Yes, and it made me pre-order the game.

If you liked (co-op) L4D, you will like this game. I can't wait for the inevitable Jeff singleplayer QL where every complaint is from him playing singleplayer!

Nope, but I did preorder the game so I hope I can actually play tomorrow.

Just was wondering if anyone was playing this yet. I am thinking about getting it.

Looking forward to it been craving a L4D game and it using the Warhammer Fantasy licence is a big plus

Looks interesting and I have a few friends who are positive on it, but I think I'll wait for a sale or something on it. Looks like something I'd enjoy but not enough to buy at launch.

I just bought it and started playing with a friend. We started at 11pm and were only supposed to play for an hour. It's now 3:30 am. Will continue in the morning. It's a lot of fun! Bloody co-op action with loot!

It's a lot like Left 4 Dead and that's okay.

A friend told me he's really enjoying it and I just don't get it.

Watched some gameplay on YouTube, watched the trailers, read up on it.. mostly everyone seems really positive on the game but it just looks.. not that great. I don't know what I'm missing here.

Anyone have any more detail? I just see people keep saying it's L4D but obviously it has melee, loot, RPG stuff. How does the melee combat compare to other games?

I hope they do a Quick Look because I can't find much actual detail on the game.

It made my computer overheat, along with a lot of other peoples in the tech fourm.

I did not like L4D at all but I'm absolutely loving this even with just the 3 "pre-order beta" maps. The melee combat is so satisfying and teamplay is a must, even on the lower difficulties. The loot system is good as well. If you're not into melee and loot this game is probably not for you.

Both me and my friend had problems with cpu overheating too, but capping the framerate and turning down some graphics settings fixed it.

I'd say it's more similar to Dragon Age Inquisitions multiplayer than L4D, but with great combat and a much better loot system. This will most likely be my main game for months. Boatloads of fun!

@gorkamorkaorka: games/software cannot make your hardware overheat, if your pc can't run at 100% without overheating then you have a serious cooling problem.

@kogru: That is definitely false. Go look up the issue launch Star Craft 2 had with game rendering the main menu without a framerate cap and causing GPUs to overheat.

I've had a tremendous amount of fun with Vermintide. I picked up a copy before buying two for friends and another picked up their own copy so I've been knocking about with a (moderately) competent group. I like Vermintide for the fact that the game looks beautiful both on a "oh hey that's pretty" and artistic "wow this is a design that I've not come across before". Furthermore the Loot dice has that 'card pack opening' feeling to it and the implementation of Grimoires (1 guarenteed dice for the cost of 25% party max HP) and Tomes (a 3x Chance dice)allows you to comfortably change your own level of risk-reward as you play; If you're having a good run you could pick up a grimoire and reap the benefits of your parties good performance.

The level that you can customise your hero to with the moderate variety of weaponry that you loot at the end of games is pretty nice too. My party has been rolling around with two front-liners (Dwarf + Imperial Soldier) and two ranged (Waywatcher + Bright Wizard) with a mix of AOE and high damage single-target weapons/abilities that's allowed us to handle more or less anything that the game throws at us.

I think this game takes the base foundation from which L4D, Loot games (Diablo/Borderlands) and Chivalry whilst coating it in a Warhammer Fantasy setting and making something that both looks and feels fresh and very inspired. Plus the very modest price-point makes it a very good game to rope multiple people into.

I do think this game has suffered a little bit from lack of marketing as it's snuck up on me and I was keeping a smoldering interested in it stoked in my fire. I'd love to see a little bit more press and I toyed with the idea of probing to see if a Quick Look was being planned but A) There's already a dumptruck of much higher profile games coming out immediately B) It's not my place to ask and C) As has been mentioned before anything that I have thought of has undoubtedly already been thought of by the folks at Giantbomb. Would be nice to see a Giantbeast + Giantbomb West (Giantbest?) have a bit of a play together like they did with Evolve a while back. It's not often a competent L4D-like comes along.

Really fun! Will definitely get my monies worth (~$26)!

Would also like to see GB East play some of this. I know Vinny is Warhammer fan, and I'm willing to bet so is Austin!

I thought it was shite. Mindless drivel.

Is there any point to playing this on your own?

@a_e_martin: if you enjoyed playing L4D on your own then I guess personnaly i don't think these types of games are great singleplayer though

So, it's out.... how are our thoughts now?

There's a lot of great things here. As a previous Warhammer tabletop player, the lore seems accurate. From a design perspective they managed to keep it thematically intact while also bringing in some aspects of tabletop: loot is distributed through a system based on d6 dice rolls, which is a nice touch. There are legitimate complaints about the level of RNG involved, and you only get loot if you complete a mission, but I think some of that can get worked out over time. The core of it is an interesting idea, and it is at least reasonably well executed. You probably won't ever get an item with perfect stats, but this game is designed with improvisation as a core theme, so that's not really a negative to me.

The level design so far is fantastic, though long-winded as well. The breadth of creativity here really is something. Levels can be wide open or very claustrophobic, you go deep above and below ground in different parts of the city. Atmosphere is key, and each of the 13 feel different. Sewers are quiet with running water and the echoes of skittering rats, The ramparts are loud and filled with screams and warp lightning destroying towers in the background. Caves and graveyards and poison wells and fighting rat ogres in a warpstone-moonlit courtyard surrounded by burning buildings, it's great.

Objectives usually are relatively static: go from point A to B and interact with an object, then escape. The interaction could be dropping explosive barrels somewhere to blow something up, delivering explosive barrels somewhere, cutting support structures to destroy a large object, etc. In the end, it's about traversing a level, upgrading your loot dice, and making it out at the end.

Gameplay feels solid. There was a debate over in a reddit thread about which wizard staff was the best, and they had to start mathing it out to find out which one was optimized the best, so it seems pretty well balanced. What weapon you use seems to define how each of the classes feels (in fact, the class distinction, aside from the bright wizard/waywatcher seems minimal, aside from weapon choice.) Everyone has preferences, but overall they feel pretty close in terms of killy-ness. Everything is responsive and weighty.

Haven't had issues with networking. In the beta the waywatcher could fire a particular arrow type and crash the host, kicking everyone from the game, but I haven't seen stuff like that post-launch. Haven't noticed any real lag, despite my crappy wifi connection.

It's not an easy game like L4D. It requires more teamwork, and the bot AI is baad, so in the end enjoyment may be based on how the community evolves. If it becomes toxic to new players and the devs don't step in (as I understand, War of the Roses, their previous game, took this path,) this may be short-lived, but all the pieces are here for something that could be amazing and last for a really long time.

@murgatroyd: I put about 5 hours into the beta and really enjoyed it. Tried most of the classes and they felt unique in their different ways. Don't fully understand upgrading dice/tomes yet.

I gotten a chance to play since its been released, but I had a few questions. Is their controller support, and have they fixed the mouse cursor issue that sometimes requires a reboot? I've seen some others post on the forums about it.

@ballsleon: Their page lists that it has partial controller support, tomes/dice just add more dice to the loot roll at the end of the mission which gives you a higher chance of rolling for better gear.

@ballsleon:

RE: dice, sort of. Basically there's a scale of 8 items determined by the map's difficulty, and you have 7 dice. The regular dice "succeed" on a 5 or 6. If you roll no successes you get the default item, if you roll 2, you get the item 2 up from the default, etc.

When you pick up a tome and carry it to the end, you replace one of those 7 dice with a die that has double the chance of success (3-6 instead of 5-6). Trick is, the tome takes up a healing item slot, so if you want to heal you have to drop it, grab a potion, heal, then pick it back up. No combat healing, basically.

If you get a grimoire, it takes up the speed/strength potion slot, and also decreases the entire party's health pool by 25%. If you drop it, you can't pick it up again. If you bring it to the end, you get a die with 100% chance of success.

There's currently 2 mission types shown on the map: ones like Smuggler's Run have a cross outline, while Horn of Magnus is a shield. The shield ones have tomes and grimoires and are longer, the crosses don't, and are shorter. If I recall, shield missions have 3 tomes and 2 grimoires. All missions contain 2 "cursed dice", which succeed on a 4-6, instead of the regular 5-6.

TLDR you upgrade a set number of dice, giving you better chances at the good loot. Every map has the potential to yield 2 successes minimum, but it's a detriment to the group, so you should probably ask before picking up tomes/grims, as it has the potential to wipe a group and keep you from getting any loot to begin with.

Buddy of mine is playing with a controller currently, says he likes it just fine. Ranged is harder with it I think. KB+M is probably better if you can do it, if not a controller seems workable.

How does the character stuff work in this? Can there be 5 witch hunters running through a map?

@theht: You can only have one of each character in any one game. The make up of your team becomes quite important as you want to have a nice mix of heroes and equipment that are specified for different tasks, especially on higher difficulty levels. For instance, you'll want someone with a shield to basically act as a tank by knocking enemies down, incapacitating them and drawing their aggro once they get back up while your mage sets up his time-consuming, but devastating AOE spells. Ontop of that, you'll want some effective ranged weaponry to deal with certain enemies, including mini-gun wielding buggers that can mow down your entire team if given the time to set up, or gas-grenade lobbing assholes who decide to hug you and then suicide in some spectacular explosions once their health drops low enough. As if all of this wasn't enough, you also need to balance weaponry that will do damage to multiple foes at once to deal with swarms, and armour-piercing weapons to deal with more heavily-armoured units. And I haven't even begun to go into the specific strategies for each mission. There's some real depth to be found here, creating a feeling that's more similar to an MMO-style raid than L4D in my opinion. That said, you can by-pass these more complicated mechanics by playing on easier difficulties, those will still offer a good challenge to anyone wanting to just brutally slaughter hundreds upon hundreds of rat-men. And slaughter them you can, there's some real good gore effects in this game.

They've also done a good job of handling the logistics in setting up a team. You'll pick which hero you'd prefer to play before starting the match-making process, and the game will then either load you into a match that suits your hero and mission designation, or provide you with the choice to either keep searching for a match that's to your liking or to join a game where said hero has already been selected by another player and have you choose from a pool of available heroes. It's a pretty elegant way of handling the situation as it means no load-times until you get a game that you'll actually want to play.

I like this game, but it crashed on me all the time during the preorder early access.

I suppose I'll wait for the PS4 release.

@do_the_manta_ray:Hm, that seems like a sensible way to deal with character selection. Sounds like there's a lot more of a reliance on individual players to play their roles, as opposed to L4D where it was very fluid. But it also sounds like the encounters can get a lot more interesting.

Thanks!

Spent a couple of hours with this last night and maaaaan this game is legit.

I really love what Fatshark did to the L4D formula and the attention to detail they gave to the setting of Warhammer, all the levels that I've played so far have a dark and oppressive feel.

The little details they add really help sell you on the world when you get just enough of a break from the tide to appreciate it.

@skald: Both me and some of my friends had issues with crashing until we capped the framerate. This game is kind of unoptimized right now and will give your cpu a beating. My cpu runs at one degree celsius below the max temp constantly, and it's only in this game.

But other than that, this is truly an amazing game, especially if you have friends to play with.