Warhammer: Vermintide

A few sites called this the best game at PAX Prime.

"Vermintide is a co-operative action first person shooter and melee combat adventure set in the End Times of the iconic Warhammer Fantasy world."

Check it out.

Oooooooooooh dear. I was excited for this but it just looks like Left 4 Dead in Warhammer Fantasy Battle. Like exactly the same.

I played a little bit of Beta, and the only thing this has in common with Left 4 Dead is 4 players co-op. The combat is incredibly satifying and feel great (something Bethesda fails to do with thier Elder Scroll games), the Skaven AI is capable of some interesting tactics like flanking, forming a ring cheering on two Skavens beating you up, and ditracting players. It also has an actual character progression and some pretty interesting loot combinations that make sense. Also, each character actually plays differently unlike Left 4 Dead which is just different skin and voice.

Visually it is almost perfect, the game somerimes drops in large areas with too many enemies but hopefully on full release it is fixed. They also plan on expanding the game, with characters added post-release. These guys are really in it.

Overall, while the game may have taken a couple of cues from Left 4 Dead, it has enough different mechanics to stand on its own as a strong game. Also, the game's creepy music is composed by Jesper Fucking Kyd!!

edited 26th Sep '15 2:12:42 AM by YoKab

My only confusion with it.

why are we getting an endtimes themed game when the endtimes event happened in tabletop over a year ago?

Bit late for crossbranding with the now-dead Warhammer fantasy franchise, innit?

They know people will want that even more since they are still in fury over Age of Sigmar.

I guess?

I mean, my first thought as a fan of the warhammer series was "I fucking hate skaven." >_>

See, works for you too, because then there'll be a game that's literally abut killing your target of hatred constantly.

Right..but I want Orcs :(

Yeah, I understand that, but I think Skaven may have been a choice for a tad more distinction while Orcs and Orc-like fantasy creatures still have a lot of popular perception for a go-to choice as numerous Always Chaotic Evil enemies. Rat humanoids are a road a bit less traveled in games for that niche thus far.

Also, Orcs aren't sneaky gits are they? So then they wouldn't be able to put in a Hunter-analogue enemy.

edited 27th Sep '15 7:41:23 PM by VutherA

HEY!!! It's Orks. Or is that just WH4K?

edited 28th Sep '15 8:39:47 AM by AnotherGuy

No, it's here too, though they're mostly called "Greenskins."

I blame the diminutive man-of-snow, I didn't remember myself!

The Ork with a k spelling is only for 40k.

technically, with the transition to age of sigmar from fantasy, its now ORRUKS

Zero, as was me and snowman, is correct; checked the wiki. You two had me worried there for a bit!

edited 27th Sep '15 7:54:31 PM by VutherA

The video showed very little proof on the whole "silent" end.

What's that accent she's got?

Having played the beta, I love it so far. Warhammer 40K has become so stale and tired over the course of the past years that the Fantasy universe feels almost fresh and original by comparison, and I'm quite happy to see the Skaven be the fodder for once, rather than having to deal with faux-Cockney spewing Greenskins for the umpteenth time. Also, the abrasive industrial/noise soundtrack courtesy of Jesper Kyd is all sorts of brilliant.

edited 29th Sep '15 4:24:47 PM by TAPETRVE

Hm, I am still mostly just hopeful about the game, but I I think I've honestly got enough co-op multiplayer games in the meantime...I'd probably wait a while to get into Vermintide if ever.

Yeah, the focus on coop makes it a wee hard to recommend for people who want a singleplayer experience. It's not quite a replacement for the sadly cancelled Hellraid, but I'm still looking forward to it.

That's pretty expected of co-op multiplayer games. The singleplayer option tends to be very poor by comparison, probably from a combination of expected apathy to it by the audience and the simple fact that good AI is clearly difficult with the multitude of examples of the opposite in games.

edited 29th Sep '15 5:28:03 PM by VutherA

Very true. To be fair, the Skaven in Vermintide are acting quite a bit more intelligently than the enemies in Left4Dead, and the bots that replace missing players are able to hold themselves better than their zombie-killing counterparts, too. But at the same time, those bots never do any of the objective-related stuff that triggers mission progress, because they are not supposed to take away from the player agency. And that's where the simplistic game mechanics start to stand out, because even a completely action-focused singleplayer game usually has a lot more interaction going on. The linear and often narrow level design in Vermintide also falls more in line with the first L4D than its sequel, which had larger, more open maps (at times too large and open, to be fair). That said, the third available map in the beta campaign, a forest area, actually is quite open and sprawling.

edited 29th Sep '15 6:00:52 PM by TAPETRVE

Yeah, that's a pretty good way to explain an issue with co-op games' singleplayer. It probably has to do with how one player must be limited in their abilities so they have to rely on teamwork to succeed, which of course makes the latter the true meat of the gameplay (indeed, a co-op multiplayer game I was thinking of having a pretty decent singleplayer component compared to most of them definitely only succeeds in doing so because it can just allow you to control all the other bots in singleplayer anyway and make it like an party-based RPG, games where the gameplay depth comes in using all of your options together).

edited 29th Sep '15 7:12:51 PM by VutherA

Games Workshop kills the Old World for Age of Sigmar. Developers favour the Old World for Warhammer Fantasy Games.

Good to see I'm not the only one who enjoyed the Beta.

edited 30th Sep '15 1:18:20 AM by YoKab

One game that comes to mind is The Darkness 2, which has a separate coop campaign with entirely different characters.