Dev Blog: Versus Closed Alpha Test - Lessons Learned & Takeaways
In this dev blog, Vermintide 2’s Design Director, Joakim, talks about the takeaways and solves that Fatshark learned from the Versus Closed Alpha Test.
Greetings Heroes and Pactsworn alike,
My name is Joakim and I’m the Design Director for Vermintide 2. In this dev blog, I want to look at some findings from the Versus Closed Alpha Test and give you an update on the state of Versus.
To kick this off I want to extend our deepest gratitude to all of you who participated in the Closed Alpha Test. From a developer standpoint, it is always a scary feeling putting things out to you players for initial impressions, but we came out of this with the feeling of overwhelming success. You seemed to have a good time, we got a ton of good feedback, the servers were fairly stable and we did not see any overly alarming crashes or issues preventing play. In short, we couldn’t have hoped for anything more.
Now, on to some stats!
The Closed Alpha Test saw slightly over 3600 players on PC participating in a total of 6056 rounds across 2093 games. The overall majority of those ended up with a clear winner, with 7% ending in draws, and with matches concluding in general within 20-30 minutes on the Screaming Bell Versus mission.
For the Heroes, the top career picks were Mercenary, Battle Wizard, Ranger Veteran, Waystalker, and Witch Hunter Captain, with an overall meta solidifying around handguns and the longbow. For the Pactsworn the spread was fairly even across all specials but (not surprisingly) with a higher pick rate, playtime, and damage rate for the Globadier.
More than a thousand of you also answered our survey, which together with the forum and Discord posts made for some (long and) great reading. Again, a big thank you to everyone who took the time to provide us with thoughts and feedback for the good and the bad.
94% of the survey respondents have played Vermintide for more than 60 hours, and 85% of those usually play on Legend or Cataclysm difficulty (with an additional 13% players on Champion). Naturally, this showed in the test as well: high-performing Hero teams were outplaying the Pactsworn early on, although we did see a shift toward the end of the test as players were getting more familiar with kill-slaying as Skaven.
In terms of feature requests the majority of the feedback touched on the following:
Balancing being too much in favor of the Hero side, with a low amount of AI-controlled enemies and an abundance of healing items and THP.
Requests for playable bosses or elites.
Requests for a training area for the Pactsworn specials.
Requests for abilities or talents to deepen the Pactsworn gameplay.
All of this feedback aligns with our current goals and we aim to bring you more news soon on our plans going forward. As for balancing, we're continuously tuning it and further tests will help us figure out a sweet spot where a majority of players can enjoy Versus. Given that the Closed Alpha Test feedback is skewed towards more experienced players though, we are hoping to get more Recruit and Veteran players into the next tests to get their input.
Rest assured, we are tuning things for the next test to mitigate some of your frustrations. Matches were often too close in terms of scoring, and the Hero team reached the safe zone far more often than we liked. As a starting point we have upped some of the Pactsworn specials’ damage output, tweaked the amount and type of pickups in missions, as well as having adjusted some of the Versus Hero talents and abilities.
For the next test, you will play on a new map, see the addition of premium careers, get kick and mute options, see a match score screen, and Versus specific menu settings. We’re also aiming to do the next test directly in the Vermintide game and not on a testing app, and for this reason, we’re adding a title screen, just like for consoles, with shortcuts to Adventure, Chaos Wastes, and Versus.
Speaking of consoles, you are due a clarification here. Unfortunately, the outlook is not great for seeing the game mode on Xbox or PlayStation. There are a number of reasons for this, but primarily it's due to technical limitations on the memory and network side. Vermintide 2 was not built with Versus in mind, and as we are bending the game and engine even for PC there are no good alternatives available for console at this point. We could of course have decided not to pursue the game mode at all, but from what we’re seeing we strongly believe that PvP+E is a great addition to Vermintide and an innovation worth pursuing. In the end, we’re making the call that it is better to release it to some than not at all.
Deciding to separate the platforms and player base is not an easy one, and we understand that we are letting our console players down in that regard. To some comfort for you, as well as for the ones uninterested in Versus, know that we have exciting things in the works this year.
As for the next Versus test, we’re delighted to announce our next alpha will launch very soon, and will be open to all owners of Vermintide 2! We hope that you are as excited as we are and that you watch this space for any updates! On behalf of the team, thank you so much for your continued support. Together we can make Versus a great addition to our beloved Vermintide.
See you in a poison wind gas cloud soon,
Joakim, and the Vermintide team