto the next challenge presented to them.
The decision to make weaves as handcrafted challenges opposed to making them randomized, like Diablo 3 rifts, for example, is very deliberate. While the truly randomized Weaves would work up to a point, there are a few reasons we decided to go down a different path. The combinations are limited, and if you play long enough you start identifying good and bad Weaves when you step foot in them. This leads to so-called “Weave fishing”, where you load into Weave after Weave, ditching any that are less than the perfect randomized value. We wanted to avoid a player experience where you matchmake into a level and everyone leaves or you burn hours rerolling levels until it’s the combination you were hoping for. Which is at best tedious, and at worst is the reason you stop playing for the rest of the season.
We wanted to move away from this and instead try and see if we could build interesting and challenging handcrafted versions of Weaves which would cater more to the fact that Vermintide 2 is a much more mastery based game. We think you could play Weaves much like you play a From Software game, where you enter blindly into a new challenge, you have no idea what’s coming at you and initially struggling at being able to respond to what the game throws at you. After you fail a couple of times you start identifying critical moments in the Weave; “I will get attacked by berserkers at this point, then a gutter runner will spawn that I have to deal with”, then the mastery aspect kicks in where you learn to deal with these different challenges one at a time until you have a 100% clear rate against this specific scenario.
Why no random mode outside the leaderboards? It is an interesting idea we have also been talking about, we wanted to start with the static weaves see how that impacted the matchmaking experience at scale and then iterate on that design based on that information.
Will FS reject their own ideas and turn Weaves from mistake of game design
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