Quick Look: Warhammer: Vermintide 2

Woo!

@benpack The Time Bubble game is called Darkest of Days. You were very close.

Dammit Jan, it's SPEHSS MAHREENS, not SHPACE MUHRINES

Had a blast with Vermintide 1, so it's good to see that FatShark is responding to fan requests/demands for Chaos to be added as a new foe, as well as general refinements/enhancements to the first game. Also, from what I saw of yesterday's GB live stream, the game looks damn pretty.

Also, I feel like the addition of mod-support will be HUGE.

well, that was thorough!

and accurate (except Fatshark did Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 and War of the Roses not Payday)

they have also promised not to sell loot boxes, just maps and skins

Nice to know that loot boxes will join cockroaches as the only survivors of armageddon.

What are these giant rodents you speak of? Heresy!

I can't stand skittergaters

@dasakamov:

Also had a great time with the 1st one too, and the developers confirmed mod support too :D

Weirdly compelled to buy this after falling into a Warhammer wiki hole.

Also Overkill did Payday, not Fatshark.

CORRECTION- in Vinny's voice : this isn't the same developers that made Payday (thats Overkill) FatShark has made War of Roses, War of Vikings, Bionic Commando 2 and some other games which weren't great.

Man after watching this I decided to read up on the "The End Times" on a Warhammer wiki, and that wiki page alone is a 180+ pages of non-stop lore about just this world ending event.

Quick Look: Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine

What happened there on the first map is the team getting wrecked by a stormvermin (armored rats) patrol during a boss battle. They hit pretty hard compared to other common enemies, especially in a group. They are very vulnerable to bombs, though, you can take out most of them with an accurate throw. That was somewhat unlucky for Recruit difficulty, but you should see the kind of things you have to deal with on Champion. It's pretty exhilarating when you overcome the crazy situations the game throws at you at higher difficulties.

SPAAAYYSSE MAREEEENS?!

Recycling a chat comment, but these giant rats look more like space murines.

Hoping to start this up proper this weekend with my buds, soooo damn fun in co-op enjoy it way more than I ever did left 4 dead. Love all the changes they've made since the first.

I picked up the game after Ben mentioned it was like L4D. Really enjoying it so far. The graphics are amazing--lots of beautiful walls.

I'm genuinely sorry if I spoiled a part of Game of Thrones for anyone.

@neocalypso: Thanks for the link, I just spent hours reading through that, also it seems like almost every major entry in the wikia is several hundred pages.

@benpack: I hate to be that guy, but the Warhammer universe never goes from fantasy to Warhammer 40k. Those two universes are completely separated, instead being parallel realities or some such. I am a lot more into 40k (started painting miniatures last year, read a few books etc) yet enjoyed Total Warhammer at least. Was going to save up for Total Warhammer 2, but your coverage of this made me buy this instead...

Boy, this game is boring to watch other people play but it looks really fun to play.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaggggh!!!

This looks fun, hopefully Vinny will do a Playdate or something.

Correction ! they didn't make payday. That's Overkill studios there working on upcoming GTFO.

FYI; wazzock is english insult. Like calling someone an idiot but not quite so harsh, similar to pillock or nitwit.

Overkill isn't making GTFO thats the designer of Payday at his new studio, 10 chambers collective.

Overkill is making the walking dead game and Payday 3, I can see why you would get them confused

Ben Pack: Professional Chuckle-head. I think that first wipe proved that. Tank shouldn't be that far from his group!

BEN, FATSHARK DIDN'T MAKE PAYDAY HOW DID YOU EVEN THINK THAT

They DID make Blood and Gold.

WAR!!!

Anyone knows if the AI is improved from the previous game or should I wait for the mod community to fix it again?

@beefscorn: You're right! Giant Bomb should withhold Ben Pack's next paycheck in order to teach him to play-his-class-dammit.

Because video games are super-serious and shouldn't be thought of as "entertainment" or "leisure".

Lets stop comparing everything to Destiny.

Destiny didn't invent basic RPG elements or class systems.

Are Overkill and FatShark Double-A studios? Is Vermintide a Double-A game? Not that it matters, it's just semantics, but I enjoyed Vermintide 1, and was shocked to discover that the same company made the illustrious Escape Dead Island! Seems like they have really gotten their act together since then.

That's true, but the "hero power" thing seems like its pretty directly comparable to Destiny's light level.

@president_barackbar: It's pretty directly comparable to ANY item level system, which MMOs have had for at least a decade before Destiny.

That has to be some Ben Pack attempt at humor, or someone deliberately feeding him false information, right? Like, he's made this claim on multiple occasions now... you would think someone would have corrected him by now.

Or maybe Ben is secretly trying to beat Rorie's record for the number times you can say something that's not true with absolute certainty?

well you don't pay for them here, so... it's the same thing as just getting 3 random pieces of equipment...

Though he probably didn't know either way, there are a few references to them being in the same universe before it became officially stated that they were not. The only one I know personally is from The Black Library publication "The Liber Chaotica" which takes place in Warhammer fantasy and has a segment dedicated to a "portal in the warp" that appears at which point they begin to describe "great fire machines" and such, and the whole segment effectively suggested they were looking into a portal in time and were describing various things from 40k.

There are plenty of long-time Warhammer fans who think that the official "parallel realities" explanation for Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40k existing at the same point in time to be pants-on-head stupid. :b

It'd be like saying, "Well humans in Sweden emerged from the primordial soup of creation fully-formed and automatically knowing the secrets of laser weaponry, space travel and earth-shattering psychic powers. Meanwhile, humans in Canada emerged from creation armed with wooden pointy sticks , bows and arrows primitive blackpowder weapons and maaaaaaaaagic.

Space-Sweden waged in Space-Wars with Space-Norway. Meanwhile, Dark-Ages-Canada engaged in devastating conflict with Dark-Ages-United-States. The Dark-Age countries suddenly blow up because...reasons. Space-Age Canada and Space-Age US emerge out of nowhere and immediately begin shooting lasers at each other."

@feckless: Well, I thought the same thing until I actually got into Warhammer 40K and learned more about the lore there. Which makes it kinda clear that nothing of the Fantasy Warhammer lore could have happened far back in time. Not on Earth anyway. If Warhammer happened on some other planet in the galaxy, it could maybe work, save for a lot of things that would not fit together. Anyway, I am sure they are going to keep saying it's the same universe, and it's not like it really matters anyway.

i'm not a warhammer expert, but i believe the name of that tree at the start is Gnarled Barkley

@president_barackbar: Pretty common in other earlier games too. Even things as big as WoW used an ilvl system, it’s not like Destiny even popularized the mechanic.

The crew played a lot more Destiny though, so it makes sense for them to draw that particular comparison,

@addfwyn: ilvl wasn't really a thing in vanilla wow, and it ruined wow.

Ah yes Destiny, the game that invented item levels and subclasses.

@lumbermancer: It was always in WoW, it just wasn't transparently presented to the end user. People used mods to surface it for a long time until Blizzard just skipped the middle man and did it themselves.

I would say WoW has consistently gotten [A LOT] better since Vanilla, but that is another discussion altogether.

@addfwyn: Right. And when gear score addon was first released in vanilla, there was backlash against it, because some people thought it trivialized gear progression and allowed for artificial gating of content.

Lo and behold, I come back to WoW in Legion, and you need to have average ilvl yea high to queue in dungeon finder, and they removed weapons replacing them with collecting tokens which increase your weapon ilvl.

That said, I don't dislike it in Vermintide, even though unlike Brad (and most) I'm not a fan of progression systems.

The part that bothers me isn't that he thinks they are set in the same universe (which is completely understandable). It's the part that he insists that the "End Times" signify the transition period from Fantasy lore into 40k. That it's actually, in his words, Warhammer 39K. Um.... wha... huh?

What part of the setting in Vermintide suggests to him that it culminates in humanity become a galactic empire with giant mechs and space guns?... Like, I'm genuinely more curious in his thought process here than anything.