Anyway, I noticed that Warhammer: Vermintide is on sale for $10. I could maybe go for a good L4D style game if there's people playing. Does anyone here play? What do you guys think of it?
I play it, mostly because my friends made me buy it and play it with me on occasion.
It has its strengths but it has a lot of weaknesses too.
Strengths:
1. Easily the best FPS melee combat to date. It's not as technical as something like Mount and Blade but it's way, way more visceral and entertaining. There's just so much joy about the way you use your weapons. I can't really describe it, you need to actually cleave through a horde of clan rats with your great axe to understand what I mean. Seriously. It's so good. So so good.
2. The characters are very entertaining. They also have great, diverse loadouts and great, diverse dialogue trees / banter. Take the dwarf for example. He can use a single handed axe, axe + shield, mace, mace + shield, great axe, great hammer, rifle, crossbow, flame pistols, etc. They're all very different from one another. Playing with a mace is completely and totally different from using the single handed axe. So even though it seems like there's only 4 guys, there's basically like 10 subclasses or something.
3. The game is fun with friends, and also hard as balls so you guys don't just breeze through with your group. There's a lot of nuance and intricacy to the combat. Again, it builds point number one but the combat really is just that good.
Weaknesses:
1. The loot system is garbage. It's total shit. It's RNG on RNG on RNG on RNG. They give you crafting, but that has more RNG on RNG. It's nonsense. You have RNG for your stats, RNG for the class the weapon is for, RNG for what weapon it is, RNG for rarity, etc. etc. They tried to alleviate it with the quest board but all that did was add more RNG. It's dumb. It wouldn't be so dumb if the loot was just cosmetic or something but no, you must have legendary gear if you want to stand a chance at beating the higher difficulty quests and DLC. But wait, you can't just farm low level quests to get legendary gear because you can only get them on the higher difficulties. So you need legendary gear to farm quests to get legendary gear. You better hope the legendary gear you get has the correct RNGed stats too. Oh, and that it's even the weapon you want in the first place.
But wait there's more! You literally get shafted if your team dies during a mission. So even if you spent 40 minutes clearing your very hard difficulty map, if you die at the end you get nothing but some idiotic shards or some shit.
Did I mention it gets worse? Even your opportunity to get a legendary weapon is determined by RNG. See, at the end of every mission you roll dice to see your loot. This dice is, of course, RNG. The loot table is also RNG by the way so most of the time there's no legendary on it and if there is, it's usually when you roll a perfect roll. Okay, so if you want to improve your odds you need more dice basically. You get these several ways. One is to carry tomes around which take up an item slot and you must carry them to the end of the game. Another is to collect grimoires, and every time you do your hp is cut by 25% of its total. Most levels have 3 so you will be wandering around with 25% health which means you die in one hit to a random clanrat. There is an item that significantly reduces this penalty, but it's an RNG legendary drop so good luck. And finally you can stumble across loot die in the mission but this is RNG as well.
Do you see what I mean? It's total horseshit.
2. Some of the maps are great. Some are idiotic. Some are WAY WAY WAY WAY WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY too long. What usually happens is everyone (of which there's like... 10 people) just ends up playing on the same 2 maps forever so they can grind for loot. It's stupid.
3. It's for these reasons that you need to play with friends, as at least then you can experience other maps and you can faff around instead of being forced to be perfect when playing with groups trying to grind loot. I do not recommend buying this solo unless you hate life.