Why the current game is frustrating

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Gameplay Feedback
22

I agree entirely with your post.

I’d also like to add, that I don’t like the addition of ranged focused classes. Ranged isn’t what VT is about and ranged classes make runs harder in general. The usual scenario is 3 ranged classes killing at random and one tank pushing & blocking. Then a boss comes along or a bunch of specials and it’s a wipe. THis game was and should be melee focused and people don’t realize that playing ranged all the time isn’t actually very helpful regardless of “muh kills” and “muh damage”.

Also,the tardiness with dealing with actual bugs,straight out missing features(keep customization anyone?), lack of transparency and the BS red/cosmetic droprate will quickly drive away the more “mainstream” players that were introduced to VT via VT2.

At the rate things keep going the concurrent player numbers will drop rapidly and we’ll have another game on our hands that you can either play with friends or not at all and I’d hate for that to happen.

23

Well, when I ussually get an Emperors Chest in legend, I ussually get worst items than the rest of coffers.

Hows possible to get 3 orange items of less than 300 Power in an Emperros Chest of legend?

Hows even possible to get items less than 300 on legend with Emperors coffer?

I dont get it at all…

P.D. Bugged Patrols my friends, that do not sound and are sticked in a place where you cant avoid them. And tons of times you pull them without even knowing cause you dont hear them. Thats soemthing to fix either.

24

I kind of know where you’re coming from with that. In a game like Vermintide though, the extermination of rats(and chaos now) is what it’s really about(regardless of melee or ranged). After all, I remember in Vt1 where I could rock ranged a lot.

I believe the difference we’re seeing right now though is in VT2 we have more tools to do various jobs, right(both melee and ranged)? So what happens with players is, range is really fun. But it’s also safer and easier to play like that. A lot of players don’t want to explore and learn how to play melee well, so they just say “melee is the worst” or that “melee is useless” because it’s significantly different from ranged. It’s a lot riskier, it takes far more practice, there are various techniques to be learned and mastered… and a lot of people just want to have their hand held through the game rather than learn how to play melee in this game. It’s evident when you see how much they want melee to have just to compensate for lack of skill. We’re not talking about making talents like +5% dodge or +5% movement speed useful. They want the entire passive/active tree remade.

Mind you, there are still a number of problems plaguing melee which also shifted players towards a ranged approach:

  • Phantom swings

  • Bile Troll feeling impossible to fight via melee(pre-nerf)

  • Blight Stormers casting their storms from the moon

  • Globadiers launching globes from a mile away and then scurrying off into areas you can’t reach

  • Many players don’t know how to work as a team and don’t watch each other’s backs

  • Many players don’t know basic melee and horde-fighting strategies

  • Many players don’t know how to avoid shooting team mates in the back so melee becomes even riskier.

The list goes on.

Too many bugs, over-tuned bosses, and other things were allowed to persist for too long and players on reddit, in game, on forums, and so on are reinforcing a “ranged meta” mindset for damage, damage, damage! Then you have a number of players who are not only bad at ranged, but bad at melee as well because they don’t understand the duality of ranged and melee in this game.

To return to topic, the pipe dream(via the almost non-existent RNG chance) of ever getting the things I’d love to have in this game really killed any incentive I once had of obtaining them. And I really hate to be that person, but a number of the cosmetics also seem either goofy or not done well enough which only further kills that incentive. For example, there is 0 customization with the cosmetics. They can only be used on specific careers, with specific outfits, and their colors can’t be changed. So the Handmaiden hat makes Kerillian look like she has a giraffe neck and the green color doesn’t make any sense on her outfit that has absolutely no green. It looks more like it was originally intended for Waystalker. If the giraffe neck thing was changed and you could change colors/use it on any career, it would fix that and be an amazing cosmetic.

25

I get why people use it, but it wouldn’t even be that much of a problem if not for:

Too many bugs, not handled fast enough,with updates focusing on crashes and pretending that class talents not working or countless other things in the game not working or not working as intended, are just exaggerated non-issues.

I get Fatshark isn’t an “AAA” developer, but if they can’t deal with the countless bugs they should just use the money they got from the games initial sales success and hire someone who CAN.

Otherwise the game will fade into obscurity as yet another industry overyhped disappointment. Having a unique setting and melee focus is the only thing keeping it alive when there’s so many good,balanced and actually working co-op games out there.

Killing floor 2 for example - it’s not perfect, acquiring cosmetics has been changed from major scam to barely acceptable money grubbing, but the game WORKS, there’s no one complaining about clots going through solid objects or fleshpounds teleporting on players. There’s no such complaints because issues like that are something that’s been dealt with in the all-father game of co-op “hordes with specials” games - L4D.

Somehow these things are still major issues in Vermintide(alongside countless other things that are unfathomable to be issues at all in most games- indie or not), despite doing alphas/betas/shmetas and all that meaningless bull that seems not to have helped in fixing anything for release.

Good thing they fixed twitch mode in one day though.
I simply couldn’t live without it (sarcasm overload)

26

then do it. “give me items so i can uninstall your game” isn’t exactly appealing to fatshark, and it’s honestly pretty damned sad. get off the theme park collectathon mentality or go play something else.

i’m still on the fence about drop rate, especially with how much easier legend is now, but a recycle system or rewarding them for the insanely hard deeds is probably a good idea. this deed says hello i just think it’s pathetic how, with everything else that could/needs to be changed, fixed, or retuned in the current game, there are a million topics about a stupid blue glow on the front page every day. every single one of them is the same thing too. “GIVE ME MY ITEMS SO I CAN STOP PLAYING” why would fatshark give a damn about those threads when those people are out the door one way or another anyways?

27

Yeah what I said was give me all the items so I can uninstall, not reward my time spent instead of treating me like a fool with these droprates. You nailed it buddy.

28

I mean, I have full reds on Kruber (if I wanted to) im not going to use my exe sword cause it phantom swings and I refuse to block cancel every attack, thats simply not fun, but I still want to play, maybe more now that I have an ideal set up to play around with!

Furthermore in regard to melee issues, yes most people I encounter in pubs don’t know how to dodge or use mobility to maximize melee damage, or block cancel to get proper swings for different situations, or ect ect, this makes melee seem so much more lackluster than it already is, i’ve done Legend games where myself as Kruber is the only person with over 20 melee kills, i’ve also messed around with a full range team where our total melee kills is 0 and finished the level (on legend) without a hitch. I think the current implementation of things like drakegun, unlimited ammo (on weapons and via talents) just simply supports bad gameplay, also the effectiveness of things like drakefire pistols on legend is far superior to how they worked on Cata in V1.

29

Agreed. As much as I want to be patient and understanding, there is also a limit. I think there is supposed to be patch this week to address a number of things, so we’ll see how that turns out. In general though, all these issues have me one foot out the door and considering just coming back in a couple weeks to see how things are. I already put a lot of time into this game, so I’ve definitely gotten a fair amount of enjoyment either way. Hopefully they can really grind this stuff out and get it on a glorious path.

30

Vermintide is very close to my heart and i like fatshark so it really pains me to see the current state of the game. I still play it and i still enjoy it but it could be so much more and so much better and i think that’s the most painful part.
Along my friends we can’t stop asking ourselves the question: “I wonder when this beta will finally go into 1.0”

31

Very good points, you’re right . I see that behaviour sometimes, I’m still in veteran difficulty.

Anyway, you can craft all the red items you want if you have enough materials.
Cosmetics should drop mopre often.
Dice and Ranald’s gift should give more points to get a chst upgrade.

I didn’t know that half the talents and traits don’t work.

32

Youre talking about orange ones here. What everyone else is referring to are truly red items. The same red that cosmetics from a chest are coloured in. Theyre extremely rare and non craftable.

33

First off V2 is great, I have dumped a ton of hours into this game (215 to be exact) and I love it, however the rose colored glasses are starting to fade a bit and here is why.

Honestly, you’ve put 215 hours into a release game. That’s a mark of pride for developers, not shame. Yes, the game has rough edges, that’s the nature of release games. Game design is based on iteration and while they can test alot of things in house they can’t test near as much as us AND sometimes the ideas they get in their head do not match ours because they have played it every day for months and are too close. There is no perfect solution to that unfortunately, nature of the business. And that’s assuming they had plenty of time and money at the end of the project, which is often not the case.

Most games go through alot of iteration after release exactly because of this. But iteration takes time. It does not happen instantly. At release the main concerns are gamebreaking issues, not smoothing out the 100+ hour end game. End game gets complained about in basically every game, MMORPGs are notorious for people complaining about end game 1-2 months after release.

Honestly, if you want to avoid these things do not buy release games. Wait a few months, you’ll be happier for it. And everyone says “there is no excuse for Y” because it’s not their job. Work tech support for awhile or customer service, now realize you’ve become that guy on the other end you hate that thinks they know your job.

At this point in playtime in V1 I was decked out, I had what I wanted, I looked cool, I was geared (enough) and got to spend time helping people learn how to progress to higher difficulties, this was my favorite part of playing v1 and im just stuck in this endless farm for usable reds and cosmetics with no end in sight and every day I just run into more and more people who seem angry or distraught doing the same thing.

Not at release you were not. When Vermintide 1 released the loot system was a broken mess. It didn’t improve until months afterwards when the Age of Sigmar DLC released. V1 became alot better over time via iteration and love. V2 will follow the same path, but you need to give it time.

Comparing an old polish product to a fresh new release that hasn’t had the chance to polish yet is highly disingenuous.

34

True. I suppose the proper idea is to give a bit of “push and pressure” in a certain direction and then lightly reinforce it. Over time we should(hopefully) see it evolve in the way one would believe. Similar to slow-cooking to perfection. The main issue that people have here though is that it’s not so much that VT2 is unpolished as it is just plain unfinished. Sure releases have bugs and such to hammer out, with maybe a few changes to be had… but this goes far beyond that. A lot of the criticisms that people have are pretty justified.

At this point and time though, I imagine Fatshark staff is working tirelessly to try and get the game to where they feel it needs to be. Given what their “roadmap” shows, I’d give it another 2-3 weeks at least. Their map shows that they planned to spend the first month or so fixing things and all that jazz. At which point they were going to move into other stuff like DLC/Dedicated Servers/Mod Support.

I have done this many times. Works wonderfully. It’s honestly one of the reasons I’m being as patient as I am with Vermintide 2’s current state.

35

Things being bugged is not the same as being unfinished. Again bugs =/= unfinished. If that was the case, Skyrim would still be unfinished in it’s 17th re-release. Not having tons of cosmetics in right now =/= unfinished.

Then we have to ask, what is unfinished? Would you consider Overwatch unfinished if you learned post release characters were being worked on before release? Or is that just good support because these things take time? We know Blizzard does that all the time. Multiple HOTS characters were seen in early beta/alpha versions but did not release until well after launch. Like Zuljin. Was that unfinished? How do you get to decide what is finished with game development time lines, post launch support, and etc? Predicated on what experience/expertise? Like I get it, bugs are annoying, but stating a game is unfinished is a serious overstep.

And in reality, no game releases finished. If they had the time and money developers would work on a game for much longer than reality allows. Tons of things are cut from every single game. Because scope creep kills games dead.
.
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Sure releases have bugs and such to hammer out, with maybe a few changes to be had… but this goes far beyond that.

People say that about every game. People have no sense of scale or comparison to the industry. Vermintide’s bugs are not even bad as per the industry. It’s on the more minor side of things. People gloss over alot of game’s they like and the bugs they had. The Witcher 3 had plenty, every Bethesda product is chock full, Ubisoft certainly has it’s share, Grand Theft Auto V had plenty of glitched, every MMORPG basically, a ton of FPS games including the biggest names. And we have not even touched the really bad stuff like Battlefield 4 or The MasterChief Collection.

If you don’t like bugs, buy after release. If you play at release and do not encounter many bugs, just be thankful you were lucky.

At this point and time though, I imagine Fatshark staff is working tirelessly to try and get the game to where they feel it needs to be. Given what their “roadmap” shows, I’d give it another 2-3 weeks at least. Their map shows that they planned to spend the first month or so fixing things and all that jazz. At which point they were going to move into other stuff like DLC/Dedicated Servers/Mod Support.

I’d say 1 month hashes out most of the major bugs in a product, 3 months for most of the moderate to minor.

36

Id argue the game is bugged right now, yeah, but certainly not unfinished. It has 13 maps(the same as V1 without dlc) - all of them are playable(note, playable not bug free. Skittergate is still a pain in the bum). Balancing is something that takes time and considerable community input to get right. Imagine if theyd had a small focus group of 20 players or so decide everything down to balancing before launch and then the devs leaned back and went “oh well, its balanced now. no need to tweak further”. Wouldnt be very nice, would it… Part of why it takes so long is because gaming communities are crafty and will try all sorts of wonky builds the devs never intended that will most certainly break the balance. Tweaking just 1 skill that, at first glance, might seem unimportant might have a bigger impact than one might think at first, if theres some crafty fox finding a way to exploit it. Think back to V1 and how the game still received balancing changes pretty much all the way up to the very end of development. I wouldnt call that unfinished. Id call that dedication to try n make the players experience better and keep it that way by the devs.

All that aside, I agree on the loot issues - somewhat. Theres a thin line between making it too grindy and making it too easy to get everything you want and need. The new loot system took a massive step in the right direction compared to the first one(although I miss just rolling the dice, even if only for the aesthetics). Its far, very far, from perfect tho. In a perfect world, traits and such would have a set value to them that youd be able to buy and their strength percentage would have a corresponding value to it too. That way, youd still retain some of the “grind” but this time for the materials to CHOOSE what you want, rather than for the 100 different rolls you need to get what you want. It wastes time and is just a bit too meh atm imo.

In regards to reds and such - after 150h(most of them on champion with a few legend mixed in here and there), I have yet to find a single one and thats a bit disappointing but not too unexpected. I cant really talk about the legend drop rates too much as I have maybe 10 or a few more successful legend runs under my belt, so Ill leave this to the ones whove done more of it than me.

In regards to bugs and such, most people seem to miss the fact that the era of “le olden days” is over. Today, time is money and more so than ever before. Back during the times when games were almost exclusively delivered via disc, it would often times be cheaper and more than anything else easier to delay a games release rather than to ship 10 patches out. Now, during the digital age, where its easier than ever before, also thanks to steam and such, to update your game whenever and however often you want, it has become more important to ship the game in an “ok” state, rather than “almost perfect”. Its not something I agree with personally but thats how its been for the better part of the last decade and I dont see it changing anytime soon. Thats not to defend the bugs. Some of them are quite abysmal and should be fixed asap. However, its to give some ppl perspective of maybe why the game seems so buggy in certain areas. Lets also not forget that FS are a relatively small studio and we didnt even pay half price, compared to a AAA game. Does that excuse the bugs? No, certainly not. But it explains them.

Lastly, some ppl might just find themselves fighting a little bit of burn out after 200h in just a couple weeks. If you do the same things over and over again excessively, the smallest issues can start to annoy the living hell out of you at some point. Give it a break, play something else for a week, come back and see if its still as bad as you remembered it being.

37

When a number of talents are unusable(they simply don’t work), I feel that might fall towards the unfinished side of things. Skittergate could only be completed through sheer luck because the end boss was so broken. I suppose that’s still accepted as a finished product. How do these things possibly get past play-testing? I could see these things on my first go-around. Whatever word anyone wants to use, at the end of the day the game had a lot of unusable content. We’re essentially still in beta. I get what you’re trying to say, but VT2 has had a very rough release.

Even though I’m not fond of Blizzard, I’ve actually seen them be fairly consistent. When Diablo 3 released it was a horrible game, but it was finished. Starcraft 2 and HotS were finished. They’ve all changed a lot since then, but they weren’t this bad at all. I played through alpha/beta of HotS and they definitely had the game pretty clean for their launch date. I played through a lot of the Necro DLC for Diablo 3 too. All the issues with that were cleaned for its launch. VT2 was released and was messy. I won’t pretend to understand the gaming industry in and out, but I do understand general business well enough to know that putting out a product in the state that VT2 was at release should not have happened.

Amen to that.

38

"if that’s all you’re hoping for when you play "
I don’t know anyone who is only playing for reds dude.
I do know a lot of people who keep making fools of themselves by arguing against this strawman.
No one I know is only playing for reds. No one I know would stop playing if they got a few more reds.
The reds don’t add any special power. They don’t even look that great most of them.
But people want something to show for hundreds of hours. And you can’t show off a necklace.
Please just stop repeating your strawman you add nothing to the conversation.
I have 1 red accessory in 300 hours. Friend last night got 2 red necklaces and a hat 3 boxes in a row, 2 reds and a hat in 1 hour vs 1 red in 300.
The system is stupid.
If you support this system, you’re stupid.
If fatshark doesn’t change this system, they’re stupid.

I love the game, I wouldn’t have spent that much time if I didn’t. But reds don’t even look that nice to keep opening boxes for. 300+ hours, almost all heroes level 30. 1 red accessory, no hats or skins. I have nothing special to show for my time played. Friend has half the time played I do and has 7 red/cosm. Theoretically I could go another 300 hours with nothing, and I’m not going to do that. I’m just going to max out my dudes, and then I’ll only play when my team is on. I’m not going to do randoms trying to grind for reds I’ll never see. I’ll just play when I know I’ll have a good group of friends I can help and have some good teamwork.

39

That’s literally called a bug. Something that doesn’t work that should is the textbook definition of a bug.

How do these things possibly get past play-testing?

You only see like 1% of the bugs they found and fixed. I literally work in QA. There are thousands of bugs in the database on larger games. And they get fixed, but fixing bugs often creates new bugs. As the old saying 99 bugs, fix one bug, 101 bugs. New features often introduce new bugs too. Most likely one of the patches near launch broke the talents. And because almost all talents are subtle, that’s hard to see and you are prolly not testing for it.

But OI, boss taunt is obvious you say! Maybe, but you’d have to be testing at level 25 on ironbreaker to reproduce that. if it was fine last build and you have no reason to suspect it would break, why would you test it? Your time is not infinite, and the vast majority of release and beta players will be playing levels 1 - 15. So that’s what you test.

Chances are the level 25+ experience is relatively untested compared to the level 1 - 20 experience. You take some runs through here and there, but not near as much. Because you have a finite amount of time and the early game is the most important.

40

They should have automated tests for things like talents, though, so you don’t have to keep testing them manually. Especially so since the talents, as you say, are so subtle as to be hard/impossible to notice in regular gameplay unless you know what to expect (ie. know how many hits it should take to kill stuff with and without the talent). A simple automated test could be to simulate “hits” on enemies with and without the talent and check that the operations (hits) return expected values.

41

IIRC collectors edition promised “keep decorationS” not “a statue of Sigmar” but decorations. As far as I know there’s only this one.

The devs were also boasting that something would happen with the painting frames in the keep- nothing does and it’s not implemented into the game.

Cosmetics…15 total helmets + collectors ed. + VT1 owner ones. ZERO,NULL,NOT ONE chest cosmetic in the game aside of the aforementioned. When you have a game with a “cosmetics” tab and it has a “chest/armor” slot then you’d assume there’s some actual content to go with it. I can hardly imagine they made a chest/armor slot for the 6 total armor skins there are in the game.

also,this:

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This isn’t a bug,it’s a straight up unfinished part of the game. There’s a ton of small things like that and they amount to a substantial pile.

You can accuse me of being nitpicky all you want, but you dismiss the amount of bugs the game released with as “standard for any game”,and it most definitely is not standard. I played a ton of early access games that were better polished and had less bugs than VT2.

Third of the talents not working is also quite literally unfinished- they were not worked on enough to properly work,so they’re not in the game. What adds insult to injury,some of the bugs are bugs from VT1 and what adds even more insult to injury is that many of the existing bugs were reported A LOT during the “beta” phases and nothing has been done with them(i.e Oi Wazzok not taunting bosses 99% of the time)

Also, most of the “buggy” games you mentioned didn’t have bugs that ruined players experience and halted them from enjoying the game.

You say people have no scale of comparison to the industry. Well,I’ve been playing games for over 20 years and I saw it all. Granted,there were some worse releases than VT2,but they were actually in the minority. I’ll repeat myself - the all-father of co-op horde + specials games, L4D never had so many bugs at any point after release. And it was PUBLISHED by Valve,it was developed by a tiny studio called Turtle Rock.

Same studio released a PR mess that was Evolve some years ago,a asymmetrical co-op versus game, and it had a lot of bugs, lot of them game breaking.

Only there were a total of 4 of them (occasional falling through map/jetpacks and monster movement skills not working properly and players getting stuck on terrain) and they were reduced after beta and disappeared almost entirely less than a month after release.

Then again, look at Tripwire- another small,indie studio- I mentioned KF2 before as well- you know how it released with no gamebreaking bugs whatsoever? It was in early access for about two years and it got polished and tweaked and worked on until it was actually DONE AND WORKING.

Most of your argument here are appealing to nature or genetic fallacies with no actual examples and full of criticism of people’s expectations. Well,your bar may be as low as you want it to be, but most people just have higher standards. Which leads to another thing that I’ve said before - yes,WE expect the game to be polished and finished in 3-6 months(which is still purely speculation), but most people expect the game to be finished and polished on release.

The longer the game isn’t properly fixed the more people will stop playing it, it’s popularity will start dropping and then we’ll have 300 concurrent players on a good month. Games don’t pick themselves form that.

If you consult steamcharts you’ll see that concurrent players logins are steadily dropping and it’s not the game “settling in” it’s precisely because of the bugs and negligence. People will just keep dropping out more and more rapidly until something substantial is done.

the game will have a “release lifetime” of a month tomorrow. NONE of the major bugs are fixed. Soo…what does that tell you?