I’m pretty excited about Versus. But when I look at the balance of the current game, I can only feel unconfortable thinking about what Versus will be.
With an half decent team that stick together like glue, I don’t know how the Pactsworn can do anything. I can already see the 4 pactsworn players being insta decimated by a double ult from pyro and WS.
With a bad team of heroes, it will be a rampage. At the first horde, being separated, a gutter runner or 2 will do the job easy.
Also also, what about the units at the disposal of the Pactsworn ? Can we chose the same unit, like 4 chaos warrios ? Can we go 3 CW + 1 gatlin into a patrol to murder rap* every team of heroes ? Can you roam with a gutter runner until you see someone separating from the group ? Can leech and blightstormer teleport where they want to go, or is it random ?
In short, I don’t see how they can balance it : it’s either “the heroes stomp because they are way more powerful than any enemy unit of the game” (even more if they are coordinated), or “the pactsworn murder stomp with abusive combos and sneaking around until the perfect moment, because that’s the only way they can win”.
The last information for Versus we got has been this:
Enemy density will be based between Recruit and Champion values while damage is on Veteran level. This leads to a sinister problem: If you get a team where you have just one Veteran, he will roflstomp through everything.
Then again, we have not really much information. Dev blog #1 implies that Versus will be standalone. This will come with a lot of advantages. One of them being that they can discard the leveling system for the heroes and set them to an appropriate power level as well as reduce other game elements to a less abusable state. This may anger people used to more power from the PvE game but if the game is really standalone they will hopefullly be diluted by new players.
Other than that, people also discussed the possibility of the pact-sworn upgrades but this will be even harder to balance. I think reduction is a more useful tool. Or they just set the mentioned timer so low that the human team has to speedrun constantly. Then again, with some active skill it will be problematic. So … reduction again.
So in the end, there is just waiting for more information. My assumption is that they will reduce powerful elements of the heroes.
Also, I had the impression that only specials will be playable and not elites. But no information here as well.
One thing to keep in mind is that no matter how unbalanced Versus turns out to be in either the heroes’ side or the vermins’ side, the game will be “balanced” because both teams switch and then go again to determine the winner.
As in, team A starts as Heroes, team B starts as villains. Match goes on until team Heroes dies or team Heroes escapes, and if they die the game marks down how much progress they made.
Then, team B goes as Heroes, team A goes as villains, same thing. The team that got the furthest along wins.
Now, obviously it’ll be stupid and unfun if one team is just constantly destroying the other, but minor differences in balance for one side or the other won’t matter because both teams get to play as both sides. So at least there’s that.
With that said, I expect the balance to be heavily in the villain’s side, actually, with the intent of “the hero team won’t escape the match most of the time” because, well, if it’s common for the hero team to escape… how do you decide a winner?
I believe balance will be such that getting any progress done as the heroes is incredibly tough, so that versus matches don’t always boggle down to a 40 minute draw.
I’m sorry if I will seem rude but, honestly, if the base game has all these balance’s problems… I can’t understand how they want invest much time and resources into Versus. Mostly if we think about how many lacknesses Vermintide 2 has that could be fixed with some love.
At least Versus will be a separate mode (like Weaves should be).
Then I repeat: I don’t want to offend but, as customer, I wanted to say my opinion about the direction game (imho) should take.
Speculation here, but I think it depends on which way FS wants to take. Either a fully competitive game or as a fun mode or addition to VT.
Fully competitive would imply no leveling or grinding, since all players should play on the same premises. And it would make versus a better LAN experience than VT (since one person without a lvl 35 hero basically disqualifies VT from the LAN playlist).
I personally hope they take the fully competitive path, but only time will tell.
Without Dedicated servers it’s gonna be host-ragequit-hell,… and if they DO have dedicated servers, they better be coming to PvE at the same time otherwise the community will explode into Bogenhafen-skins levels of outrage.
This is what concerns me the most. Based on what I have seen, the heroes are going to be outright unstoppable if they are half decent players. There is only so much intelligent play can do as a Skaven unit, unless they get some sort of talents too. On the flip side, if the heroes team is not very good, I can see them dying extremely fast. Also, bosses will make a huge difference.
Things will obviously have to be balanced quite differently than the base game.
There’s no point in being sneaky as a special if the Waystalker and Pyro can 360 noscope you with their ult behind a wall as soon as your spawn sound plays. There’s also no point in spawning outside a horde or boss event unless the players are in a bad choke point.
A lot of ranged weapons can one-shot specials even across large distances.
Since only 4 specials can be controlled by players at a time, their health values will probably be scaled up a bit to make them harder to kill.
We should wait. We do know nothing about the game yet. There won’t be a perfect balance (L4D2 is also not balanced as well), but I don’t think “it will be a breeze”. Assuming that from exactly nothing yet is, I think, a mistake.
Speculating again, but since I hope for fully competitive, they need dedicated servers. Both for normal games (i.e. hosted in some cloud somewhere) and for tournaments (i.e. hosted locally by the organizer).
I have no idea if FS has any other games with requirements of dedicated server infrastructure, and speculating again, could that be the reason for the Versus delay? I assume, given the state of Versus before summer (my interpretation is that it “worked” then), that the mode / game should have been available in some alpha / beta format by now if there were no contextual issues (such as hosting (if FS has no own infrastructure to host games nor existing favourable contracts with infrastructure providers it is to be expected that such things take time), IP-related stuff (maybe the IP-deal only allows for pactsworn as AI-controlled hordes and not as playable?), or practical (such as the network code not working well enough with 8 people + potential observers in the same gave given some network delay))
TLDR; I do not think the current Versus delay has anything to do with core mechanics such as balance, but rather with something contextual such as IP-deals, network code or hosting solutions.
Honestly we simply do not have the information currently to even start speculating properly. If its something similar to L4D then it will work totally different compared to what we think about the base game currently.
I personally see that it will be one of those game modes where you might play it once in a while with party of friends but nothing else so a.k.a just a fun mode where any kind of balance is more of an afterthought and to keep the most oppressive mechanics out of it.
If they seriously hope for it to be somewhat serious mode then dedicated servers are a must but since that cat is already out of the window i think this is the least likely outcome.
So, we’ll have 8 players? Ok sure, but are we still going to rely on one of those players to host sessions? With the current environment where players are more likely to “quit” when they die?
I don’t know that I will want to play this mode if this isn’t addressed honestly. What happens when people leave a team mid-match, and the number of players on both sides are uneven? Will the player join process be much more smoother, and efficient than what it is now?
I’m more interested in seeing these core components polished, b4 we start talking about leveraging them in PVP experiences with 8 players.
What I am wondering is about Kerillian’s Trueshot Volley. Put that with CDR traits and you trivialize 50% Specials.
Will we be able to control a monster too?
Imagine playing whack a mole as a ratogre!
