Warhammer Warhammer: Vermintide 2

[Obsequious Approbation]

Fatshark have announced the release date, plus shown some new gameplay.

Coming March 8th.

 

[Vexxt]

Never played the first, but this looks interesting. Seems kind of like Killing floor, except you actually traverse levels on a linear path rather than run around the same "arena"?

 

[Dawkinsfan69]

It's basically left 4 dead in a fantasy setting with classes and loot mechanic.

LOTS of fun and there are a ton of well designed maps in the first one but it suffers from the "WoW problem" which is that players mostly only care about grinding teh best epic lootz so many people only run two of the 15 or so maps just because they're quicker.

 

[SerratedBiz]

My body is fucking ready. I like that they added new enemies in the form of Chaos, but also new bosses such as the Troll.

Also, Dwarf playing without shield? ggkbyethx votekick

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Great Deceiver]

Crafting system, skill tree... game didn't need that. In fact, it needed not to have item drops at all. Pass.

 

[Vexxt]

I played in the beta over the weekend - it's a lot of fun, much more fun than I was expecting. If you happen to get a few good squad mates that know how to exploit the environment and handle trash mobs then it really is a great experience.

Side note - I'm really impressed with how good the game looks!

 

[tabacila]

Beta looked awesome and the melee system feels 'meatier' than ever. That feel when a halberd swing went through a couple of low level chaos guys only to suddenly stop when it hits the armor or a Chaos Warrior. Priceless.
They kind of nerfed ranged ammo way too much for the non-ranged specialized careers, but hey it's still just a tech test beta.

Next closed beta test starts on the 22nd.

 

[Dawkinsfan69]

This is gonna be GOTY.

 

[DeepOcean]

Bought first one on a deep steam discount, kinda fun but the way they implemented loot was beyond retarded, the first time I won a map on hard and got all the dice, the tomes and grimoires to just get a really shitty reward was the moment I realized there was a big flaw, you had to play on the harder difficulties (that are just retarded and not difficult on a sense that it requires different strategy, just that you are severely punished for not doing the same shit you did on normal perfectly.) and even then it wasn't guaranteed you would be rewarded, then I realized it was artificial grind for grind sake to force you to waste more hours with it, I hate grinding with a passion, you can always do better things with your life than waste time grinding.

The game used well the setting and there were a few maps that made me understand why so many nerds like the setting so much, it is a pity this whole grind for loot thing, the system was so unfair on the first game that I wouldn't be surprised if there are loot boxes on this one.

 

[Great Deceiver]

That's what I hate the most about the loot system - the game should be about clearing the levels themselves, which are pretty well designed, especially the later and harder ones. Too bad almost no one ran the harder maps and they were a barren wasteland because people would rather grind the same 2-3 ones for easy drops.

I think the game would be much, much better if it just scrapped any sort of progression whatsoever and had weapons that tied to the levels themselves.

 

[Ezeekiel]

That's what I hate the most about the loot system - the game should be about clearing the levels themselves, which are pretty well designed, especially the later and harder ones. Too bad almost no one ran the harder maps and they were a barren wasteland because people would rather grind the same 2-3 ones for easy drops.

I think the game would be much, much better if it just scrapped any sort of progression whatsoever and had weapons that tied to the levels themselves.

Why not put loot in the levels, randomly generated if necessary? With more difficult levels having higher level/more unique loot. That would give people incentive to scour the levels fully and play all of them, while being more rewarding than the shitty dice system. Also less of a time-waster than the dice animation.

They might also want to rework the special rats a bit imo.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Dawkinsfan69]

Ok NDA is lifted so basically I can talk about V2 now it's fucking SWEEEEET

If you're bitching about loot or whatever stfu and and go sucka dick. The game's about killing rats. If u don't like killing rats don't play

 

[Ezeekiel]

Played the beta some.
My random thoughts so far:


-Field of view can be set from 40 or 45 all the way to 120. Nice, but has a big issue: The higher the fov the further away your camera appears to be from where your character actually is, or something like that. So enemies hit you from far away and your own strikes reach weirdly far. That makes judging distances and such difficult as hell. 65 is standard fov and while annoyingly narrow it "feels" right in regards to the weapons/attack ranges. A bit annoying. Tripped me up at first as I set it to 85.

-It's just the first game with some extra stuff. The loot system is better, you get chests if you win a battle with 3 pieces in them each, all of which you get. You still need to click on everything to reveal it etc, useless waste of time, but not nearly as bad as the first game at launch. So that's better. Chests also seem to get upgraded depending on how well you do in the map or something.

-The characters are fairly gimped imo, considering how outnumbered you are.
Similarly to first game. No sprint means no catching up to the team if they happen to get ahead of you (easy to end up in that situation, you fight as rear guard for a few seconds, that's all it takes).
This also means that your team cannot save you quickly if you are in trouble and they are even a little bit away.

-Charged attacks take far too long to charge up fully (you can release early though), what's the point? They get interrupted from hits as well. So by the time you charge one up the enemies are either all dead because your buddies left-clicked them to death, or they've reached you, or they got distracted and are not close enough to hit anymore. What's the point? You can pretty much only use them well if there you work with a shield guy or something to draw the enemy attention, keep them in front but a bit away from you etc.
In the time it takes to hit with these, you may as well left-click spam instead.
They can trigger some abilities though.
Also, charged attacks don't necessarily do more damage (?). I'm not sure what attacks deal the most damage, which pierce armor etc. The game doesn't give much info in the tooltips.

-Regular attacks: I used the soldier with a halberd.
He does different attacks in sort of a combo if you keep left-clicking, which is actually kind of suboptimal. He may hack from above, slash side to side, or thrust. There doesn't seem to be a way to, say, thrust when you need it though. You have to attack a certain amount of times to trigger it. That makes the halberd kind of awkward. You have to use charged attack to get a surefire side slash to hit multiple foes. Edit: Charged attack also sometimes thrusts, sigh.
Greatsword seems to just be slashes. What a waste of a very versatile weapon. The devs haven't put enough thought into melee weapons imo, lots of wasted potential.
Halberd is quite short and he holds it weirdly at the end of the shaft, always uses it head-forward. With such a short halberd you'd use it differently, but whatever. Could put a spike on the bottom (it does kind of have a multi-pronged end here, weirdly enough) and use it like a pollaxe instead, that'd be cooler.

Instead of this system with charged attacks and (depending on weapon) different left-click attacks in a combo, I think it'd be better to have left click always be single target (or few targets) attacks and alternate attack be sweeping strikes (lower damage, multiple foes hit). That way you can hit accurately or in a sweeping motion depending on what you need right now... Both actions would be useful.
There is no need to gimp the player with the charged attack imo because you are up against massive hordes anyway, which can kill you fairly quickly and you can't even really outrun them. Stronger foes are quite dangerous as well.
I also see no reason for as much of an attack delay on the greatsword for example. Again, no need to gimp the player here, it's not a pvp game and you tend to face big, messy hordes and some dangerous specials.

-Stormvermin armor seems to either block your attacks or severely reduces the damage. Your own armor is basically just cosmetic (passive char abilities seem to have some damage mitigation, like the dwarf ignoring 1 hit every 20 s or every 20 hits or whatever). Lame! Why can't your stuff work that way? Accumulating more armor coverage or better armor could then let you tackle higher difficulties. Would also differentiate the characters more.
This isn't terribly important, but I did think the soldier was kind of wimply compared to the ranged chars.
I don't want to game to end up with shield meta again for the melee guys, that's boring as hell.

-Special rats except for rat ogres are fairly easy to kill with ranged weapons especially. Makes gunners almost a nonissue tbh. I don't have a good solution for this as they're basically either too annoying to too weak. Maybe break from the L4D mold and make them more numerous but weaker, include jezzails etc?

-In general I think the L4D clone aspect kind of holds the game back. They are sticking too close to the formula imo.

-Graphics are fairly nice but it doesn't matter. A lot of the time you don't see details anyway. You can safely disable "nice fur" etc functions, anti-aliasing and whatnot, it's all a seething mess anyway. Also too much twilight, the contrast becomes low-ish and everything starts to look like shit at times.

-Performance was great for me although my GPU fan was going full blast all the time even with nothing happening. Only had some dips when in the middle of big hordes. V-sync unnecessary, you can cap framerate in the ingame options.
I suggest getting your framerate to a steady 80+ rather than just 60, as with all that's going on and the low fov (if you don't want make attacks all weird in range) and frantic turning around and whatnot 60 kind of made it slightly hard to make sense of what I was seeing sometimes. More fps helped quite a bit, even though it's no twitch shooter as such. The more the better once things get frantic, imo. You need to make accurate hits on heads against storm vermin and specials and such in the mess.
Make sure to disable all lense flares, bloom, camera smudge/abberation and all that bullshit. It's just going to annoy you or you won't notice it. More fps = better here. Pretty graphics are only evident when there is no horde around, and you'll barely notice them anyway.
You might want to turn the brightness/gamma up because a lot of the time the game is dark-ish with your buddies' and items' bright outlines in-between. Weird.
Oh and make sure outlines are always on so you don't lose your team or confuse them with rats and waste your time attacking them.
There are weird black trails to greatsword swings (for example) that don't help the general feeling of looking at this weird miasma/twilight.

-Firearms ammo has been reduced for non-ranged characters it seems. Ranged chars appear to be the big killers. The witch hunter has greatsword and halberd just like the soldier, but also great ranged options. I felt like even when I was killing rats left and right en masse I wasn't contributing to the team all that much as the soldier. Shield is probably better for teamwork than large weapons in that case, which kind of sucks. Special ability for the soldier is just some lame radial stun that throws rats to the ground. If you trigger it it will hit the ones around you and then the rest of them will move in and you basically wasted it :D

-Server broswer did not show pings or am I missing something?


If you enjoyed the first then I'd say you will probably enjoy this one at least as much, though I can't say much about the maps yet (I've only seen three so far).

 

[Cyberarmy]

Gonna try this one just for the dwarves .

 

[Ezeekiel]

So, the a.i. director or whatever it is can really spam you with specials sometimes... Jeez.
Normally any half-way competent team can win maps easy unless they get unlucky and have those weird caster enemies with their tornadoes plus assassins plus stombeast(???) plus packmaster... All spawning behind you of course. Caster teleports around a lot, couldn't see it (them?), endless tornadoes in a tiny area separating the team. Got thrown by the tornado like 3 times because I got stuck between an altar or something and the ogre/stormbeast. Then got thrown off the map, my char hung onto the edge and is apparently too weak to pull himself up without help lol.
Same happened to wizard. No idea what killed the dwarf.
Only the elf survived. He/She managed to kill the remaining foes and nail the caster (finally!), then went to rescue the 3 recently dead teammates... Was kiting some enemies (including chaos knight)... And then got hit by an assassin from behind, instakill.

The specials pretty much make or break a session it seems.


Also, the greatsword seems kind of short. More like a longsword?

 

[Ezeekiel]

whats the loot system like

You get a chest for each level up and a chest for beating a level. Depending on how many tomes, loot dice etc the team got on a successful mission completion, the mission completion chest levels up it seems.
Each chest has 3 items in it, you get all three (don't need to pick). You do need to click on each to reveal them for some retarded reason. The loot screen animations etc take way too much time, you can't click through faster.

Better than the previous game was at launch though with the dice bullshit. Here loot dice only help improve the mission chest it seems. They, tomes and other stuff fill up a bar, if it's full the chest upgrades. Can happen multiple times.
The level up chests (which you even get if you fail a mission but earned enough xp from it to level up) don't seem to upgrade, they stay as they are.

 

[Dawkinsfan69]

So, the a.i. director or whatever it is can really spam you with specials sometimes... Jeez.
Normally any half-way competent team can win maps easy unless they get unlucky and have those weird caster enemies with their tornadoes plus assassins plus stombeast(???) plus packmaster... All spawning behind you of course. Caster teleports around a lot, couldn't see it (them?), endless tornadoes in a tiny area separating the team. Got thrown by the tornado like 3 times because I got stuck between an altar or something and the ogre/stormbeast. Then got thrown off the map, my char hung onto the edge and is apparently too weak to pull himself up without help lol.
Same happened to wizard. No idea what killed the dwarf.
Only the elf survived. He/She managed to kill the remaining foes and nail the caster (finally!), then went to rescue the 3 recently dead teammates... Was kiting some enemies (including chaos knight)... And then got hit by an assassin from behind, instakill.

The specials pretty much make or break a session it seems.


Also, the greatsword seems kind of short. More like a longsword?

The caster is a bastard, he'll literally teleport behind you out of nowhere and insta grab you.. And if you're playing with some dipshit puggies they won't notice till the whole team's dead

 

[27]

If anyone's interested in trying the raticide simulator for themselves, grab a key here: https://vermintide2beta.com/

The current phase of beta ends on Sunday, though (or more likely: on Monday morning/noon, UTC).


Also, be aware that while Ezeekiel's post above includes a few somewhat accurate observations, the majority of it applies only to the 'Rookie' difficulty level. That is, it stops being relevant or accurate just a few hours in (since now difficulties are (un)fortunately level-locked).

 

[Ezeekiel]

If anyone's interested in trying the raticide simulator for themselves, grab a key here: https://vermintide2beta.com/

The current phase of beta ends on Sunday, though (or more likely: on Monday morning/noon, UTC).


Also, be aware that while Ezeekiel's post above includes a few somewhat accurate observations, the majority of it applies only to the 'Rookie' difficulty level. That is, it stops being relevant or accurate just a few hours in (since now difficulties are (un)fortunately level-locked).

Yep. Haven't had the time to get much further.
How does it change later on? If you're a veteran of the first game I'd be curious to know what you think about the beta.

 

[Ezeekiel]

Someone took these and posted them on reddit:
https://imgur.com/a/yUwkp

So I wasn't imagining the weird darkness/miasma/lack of contrast issues.

Also note how in some of these the shadows are flat out black in spite of it being very sunny out. I remember such issues from Battlefield 3's metro map if you started outside. It's clearly sunny but the inside of an open window is weirdly dark for example.

I wish games would stop fucking with all of these camera-effects. You play as a fleshy being after all, you should not be getting lensflares in your eyes or weird auto-exposure stuff like this.

 

[27]

I played some Vermintide 1 - have everything completed on Cataclysm, most reds aquired etc. so I suppose I could be called a 'veteran'. I got into the VT2 beta two 'phases' ago and managed to get some playtime, so:

- In my opinion VT1 is one of those games that seem to have simplistic mechanics, but prove to be much deeper the longer you play and the harder difficulties you try. Despite not much changing between those difficulties, you have to change your tactics to a degree when switching from Hard to Nightmare, and then change them completely from Nightmare to Cata (unless you intend to be just carried by a more experienced team - sometimes that works). So while VT2 seems similar, some of the finer details have changed, and gameplay implications seem to be rather notable - weapon combos have been modified, damage system reworked etc. - that people who routinely completed Cata in the first game had considerable problems on Hard in VT2 and had to spend some time to adjust (which is a very good thing, new challenges and all that). But I agree that the core is basically the same: the same way to attack, dodge etc. - it just feels either a bit better (melee weapons), or SO MUCH BETTER (shooting with non-hitscan weapons - archery is way more efficient and consistent right now, without making it feel broken).

- Loot system is indeed better, if only for the fact (that I don't think you've mentioned) that you can now decide which character will get all the rewards, i.e. the character opening the reward box is the one getting ALL THREE DROPS (trinkets and resources are still universal, of course, but you are sure to only get weapons your selected character can use - if not always the currently selected career, since some of them have their unique weapons - like the longbow for forest hobo Kruber, and crossbow for dork elf Kerillian). Other than that nice addition, for all intents and purposes the only difference between the new and the old system is that you get three rewards instead of one (and no dice rolling). No lootbox mechanics (despite crappy presentation which does bring negative connotations and should be changed).

- Crafting has been completely reworked. Can't say if for the better. You seem to have a bit less control over the traits/properties than in VT1, which might be irritating in the long run for min-maxers.

- The game is somewhat loot/level based, which wasn't the case in VT1 - at least not to such a degree. In VT1 as long as you had a healing trait on a melee weapon, you were basically set. Other stuff could help, but wasn't *essential*. But here they introduced the concept of Power, which seems to scale damage done to enemies and is averaged from all your equipment AND your level (so if you have a weapon with weak-ish Power, but stack up trinkets with high levels, it will still increase the effective damage - well, as long as it passes the threshold). Someone calculated that there might be as much as 72% damage difference between a new character and one that reached level cap (30) with all the best possible gear. Which isn't that far from the difference some weapons had in VT1 between their white and orange versions, but still might rub some people the wrong way. I am not a fan of this system, but at least the cap is low so you reach the max damage values relatively quickly and if the values are balanced for the highest difficulties, I won't mind. It also has a side benefit of 'kickstarting' your other characters, since now all level up separately, but you can just give your lvl1 chars your Power 150 trinkets, and boost their initial efficiency.

- I wouldn't say that characters are gimped, rather the opposite. Hordes are way bigger and once I had been attacked by as much as four globadiers in the span of 30 seconds or so - so specials are also tuned up, although with all the new additions you barely ever see them repeating like that. The thing is that now you have way more 'effects' than before. In VT1 you were limited to up to 3 weapon traits (per weapon, so technically 6, but you couldn't use them both at the same time), and 3 trinket traits. That's it. Now each career has a passive ability, which grants 2-4 effects. Most of them are situational like in the case of Shade: "Backstabs deal 50% damage / Critical backstabs instantly slay human-sized enemies", or "Killed specials drop some ammo / quicker reload speed / no damage falloff / 2x ammo" for Veteran Ranger. Usually they're somewhat interesting and suggest what kind of playstyle would be best for a given career. Passives also include auras, like bonus stamina regen aura from elven Handmaiden. Then there are actives on various cooldowns (ranging from 40s to 2min from what I've seen so far), that can change a given situation considerably. They either turn you invisible, give you a charge/dash/teleport ability, stagger all enemies in range and give some other small bonus (a bit of temporary HP, bonus crit chance etc.). Aaaaand then there is the talent 'tree' - unique for each career. This is the one thing that's completely lvl-locked. It's divided into five rows of three talents each, you unlock each row every five levels (first at lvl5, the last at lvl25), and then pick one talent from every row. The first two are somewhat generic and some of them are shared between careers and characters - like +5% attack or movement speed/dodge distance, +40% ammo, +30% more healing from healing items etc. The third row always enhances your passive, so for example it can either make Shade's backstabs deal +100% damage, or grant 1 bolt or arrow etc. The fourth gives a healing ability like bloodlust or regrowth (the third -new- one gives a lot of HP back the moment you kill a monster enemy, like the ogre), but they've been heavily nerfed. Now they only give white/temporary HP, instead of normal green. Aaaaand the fifth improves the active ability (granting healing while invisible, or stopping bleeding when you use your AoE buffing shout - most characters also have a generic one that grants 30% cooldown reduction).
And then there are weapon properties and traits. Each weapon can now have only one trait, which is a non-random major effect, and up to two 'properties', which give random +% to a given characteristic (movement/attack speed, crit chance/power, extra damage on chaos/skaven/berserkers/monsters/armoured etc.). So all those things combined: passives, actives, tallents, traits, and properties - make for much more customisation and improve the ability to deal with all the new enemies and larger hordes. Which is nice - the game got way harder but it also gave you more tools to deal with the new challenges.

- Regular attacks stop being the only useful thing above normal difficulty, although to what extent depends largery on a weapon. On Nightmare you usually try to use as many charged as possible in the initial stages of the horde, but switch to normal when you want to focus on one enemy (or make a normal+charged combo to have two powerful single target strikes). There is some nuance but of course it's not very visible on the difficulty that has enemies dying from even the lightest strikes. It's like the balance between Swiftbow and Longbow/Handgun in VT1 - on normal even something as weak as swiftbow one shots almost every enemy, but on cataclysm you'd need around 10 shots to down a special, but only 1-2 shots from something like a longbow/handgun.

- I do agree that some weapons are way more 'niche' than others, especially the ones from VT1. Halberd, being a new weapon, is way more flexible and just plain fun to use than something like a 2h sword (from what I've seen so far. The same goes for elven weapons (new 2h elven sword, and the spear). Some of the old weapons were changed a bit and their stiking patterns improved, but I haven't tried all of them, so don't know how fun and effective they are now.

- Ranged balance is all over the place right now. Ranged careers of Kerillian and -especially- Victor as waaaay too OP right now, with Victor having a self buffing crit build that makes him both the most survivable (crits heal) and damaging (crits buff damage and crits) character. While Barding and Kruber feel a bit underwhelming, but at least they can still spam the shots with their 2x ammo.


So all in all I'd say it's a big improvement over the first with two caveats:
1. The power system needs to be explained better, or actually explained at all (there's supposed to be a proper tutorial written on it by launch, but so far we had to rely on numbercrunchers with too much time on their hands) and it might make the first hours of gameplay too reliant on loot and stats instead of teh skillz (but at least the level cap is low, so in the worst case scenario it'll be a bit like Guild Wars 1).
2. There are so many new elements to balance, that the game is -shall we say- not well balanced at the moment. Since this is a beta, damage and talent values tend to fluctuate A LOT, so maybe they'll make it better by launch. Either way they'll have to release balancing patches periodically to adress stuff like 'Saltzpyre crit build' etc. In VT1 they'd release a major balance overhaul every two monts and to be fair, they were usually spot on on most of the changes, so I guess I'm somewhat hopeful.

In short, game is gud.

 

[Belegarsson]

Anyone found the fov a bit weird if you set it higher than 65 (I'm playing at 100)? I get hit way too often even though enemies don't seem to reach me with their swing at all.

 

[Ezeekiel]

Thanks!
I kind of thought the power system would allow you to match enemy HP scaling from difficulty to difficulty, but if that is not the case, then it makes sense that the game changes a lot in terms of tactics. Or is that just for specials?
Any comments on dodging? I've seen people complain about a dodge nerf, but I don't remember how it was in VT1 (I only played that for a bit after launch).