List of suggestions at the end.
After 900 hours of Vermintide 2 I decided to install the original and poke around a bit. Mostly because I wanted to check out the maps and how the game is different from the sequel. Unfortunately this game is nearly dead from lack of players, playing solo is possible with the bot improvements from the QoL mod, but the lack of 3 other humans causes some problems with game balance because there are things that bots can’t do.
There are two closely related main problems as I see it:
- Collection and destruction objectives are designed for multiple players and don’t scale
- Horde frequency during collection and destruction events assume the max number of players
Simply put, any mission that involves collecting barrels/grain or breaking chains is horrible when played solo. In the time it takes a full party to shift 2 barrels, it can take a single human player 4-8 times as long or even more than that to accomplish the same thing. Since you can’t carry a barrel and fight a horde at the same time what tends to happen is you can only carry a barrel about 20 feet before you must drop it and fight an entire horde wave before you can pick it up again. The last time I tried to play black powder solo I was only on my way back to the second barrel when it dropped the first rat ogre on me.
Breaking chains is similarly frustrating. The HP of each chain is obviously designed with 4 players in mind, it’s not like in VM2 where it only takes a hit or two. It is simply agonizing to handle them solo, you have to sit there and swing your weapon for 20 seconds or more, but you might not even finish the job before the next wave of horde hits you. So not only does everything take 4 times as long but you also have to fight 4 times more enemies than a full party of players!
I just played through the second map in Death on the Reik and it simply broke me. This picture pretty much sums it all up. At this point I had already broken about 8 chains by myself while fighting an entire horde in between each chain. So I was already at the end of my rope in terms of health and sanity when the game drops this final challenge. Carry 3 barrels about 20 feet, simplest thing in the world, a human party could do it in less 10 seconds.
I got halfway across with the first barrel before the horde was upon me, every bot on my team died to a single stormvermin because the AI just can’t cope with fighting this many rats in tiny area like this. I managed to kill the first wave almost entirely by myself but it took so long that I only had time to pick up one bot before the second wave poured in. I was quickly alone again and no matter how fast I clicked my mouse I could not physically kill the rats faster than they spawned in thus making the mission impossible. All I could do was get crushed like a cockroach and watch 30 minutes of effort go down the drain.
The experience left me so frustrated that I don’t think I’m ever going to play this game again or even think about buying the DLC unless I see some major changes made.
It’s clear that Vermintide 1 will never again see the player numbers it was designed for in it’s current state and it needs to be rebalanced to reflect that fact. I HAVE attempted to play with live humans a few times but it’s been a mixed bag to put it mildly. Most of the time when I look there isn’t a single open lobby in north america, even if I widen the search to the entire world there might only be 2-3 lobbies without a password and all of them Easy or Normal. In my first coop game on Horn there were two level 3 players and one level 326 player. I already know all of the core game mechanics as well as the book locations for that level, but the new players clearly did not. They kept walking past health kits and books without picking them up and could tell the veteran was getting frustrated with them, he not join us for the next map in the rotation. Later on I attempted to host a lobby myself. After completing several maps solo I finally got one player to join near the end of Engines. He took over my saltzpyre bot and immediately ran off on his own, backtracking almost a third of the map just to find a health potion. He promptly drank it and left the tome he was carrying behind. I’m going to be generous here and assume that he didn’t do that on purpose, but nevertheless all of my games since then have been private.
So what can be done to make the game better? Here’s a list of ideas in no particular order:
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When a map objective involves breaking chains allow bots to attack the chains under certain conditions. It could be as simple as “bots will attack a chain if the player pings it and there are no rats around”. If that’s too complicated then just give the player a chain damage multiplier based on how many human players are in the game, solo player = 4x, two players = 2x, 3 players 1.3x.
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Bots should have the ability to pick up barrels and grain sacks if you ping them. If an enemy gets close to them they will drop the barrel a short distance behind them to hopefully keep it out of harms way before engaging. Since bots can teleport they would only pick an item up if you are already carrying one to keep things fair, if you drop yours they will too. This is not foolproof or nearly as fast as 4 players would handle the same situation, but it would be a vast improvement on the current solo experience.
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Horde frequency should be slightly reduced in solo games to account for the bots being generally inferior to players, especially during collection events.
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There are a lot of bot issues. The first is the fact that bots suffer from tunnel vision. In VM2 if an enemy gets within 5 feet of a bot they will immediately attack it, or possibly shoot it. In VM1 it seems like bots will only react to things in a frontal cone, if an enemy walks up behind them they will ignore it until it hits them. This is unacceptable, especially on higher difficulties where that hit could easily kill them. (NOTE: I am playing with the QoL modpack, the bots are even worse without it)
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Bots are utterly incapable of handling gunners in an intelligent manner. Very rarely they will simply shoot the gunner in the face the moment it appears. But what usually happens is all three bots pick a spot of cover and crowd into it like scared rabbits. If they just happen to be facing the wall when they do this the previous bug will allow the horde to surround and kill them almost effortlessly.
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Bots can’t handle stormvermin in mixed hordes. If a single stormvermin walks up to a bot they will engage it with the proper attacks and dodge it’s swings. If the bot is already fighting other rats they will completely ignore the stormvermin entirely despite the greater threat, what tends to happen is the stormvermin does a single overhand attack and kills them in one hit unless they happen to be blocking at that moment in which case the second one gets them.
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Bots do not use ranged weapons enough against hordes. They will typically only fire at specials and at “random” when they feel like gunning down ambient rats. In VM2 this would be fine because player power is higher in general and you have ults, but in VM1 thinning out a horde as it approaches is essential for survival. This issue also makes certain weapons like blunderbuss almost useless in bot hands because they never use them in horde situations.
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It’s impossible to tell specific bots to pick things up, which can be a concern if you tell the bots to pick up a grim and you want kruber to carry it because he has a shield for tanking. Healing items are also annoyingly random. This issue could be solved by porting in the same ping context menu than VM2 has.
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This last one may be a quirk of the QoL mods but I find that bots are extremely hesitant to stand in front of the player, to the point that they will remain glued behind the player like a backpack and studiously ignore everything attacking the player just a few feet away. They need to have a longer leash to engage things in the nearby vicinity as they do in VM2.
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The loot progression needs to be sped up in general, VM1 is effectively a legacy game behind VM2 now and it doesn’t need the same length of progression it once had. Even with the quests and contracts system it would take hundreds of hours of play to get a full set of fully upgraded exotics on each character, to say nothing of collecting all trinkets and reds. With the current playerbase almost exclusively playing solo that’s not as practical as it was during the game’s heyday. It’s especially hard to swallow for players already used to VM2’s revamped loot and crafting system, which causes them to bounce off and go back to VM2 or just play something else.
-First off double or even triple the loot players get per mission, dice rolls determine which tier of reward is available and the player is then allowed to select any unlocked reward as his first item instead of always getting the highest one. The second or possibly third items are then randomly picked from the remaining unlocked items. This keeps the current RNG based system relatively intact but greatly reduces the overall grind needed to progress in the game. The point of this is to get new players quickly up to speed so that they can comfortably run Hard difficulty and up without feeling underequipped or discouraged. -
If a player owns a DLC that gives a new weapon allow it to drop from any mission reward pool instead of those specific to the DLC.
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The trinkets that increase loot drops for a particular character should stack. If you and the three bots all have the same character’s trinket it should give a correspondingly higher chance of getting equipment for that character (but still not 100%). In addition to this, for every 4 of the trinkets you bring into a mission it gives you an extra bone dice at the end for playing with a handycap. If the combined dice roll higher than 7 you get one extra item from the reward list.
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Expand the the Quest and Contracts system to give players more choices. Allow players to accept three different quests at once and reduce the number of keys required to unlock quests. Players should expect to be able to complete at least 3 quests a week, kind of like how Bogenhaven chests work in VM2. Finally allow players to reroll the terms of one mission per day, this changes the objective but not the reward or the map so you can’t unlock a DLC mission or lose a key by doing this. You could also use that daily reroll on a mission you have already accepted if you are having trouble with it or don’t find it to be fun.
Lastly, integrating VM1 and VM2 together would take the most work but also provide the most benefit in terms of longevity for both games. People who have only played one of the games would have an incentive to purchase and play the other, which supports the playerbase of both games and drives sales to support Fatshark itself. There is some small precedence for this as simply owning VM1 unlocks the classic hero outfits in VM2. Ideally both playerbases would combine and have compelling reasons to regularly play both VM1 and VM2. Some ideas:
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For players who own both games allow them to transfer small amounts of crafting materials back and forth. Scrap and green/blue/orange dust would convert into the corresponding crafting material and vice versa. This transfer would have a weekly limit so you can’t just dump your pile of 1000 orange dust into VM1 and unlock everything. For players making the jump from one game to another for the first time this helps speed up the least fun part of the game which is the initial grind with white items (or 5 power items). For veteran players this would also give them an incentive to regularly play a bit of both each week as you can do daily missions in one game and use the rewards to progress in the other.
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The previous suggestion would also support any eventual deed crafting system in VM2. Players who want the 500 deed portrait or just an extra challenge in general are probably VM1 veterans with lots of materials they can’t use for anything.
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Add achievements and awards to VM1 that carry over into VM2. One of the main criticisms of VM2 is the slow drop rate for hats. So maybe if you unlock a hat in VM1 you could accomplish a difficult challenge while wearing that specific hat, which then unlocks it in VM2. This gives players an escape from the pure RNG of VM2’s drop system while also providing them with an additional challenge.
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Similarly to the hat situation, one major cause of irritation in the VM2 playerbase is the RNG surrounding red items. Getting a red to drop is not that hard, however getting one specific red is extremely difficult, particularly for weapons with multiple illusions. Some of those glow skins are based off of weapon models from VM1, I believe there is an opportunity here to integrate the two games. Just like with the hats you could add achievements specific to red items in VM1 that involve difficult challenges, once you manage to find that red as a drop and complete the challenge in VM1 you then receive that red item in VM2 and unlock the illusion on it. If you already have that specific red you instead get 5 red dust to make a red item out of something else.
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One thing that would greatly increase the longevity of VM1 is porting weapons like the Halberd, Pick, Flail and Spear backwards from VM2 into VM1. (Sienna doesn’t get a new melee weapon VM2 but I guess you could port back the Flamestorm staff instead) This would require considerable effort, not necessarily in terms of art assets but to balance the weapons for damage and general utility in a different system. I think it would be worth it because being able to use those weapons in conjunction with VM1’s very different set of traits and trinkets would offer a whole new experience. It would also tie into the illusion unlock system I mentioned above.
