So if I had to pick three things to say about the Beta or big takes I agree with, it'd be these.
-The gameplay was a ton of fun.
-This feels like a preview of the final game, and less like a Beta build.
-The "game" around the "game" kind of sucks.
1. I did have a ton of fun in the beta. In-level gameplay is pretty good. I think DT has more interesting pacing than VT2. VT2 pacing was largely "Push forward as fast as you can until you hit a block of enemies too thick to just punch through." DT requires you play more carefully. You can play it like VT2 and it will mostly work. But the ambushes are much nastier in DT than in VT2. You walk into a big open space, start mixing it up in melee, and then get absolutely destroyed by gunners, bombers, las guys and all sorts of stuff that is hiding in the shadows or behind some cover. A small unit of las guys will shred your face off if they start shooting at you as a group. So you gotta move cover to cover and sometimes you just gotta slow down and deal with the ranged. As someone who occasionally found the "all go no slow" meta of VT2 kind of one note, I appreciate how DT manages to do both based on what the situation is. There were several times we just got bogged down and really had to leverage all our class specialties together to succeed. I really enjoyed it and DT had plenty of pants on fire moments of total bedlam. Especially on the last night, where the spawns just seemed to be crazy. We had one run where we came to massive room of walkways suspended over the void. We got no less than _10_ total scab gunners and Ogryn reapers. You couldn't poke your head above cover to look across the chasm without getting your face blown off. There have been times in VT2 where you get enough gunners and gas rats that you felt pinned, but at the end of the day the solution was usually "let the elf kill the gunner and then we all rush in." This was by far and away much tougher to deal with in DT, due to the mechanics and the level lay out. I'd also say that, man, your brain and eyes have to work much harder over the course of a run in DT. In VT2 things stand out very clearly, you don't have to work that hard to know what you're looking at or if you're hitting it. As mentioned above by others, between the lighting and all the post-processing effects, just SEEING something that isn't right in front of you in DT takes additional effort compared to VT2. And the pixel hunting on guys at extreme range (the beta didn't have any scope or anything for your guns), after a couple hours kind of wore my eyes out. Along with that, you just have to be more alert in DT than in VT2. 90% of stuff in VT2 comes running straight at you. But I'd say 40% of the stuff in DT likes to hang back, shadow you, take pot shots at you then hide. It can be REALLY frustrating trying to figure out where enemy las fire is coming from, particularly where you're being shot from above and below. It's a pretty different flow to VT2 at different points of play. You feel like the hunted as often as being the hunter. And having an actual enemy sniper out there feels like you're playing a WW2 shooter, where you don't know where the sniper is and they will for real fuck your shit up if they catch you out in the open.
2. Like I said in above posts. If this is the build where Fatshark was ~2 months ago, then I have some cause for concern for release. There is A LOT of shit that's wrong with the game right now, and it's dumb low-hanging "why is this a step backwards from VT2?" stuff. I work in software. I get that redoing every feature from some previous thing isn't a cakewalk, it's all still work. It's not that I think Fatshark CAN'T do it or anything....they just seem like they needed more time still. All their focus was on the new stuff, the art, the levels, the content, making sure gameplay was great......but returning VT2 players are looking for things that took Fatshark YEARS to finally listen about an add to VT2. Or things that were there from Day 1 in VT that aren't present in DT's beta. To see them missing from DT this close to release makes one wonder if we'll have to wait another few YEARS for them to return. Like, if the release were early 2023 I have no doubt most of my concerns would be handled by then. But time is short, and there's just so much we noticed that seemed wrong or half-baked or just completely absent. Lots of QoL features that VT2 really needed. Lots and lots and lots of bugs. Many instances of work that still seemed in that seemed of "first draft" quality.
3. It should probably be no surprise but, the things they've historically been experts at are great, and the things that are newish aren't. The hub, while I like the idea, I don't need it and it's pretty barebones. There's Armorium for buying new weapons, the Requisitorium where you do weekly tasks and buy yet more weapons, the mission hub, a room where you can repeat the tutorial and I think one vendor that wasn't active that's for modifying weapons. That's it. The mission hub is a big circular area, and then you have two sets of hallways connected to that that contain the rest of the hub area. There's.....just not much there. There's no sitting areas, or places to hang out, no emotes, and no real detail to pay attention to. Are those things completely superfluous? Absolutely. But why do you even have a MP hub at that point, because that shit is 200% superfluous. It's like, if you were going to do it you should have done it well and made it feature complete, instead of something barebones that no one asked for in the first place. Hey, you know what I'd rather see than 60 randos who all look too similar to each other in my hub? MY FRIENDS. And while it's kind of nice to buy gear directly between runs instead of juggling annoying loot crates constantly, it's pretty bland and soulless just going to a vendor menu and buying the same thing you're already using, but better. I hated the loot boxes in VT after a while but at least it had that pizazz, that casino/slot machine factor. I really appreciate the time savings so there's no mandatory 10 minutes of opening loot boxes and fiddling with shit before you can run another mission (maybe that will be in the full game), but it's bland and uninteresting. The UI in particular doesn't help, it's all very flat and again, feels like a 1st draft of a final product. The networking issues, disconnects from the various servers that keep all this going, the little outro cutscenes for missions that look completely janky because the timing is all fucked up......basically everything except the actual in-mission gameplay has issues of one kind or another. Most I'd classify as minor and cosmetic but there are plenty of big ones, and they're all ugly in their own way and very clearly detract from the game's polish.
I know some of this is being a returning player and coming from the highly polished, lovingly iterated VT2. New game, new problems, I suppose. But the # of "solved problems" where the solutions aren't in DT really surprise me and kind of disappoint me.
If the game is any more stable than the beta was by release, all will be well, because gameplay is fun and solid. But I think it's going to be another year after release before Fatshark really sands down the rough edges and glues all the many many features of VT2 to the frame of DT. Weapon balance, UI, all that jazz, is going to continue to be a WIP. Balance in VT2 remained a WIP for many years, while their UI experience only had a few changes not too long ago. But I feel like DT's UI is going to get overhauled more than once.
If I had to condense it all down into one blurb....."While I enjoyed myself a lot, I didn't finish the beta feeling awed or impressed. I'm looking forward to all the content being in, but I wasn't blown away by the beta. There just wasn't enough there, and much of what was there seemed half baked. If gameplay hadn't held up as well as it did, I would have serious reservations about the game."
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