There are some things regarding the versus mode i was thinking about. First thing being “autoaim” abilities like kerillians Trueshot Volley. I can not imagine having much fun (as a Rat player) playing against that type of ability.
So in Terms of Talents , versus has to be a seperate mode. Creating a talent system thats fun and fair for both versus and coop at the same time seems too much of a problem to me.
So , what if versus is a completely seperate gamemode then. Where should it be located ? Should we need to start a different client or realm for that ? Should it be included into Taals Keep ? Im personally all for the “include it into the Keep” solution since i just want to stay in a lobby with my friends , selecting the gamemode we want to play this evening from there.
But how to add in versus mode into vermindtide 2 ? Including it into the base game and not making it a dlc is what i hope for. I think making it a DLC or a complete standalone game would not be ideal. But its a thin line , some people just dont want versus … some people will end up not wanting to play any coop, sticking to versus. What do you think ?
Then there are more open questions that made me rly curious. With no dedicated servers , how will we play in player hosted games in a gamemode like versus ? Will bots be in place to fill in empty slots on both sides ? How will the game react when the host is leaving ? will it even be directly player hosted ?
What do you expect from versus ? Whats your thoughts about versus in general ? Im really looking forward to play it and i hope for some nice Gutter Runner jump movement to play around with.
In the Versus announcement they refer o Versus and VT2 as “two separate titles”. So we can expect they won’t cross over much.
I personally don’t care much for pvp in general and don’t have an interest in versus. It is something that has been requested since VT1 though, which is kind of nice.
I think v2 would benefit from having all gamemodes (regular/weave/versus) accessible through the same keep. So friends or random players that come together by matchmaking can switch gamemodes with ease.
Will this copy from the steam forums where i explained why I think it is better for Versus to be a standlone title completely separated from the main game. As I answered someone else it might be possible that a few sentences might seem misplaced.
There are several advantages.
Seperate forums: to keep the usual burning grounds of Versus games away from the a bit less burning ground the current forum is. In theory, the same result could be obtained with sub-forums. But most users rarely show enough intelligence to chose the correct sub-Forum. Source: Every LFG thread not placed in the LFG Forum.
Separating reviews. Latest with WoM it has become clear that users do not shy away from misusing the review system and giving reviews at products they don’t belong to. This will lead to mixed and mudded review scores where not liking one part will lead to negative votes despite the whole product or even just the base product being in a good state.
Target audience and pricing: Co-op games and PvP games are targetting a different audience. While there is a block who likes both enough to purchase them, it is not a majority. So basing a PvP mode on the co-op audience of Vermintide is …… questionable. As standalone title though, the game can be bought by PvP interested players specifically without caring for the rest. And this goes directly into pricing. PvP Mode will cost money. To expect Fatshark to work for free is delusional. As such if someone wants to play Versus he has to buy Vermintide 2 first PLUS the Versus DLC. This is to steep for most people. If they go standalone however, they can have a rather cheap price and get a lot of initital interest. To limit sales to a two million demographic of a co-op game is …. not the smartest thing to do.
Reviews again: If targetted on current Vermintide 2 reviews will evaluate it as a side-mode of a co-op game which will result in a less favourable score. If it is understood as a pure PvP game, it will be evaluated more fair.
Monetization can be handled differently and can be managed for Versus online. Otherwise if you make it a DLC for current Vermintide where either all new versus maps will be given out for free (because you better realize that Versus will NOT come with every map available right now since preparing them for Versus is a lot of work) or you have to make DLC’s for DLC’s resulting in the chance people buying a versus mappack which they have to refund then because they cant use it in their co-op experience.
Since there are several parts of the game unimportant for the Versus experience you can make a leaner Version which takes up less disk space for People interested only in versus.
There are probably some other reasons. Dont have knowledge about technical stuff. But I can imagine there is also advantage to have two cleanly separated codes.
For the disadvantages.
It creates a minor inconvenience for player playing both who have to switch by ending one game and starting the other one
It means people playing both have to sacrifice lots of disk space.
Only the community part interested equally in both titles would win a bit while the rest of mankind lives better with two seperate titles.
I think they are merged already in the live version. Everything I have seen points to it being a mode inside the main game, but of course it could even use the same exe and resource files but launched separately.
I can see only one major advantage for keeping the code separate and that’s bugs not leaking / unintentional bugs because something was changed for the other game mode. Having them in the same code base then again potentially gives us more bug fixes as two teams are working on it rather than one. If they were separated then maybe merging some fixes would happen until the branches are so far apart that it’s no longer possible.
Versus has different kinds of needs performance wise from the game than adventure and I am hopeful that it leads to good things.
I am interested in seeing how the keep is implemented in Versus as surely they are not letting there be duplicate heroes or specials in there.
As this is the feedback forum, I’ll give mine. I wish it could be incorporated into adventure mode in some fun way, like controlling some enemies when you are dead. If nothing else, a spectator mode would be great for players waiting for a slot to free up.
I’d guess their approach is to have 2 separate keeps, 1 for each team. There’d probably be a prompt similar to the “your hero isn’t available” when you join to chose a character and a team and be placed in their keep. In the keep you can do the typical things (aside from weaves and FoW) and the tab screen would show who is on both teams, maybe keeping either character or career info hidden. The game would start when a majority (or all) of the players on both teams are ready in the bridge of shadows.
I would imagine, there’s already a framework in place for how this happens in coop, seems easy to fill teams with bots where necessary (special spawns would include as many bot specials as missing players on that team and the heroes would use the host’s bot priority/loadouts for both teams)
This solves nothing, people can still post on the vermintide forum even if there existed a vermintide versus forum, whether it’s a sub-forum or not.
This is also unnecessary, if people only like coop, they don’t need to leave a review on the versus game mode.
Versus shouldn’t be trying to pull in players who have never touched the game before, but entice people who are already familiar with it. In other words, versus is not a place to learn the mechanics of the game, but to test your abilities against one another, so it should be a part of the main game.
You already can play on maps you don’t own by joining someone who does own it. Same thing would apply here. When new maps are released, the only person who would need to buy it would be the host but those who didn’t wouldn’t get the challenges and other things that came with that dlc.
If you haven’t checked this out, they went over some versus stuff in this dev blog a while back:
"Will Versus affect my regular Vermintide 2 experience?
Not in the slightest, no. Versus is an independent fork of development with its own team, vision and resources. Balance changes in Versus will not roll into Vermintide 2 and vice versa. That’s not to say some changes may not appear in both versions where it makes sense, you can rest easy that abilities or weapons found to be too strong in a PvP environment will not see changes in the PvE environment unless they’re too strong there as well.
Do I have to play Versus ?
Warhammer: Vermintide 2 - Versus is a standalone game mode. Whilst players who own Vermintide 2 might get some special unlocks in Versus , there is no deeper crossover between the two titles. If you don’t like PvP, you absolutely don’t have to play it and you can glaze over it safe in the knowledge that the co-op game you know and love is still seeing development from the Vermintide 2 team as before."
I’m one of the people that never really asked for a Versus mode, and I would probably have been happy had it never been made. Having said that however, it was an oft requested gamemode, and regardless of everything I am looking forward to try it. Why not? It sounds fun. Especially if it gets balanced seperately from PvE modes I can’t think of any downside of having it. Should be nice for a change of pace, and people who are not interested can ignore it completely.
As for how it’s implemented: I really hope it’s integrated with the rest of the game. Make it a seperate gamemode to be selected in the menu, and a “DLC” as far as Steam is concerned, technically. Then you won’t need to use the diskspace if you don’t want it.
You are either not capable to understand the points made or you have willfully ignored them:
Concerning forums: As I originally said, you can make sub-forums. But this isn’t about what people can or can’t. Looking at each Steam Game with sub-forums it is glaringly obvious that people either can’t be bothered or are to dumb to post in the correct sub-forum. If versus and co-op are part of the same API they will always link to the same main forum which will most likely be the co-op forum. So, it is to be expected that the forum will be flooded with versus threads. It will be a navigation nightmare. If Versus and Co-op are two different API’s though they will link to different forums. Everything will be fine.
Concerning Reviews: Latest with WoM where several people have misused the review system by posting reviews for the DLC in the main game section. Or if they were extra idiotic they would downvote every part of the game because of the DLC. Fatshark will be extra wary to avoid the main game being unfairly review bombed again. Thank the oh-so mature community for that. If Versus comes out as part of current Vermintide 2 there will be reviews on the vanilla game with people being stupid again. Of course this can happen, if the games are separate too. But in case of being separate the review can be deleted for addressing the wrong game which would be fair.
Concerning Audience and Pricing: This is just … wow. Why in the world would a developer limit himself to the audience of the current game which is mostly interested in co-op and not versus? That is like … a horrible buisness idea. The audience of versus and co-op are for the largest part different. You can get a lot of versus players who have no interest (and have not bought) in the current Vermintide 2. All of them will be alienated if you make versus a DLC in the main game due to the additional price tag. Also you can expect several game changes coming for Versus. There is very little chance that the Heroes as they are now will be in versus. Reason for this is that Versus is (from what I read) balanced around Champion. People used to Legend and above will absolutely shred specials no matter how smart they are since they die by being coughed at. Therefore we need limitations and changes which will result in all players having to learn anew. As such it doesnt matter if new players join in the mix.
Concerning DLC structure: You haven’t understood this problem. Piling both Co-op and Versus DLCs on one game leads to DLC’s being on the storepage which can’t be used if you have not bought another DLC before. I don’t even know if this is technically or legally possible. Separate API’s are a so much better and cleaner solution. The only advantage for making them part of the same game is minor convenience for the magical community part interested in both.
In the end, we have to wait for FS to make the decision based on all the facts. It they think putting them together, so be it. But frankly, in my opinion, alone on the economic aspects separating the two modes in two different games is so much more viable. And they can give a reasonably low pricing for Versus increasing potential player pool even further.
The reason people left bad reviews about WoM was partly because it affected the base game in a negative way whether you bought the DLC or not. Clearly it wasn’t ready for release and everyone was saying after a full year the game still feels like it’s in beta. Versus in no way affects the base game if it becomes a game mode select-able from the keep, so there’s no reason to give the game a bad review because something doesn’t fit your taste.
About versus being an additional price tag, I think I remember them saying it (or some future dlc) will be included free of charge. Assuming it costs money because they put time into it isn’t necessarily going to happen because it was more of a project they wanted to pursue. They still have Lohner’s Emporium as a way to bring in money from what I understand.
This and the fact that the Winds of Magic release had what… a week of pre-release? This pre-release didn’t allow people to review the actual DLC and so they simply left a review on the base game because Fatshark choosing to have a pre-release was in effect a way to silence initial reviews and so people reviewed the next possible thing.
Essentially you had an entire Beta worth of feedback with perhaps multiple phases of invitations - most of said concerns were largely ignored. Fatshark then had their pre-release which was pretty much another Beta because again… players could only leave feedback and couldn’t review the actual DLC because the option to do so was locked.
So yea perhaps people “misused the review system” but then again Fatshark misused their customer base by releasing a shoddy DLC that clearly had issues that were pointed out multiple times during the Beta and yet they barely changed anything and released their mess upon the world with some time where people couldn’t leave any review to warn others of the DLC.
If that was the sole reason it would have stopped after the pre-release was over. But this wasn’t the case. The reviews for the vanilla game came up to four weeks after the official release of WoM. And it also came from people who bought WoM and could review the DLC. Several people also downvoted both the vanilla game and the DLC for the same reason. Some very special people did this even for all the DLCs and the main game. The review system has been misused. And this is largely just on a minor part of the community behaving shitty.
But it is a side-story. The thread is about Versus. And so far I haven’t seen a convincing argument as to why Versus and Co-op should be part of the same game other than convenience. And this convenience would come for large increase in price for people solely interested in versus and a largely limited potential player pool and new customers. Again, if FS decides to do so because they have reason I just don’t see, so be it. But for now, I only see advantages separating these modes on two games.
About the “downvoting the main game” topic , people voted down base vermintide 2 because the combat overhaul of release 2.0.x and the sheer amount of bugs were killing all the fun in the game , winds of magic or not. I was one of the people that kept playing and got used to bugged trash combat again realizing how bad it actually was when patch 2.0.15 hit and the combat suddenly felt so much better. There was a reason to downvote the base game because it did not deliver regardless dlc. And we are talking about months in this stadium , its was not an “oopsie” with some quick fixes down the line. Today Vermintide 2 still is something i would not really recommend to most people because most systems in the game are poorly designed and combat is still very bugged making you lose runs you spent like 30 mins already due to some weird bugs. 2.0.15. is a solid step in the right direction and if season 2 will end up redesigning crucial elements like gear progression and overall bug density , then we can talk about a “thumbs up”.
To Versus. I dont really see the benefit of spliting up versus and coop. Lets say we roll with “versus is free and will be implemented into the main game”. New players that are interested in versus will eventually end up playing a lot of coop aswell once they discover it. Same thing the other way around , people that are interested in coop are more likely to take a look at versus when its part of the main game. If i take a glimpse at the steamcharts for vermintide 2 … splitting up the community into versus and coop players could be somewhat problematic. And yeah i get the argument of “im not interested in versus so keep it out of my vermintide” but people also said that about weaves and … i mean come on. Vermintide 2 is designed to hook you for a long time with overall progression and a mixture of many gamemodes like deeds,weaves,fortunes of war,adventure and twitch. Keeping versus out of it because some people maybe dont want to play it makes no sense to me because it creates an artificial barrier to access everything that vermintide 2 has to offer at one place, preventing people to try out stuff.
Yea both Update 2.0 and Winds of Magic impacted the base game whether you bought Winds of Magic or not. It isn’t surprising that there has been such a large backlash because both Update 2.0 and Winds of Magic were released half baked imo. After the initial Beta and vast amount of negative feedback, Fatshark should’ve taken the time to make some heavy changes before going back to a Beta before release.
As for Versus. They should definitely be separate because I could too easily see the Versus mode impacting game balance while introducing numerous bugs/glitches if they were in the same game with the pve content. Let the Versus mode stay far away with the minority fanbase behind it’s untimely development. If it’s free I might take a stick and prod it from a distance before turning back to what I like about Vermintide 2 but even that has been infringed upon due to recent updates. However both recent balance/bug/glitch fix patches and the eventual release of Drachenfels maps gives me a slight glimmer of hope.
And all the negative reviews about the poor technical state of the game were completely okay. And even the negative reviews concerning combat changes and content draught were okay. What was not okay was some people desparately claiming that the huge backslash was solely because of the combat changes and that FS should get rid of stagger and talent changes.
Even at the initial release of 2.0 only in a very tiny amount of reviews the combat changes have even been mentioned. Over and over it had to be said that the problem is the bugs overshadowing the gameplay improvement and that it will change once the bugs get reduced. And magically this is exactly what happened. Combat changes stayed largely untouched and the bugs get fixed and the reviews increased again. And still there are people claiming it is because FS reverted parts of the combat changes. I went the extra mile and checked all patch notes and stagger is reduced in 2.03 and increased again in 2.05 back closer to original values, so it has remained mostly the same. Even if 2.05 changed something it was minor and reviews only went up weeks later after more bugs had been fixed. And the dodge nerf has been left untouched completely unless it was mentioned under tweaks. This is what annoys me. People trying to spin some kind of non-existing majority to get rid of gameplay improvements like stagger and talent overhaul. Because again, the problem has always been the bugs and at no point these changes. Beastmen though got a lot of (unnecessary) nerfs but are not part of the combat changes. 2.0.15 also is not changes in gameplay but mostly fixing bugs (like phantom swings). That said, it is not good that bugs still prevail this long after the release but bug-fixing is a lot more complicated than most people think. I’m just glad that reviews finally show the true form of the mostly unchanged and untouched combat balance changes.
As for Versus: Well under the assumption that Versus would be free, then yes it could make sense to bring it to the main game from an economic standpoint. But in my opinion, that is a rather greedy assumption that all the work which has been poured into the mode should be brought to the game for naught. And I can’t imagine this happening. FS deserves to ask for money for that. The “splitting” of the community is not a problem because the “split” would be happening either way. Because people can’t play Versus and Co-op at the same time. So if they play Versus, they will not be available for the matchmaking pool in co-op. The only thing that would change is the displayed player number. A merely psychological aspect suggesting a bigger playerpool for either mode which would not be correct.
The comparison to Weaves only works half. Yes, it is a different mode and has an own progression mode. But Weaves (no matter how much some people dislike it) are part of the lore and have story progression. Base lines like Ubersroms story have been laid out in Season 1. And at this point I am pretty much convinced that Kerillian’s backstory and the reason why she was banned are connected to the Weaves. And the Illusion Weaves also give the chance to revisit past events. Lore-wise and story-wise the Weaves have a far higher potential than adventure mode. FS has already finished far more content than they have released. What people don’t understand is that Weaves was not meant to reach its full potential in Season 1 but later down the line (Season 3+). This may seem non-sensical at first but comes due to some limitations. Versus on the other hand has most likely (cant say for sure) absolutely no story-progression, so it can be a separate gimmick game like the VR version for Vermintide 1. And the lean and cheap aspects could be major trump cards. Versus running smoother than Vermintide 2 is a sad but possible reality.
But I have repeated my arguments often enough. So just let me ask you: Under the assumption that Versus will cost money and NOT be free, what advantage do you get by introducing Versus into the main game OTHER than convenience? The question is meant seriously. You are right that i have no interest in Versus and just want to have it out of Vermintide 2. This reflects in my argumentation and maybe there are important points I overlook. It may also serve as reference for FS if they havent made the decision yet. So, what are the advantages under given assumption?