The obnoxious one way invisible walls in Chaos Wastes

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Feedback
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I only see one other thread on the subject, which surprises me.

They are placed so frequently and so obnoxiously that some will even force you to die or remain trapped because they effectively force you outside of the level with only death as a way off the “ledge” because you can’t walk back across perfectly traversable flat terrain.

Honestly, it feels like Saltzpyre himself went over every single level zealously placing invisible walls on EVERYTHING where it was logical, practical or not, or prevented anything that was even possible. Yet did such a poor job, in many places the one-way invisible wall is placed before the edge of where they are placed causing players to be trapped out on a ledge with only an illogical invisible wall stopping it.

I’ve tried to minimise the rant here but honestly, bots are fraying my sanity and some degree of a hyperbolic rant for comedic effect was needed.

Also, the use of invisible bounding boxes in this game has long confused/annoyed the ever-loving umgak out of me.

  • Some things have an overly complicated collision box where they don’t need to, often causing bugs and issues with being stuck in the world.
  • Some things have no collusion that you’d expect to.
  • Some things have an invisible wall where it would have been so simple to close in the actual level in that area. Good old visible walls are a better option.
  • Some things are a jumping puzzle
  • Some things aren’t a jumping puzzle yet look more like one than half the jumping puzzles, the difference is invisible walls or missing collision).

I’ve no experience with Bitsquid/Stingray as an engine, so maybe this is a quirk of the engine, or maybe it’s a time/manpower issue, but, (to quote Kerillian) it drains my sanity.

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I’ve actually ran into this at the start of Bel’Sha’Ziir’s Mine, I think. I was just scouting around the wooden platforms at the start and I happened to walk all the way to the edge of one to look around. It was very strange to suddenly realize that I was effectively imprisoned on the edge by some invisible barrier. I managed to escape by dashing into the lower levels from the corner, but still pancaked due to fall damage.

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A friend got trapped on that same ledge.
He’s kinda new and wasn’t aware the game uses kill zones, rather than fall damage. So he tried to aim his drop to land on a ledge below but died the second he stepped off the ledge.

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The way I see it, maps will be better off without any invisible walls.
The players should be free to move as they please in the playable area unhindered by invisible walls.
The terrain itself should be the obstacle not invisible walls. If player figure out how to take a shortcut or something that the devs didn’t intend, then they should fix the problem by adjusting the terrain and take notes for future map development instead of doing this half assed solution where they slap an invisible wall in. Whenever you hit them it’s immersion breaking.

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I agree with all of the above, invisible walls have been a pet hate of mine since the 90s and I first got into level design myself.

One way invisible walls just take those issues to a whole new level.

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Some invisible walls are fine, stops players walking into places they can get stuck and ending up softlocking themselves if a team mate won’t kill them, but the amount they’re put into CW is pretty insane. Some other maps seem to suffer from it a bit too, but it’s hard to tell if they’re just weird collision boxes or actual invis walls.

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