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. [b]Now, on to some stats![/b] 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.
