Heroes and Pactsworn,
Hi my name is Joakim Setterberg and I’m the Design Director on Vermintide 2. In this devblog I want to talk about Versus’ upcoming Beta August Test - or BAT - coming August 21st. With the BAT we’re wrapping up most of the larger systems and features of the core game mode. With a few exceptions, our main focus up to release will be to work with surrounding systems and refining the content, to polish the Versus experience and, to quote the team, “fix the jank”.
First, a note on feedback. For every test we do we collect as much of your feedback as possible to find out what we can improve and fix. We sort it, rank it, and talk about what we want to accomplish for the next test. Sometimes there’s a straight-forward way to solve a problem or to implement a suggestion, but other times we’ll go in a slightly different direction, if we believe a problem lies elsewhere. That takes us to our two big features we’re introducing for the BAT: the Pactsworn Horde ability and matchmaking.
Feedback from the last test, the RAT, showed that you wanted something more for the Pactsworn gameplay - like abilities or talents. We also saw requests for notifications when director controlled Hordes were about to spawn, or calls to introduce a Pactsworn special with horde summoning as a singular purpose. These were good requests, but we felt that the Pactsworn side would play even stronger if Hordes were more integrated in active player combat, rather than being played reactive. In the finest Clan Moulder tradition we stitched everything together.
The Horde ability gives all Pactsworn specials a way to summon a small Horde on their own, introducing a tactical element to the gameplay loop. This means that Packmasters can summon cover-kin to blend in for sneaky charges, Ratling Gunners can distract Heroes with melee fodder before laying down fire, or the team can sync up and trigger all Hordes at the same time and overwhelm the opposition. The Horde ability is on a timed cooldown, which decreases faster with successful attacks with your current Pactsworn special and carries over between deaths.
We are excited to see how you interact with this new feature and hear what you think about it, looking forward to your feedback on this one.
A bit trickier were various feedback regarding Pactsworn or Hero balancing, speed running, match quitters and a general feeling of unfairness: all valid points, which we’ll be tackling moving forwards, but this also highlighted one big underlying issue: the lack of matchmaking. In the Alphas there were no guardrails preventing (for instance) solo queuing new players to meet an experienced four-stack, meaning that the experience could vary wildly from session to session. We believe that some of the “unbalanced experience” feedback may originate from this.
For the Beta, we’ve opted to rework our current matchmaking system. It's always been in our mind to improve it as much as possible, and after hearing your feedback from the Alphas we decided to go with a new solution for Versus. The new system should, on average, result in lower queue times, finding servers closer to you (resulting in lower latency), and more even games (for example, by trying to pair together premade groups). It will also allow us to more easily monitor the matchmaking in real-time and act quicker if we notice that something isn't working as we intended.
It won’t stop variously skilled players from meeting up occasionally, but at least the system should be able to favour other match setups. We hope that this will lead to more balanced and fun games, as well as lay a better foundation for future feedback.
On the usability side we are adding gamepad support for those who enjoy button mashing over keyboard smashing. Now that we are rounding up the core feature set we can finalize button assignments and focus on input tweaking to bring the controller experience up to par.
On the quality of life, balancing and bug fixes side there’s a number of things that are changed since the RAT. Some highlights include:
- We’ve updated the Pactsworn UI to display more useful information.
- Enemy healthbars now also display stuff like remaining Wounds and shows regular and temporary HP as separate.
- Your Pactsworn’s abilities and moves are all displayed in the HUD and it also shows their cooldowns.
- Allies now have their names and respawn timers shown above their heads, hopefully making teamwork easier.
- We have moved all healing supplies to be more prominent on each level’s main path. By becoming easy to see “hot spots”, we should be able to create even more interesting and intense scenarios, inviting the Pactsworn to use them for ambushes.
- Based on prior test feedback we’ve made the Bile Troll a bit slower and less twitchy, but also gave him the ability to hold his vomit attack to aim it better before launching it.
- Buffed the Ratling Gunner by speeding up his ramp up and reload times as well as improving his effective range.
- Nerfed the Globadier slightly by making the initial damage of a globe lower but making that damage ramp up dramatically over time.
- Mindlessly throwing globes won’t be as effective anymore, but catching unfortunate Heroes in a bad spot will create just as much chaos as before.
- Tweaked some objectives on Against the Grain to deter speedrunning and running ahead.
- Tweaked the VFX for the Warpfire Thrower and Globadier. On top of looking better, these should be easier to read in first person and more accurately show the actual area of effect.
For all of these features we are of course looking for further testing and feedback.
After the BAT ends, we aim to do at least one more Beta test focusing on some final systems and whatever adjustments come from the feedback we receive during this test. We unfortunately can’t give any details on what it’ll contain at this time, but we’ll tell you guys more when we get there.
On behalf of the entire Vermintide team, thank you for helping shape Versus into something great. See you in a BAT!