It took VT2 so long to become good it kind of remains a bad game because of it. To understand the tragedy that is VT2, you have to understand the history of Fatshark.
Vermintide 1 was an extremely niche and not very widely played game. Fatshark was a no name studio that pushed out mid tier multiplayer games to compete with Chivalry. War of the Roses had a scene but it wasn't all that popular and no one played War of the Vikings. You also had For Honor becoming a thing which did what they were trying to do but better. VT1 was really just L4D with rats. At the time, it was a good looking game with tight gameplay. People really liked the hub area and dialogue between the characters. The VAs poured out their heart and it showed. It was an extremely comfy game that got surprisingly sweaty the longer you stuck with it. It had its flaws, namely it's item drops but this was remedied with a crafting system and a bounty board that allowed players to target pieces of gear and/or crafting materials. It took a while to get god rolled gear but you were always making progress. Whether or not such a system belonged in what was a L4D clone is a question for another time but it was a system. Again, the problem was with the drops and less so the crafting.
Further VT1 development was funded by dlc map packs, usually containing anywhere from two to four maps and maybe a couple of weapons depending on the pack. There were a couple of stupid cosmetic dlcs but that wasn't until the end. It was an ok system. The map packs were only a couple of bucks. There were some people who complained but it was a small game played by comparatively few players and I think it was a good value proposition. Fatshark by and large had a good relationship with their community and things were good. I'm mentioning this now because I'll have to contrast it later.
The biggest difference between VT1 and VT2 is that each character in VT2 had 3 (now 4) subclasses and abilities whereas in VT1 class determined nothing besides what weapons you could use. There's something to be said for a charmingly simple game like VT1 was but I think it was a change for the better. This was seen as a good thing, though it quickly became clear that not all subclasses were created equal. What people really didn't like about VT2 was that all of the nice QoL features of VT1 were gone. Gone was the contract board, gone were the weekly quests, gone was Okri's challenges (little challenges you could do for cosmetics), gone was tavern brawls, gone was fun community events, gone was the ability to change your loadout at the meginning of the map, gone was the loot dice based drop system and neat if finnicky and unclear crafting system in favor of loot box drops and the worst crafting system ever to exist. Seriously, VT2's crafting is a mix of boring, stupid, and frustrating. The loot box thing wasn't some kind of real money loot box but rather a box where the quality depended on the difficulty and number of loot dice you collected during the run. This was on the tail of the loot box trend. Also, items had a Destiny style power level which wasn't necessary as it would have been a simple matter to incorporate any damage/stagger/cleave modifiers into the character's level but this was 2018 Fatshark and they were fucking trend chasers. Naturally, this pissed off a lot of veteran players and once the wow factor washed away, new players didn't stick around and the game's population plummeted. It's not an easy game and the game didn't really reward a player's time all that well when so much of the power fantasy was tied to levels and drops.
There were a couple of patches to address come of the concerns but it was clear that they didn't have any of the requested features in the pipeline. Okri's challenges were added after a month or two, though with next to no cosmetic rewards and weekly quests were added later but they didn't really give anything either. There was no contract board that provided players an avenue towards at least something they wanted. Because item drops were at the mercy of rng, in the early days it was rare to see players with veteran items (veteran or "red" items were the highest tier of item with maxes stats. they were extremely rare at launch and only obtainable from chests from the highest difficulty) and it's not like the game was really a looter or anything. Over time, some of the rng was changed and reds were made easier to get but again, the damage was done. Eventually map packs were added but they were slow arrive and the maps weren't that good compared to some of the others.
The game was at its absolute nadir with the 2.0 "Winds of Magic" patch. Winds of Magic introduced a new faction (beastmen), reworked skill trees, a new game mode called "weaves," one new weapon for each class, and a single map. Unfortunately, Winds of Magic also had numerous rounds of closed playtesting that all received negative feedback, in particular about what I'll be calling the stagger system. Without going into doo much depth, the game now tied how much damage you did to a target based on how staggered it was. It later received some fixes but it still viewed as a negative. Also, weaves were an unwelcome dead on arrival mode, beastmen
still remain an unbelievably buggy faction, and the map was the worst map in the game. Winds of Magic was universally shat on and to this day remains rated mostly negative on steam. It also paywalled the new cataclysm difficulty.
In the wake of Winds of Magic, Fatshark had two more monumental fuckups: they admitted that maps were expensive and time consuming to develop and their new strategy going forward was to rely on microtransactions in game to fund development, and they also had what was coined the "Big Balance Beta" or BBB as I'll be referring to it as. The map thing was surprising as people seemed happy to purchase them and since it was never brought up at any point in years prior, no one thought it was actually a massive burden. Lohner's Emporium of Wonders or the shekel emporium as I like to call it was a requested feature but not for it to be an avenue to extract real money from players. People much smarter than me have crunched some numbers that all but proved they made next to nothing from mtx sales which invalidated the whole use sales revenue to fund new maps thing but the game actually started getting a lot of maps from this point onward. The BBB was interesting because it drew a lot of changes from a community made rebalance mod (made by a guy on the FS forum who went by Incandescent, what's up nigger if you see this) and this was criticized because the community saw it as FS not just stealing ideas but also not being confident in their own abilities. Not all that much actually came from the BBB as a lot of what was tried was either over or underpowered and it kind of just fizzled out. Because the community treated them so harshly, they never tried anything like that again and chose to hide behind their trannyfaggot community managers.
The inflection point came with the release of the first post launch class, the Grail Knight; a simple but effective class what would define the top tier meta to this day. Naturally, no one was happy that the class cost money but it seemed like it was well done. After Grail Knight came the maps and earlier in the thread I listed all the maps VT2 received only since after Darktide's launch and it had somehow received more than Darktide. This game has a LOT of maps now. Anyway the story from here becomes kind of boring as it was just more maps, more paid classes, a little balance patch here and there, until the Chaos Wastes, which unlike weaves was actually fun. It's basically a roguelite mode.
Last year, they released an unwelcome balance patch that didn't really help the game, added Easy Anti Cheat (just why) and added a versus mode that was also dead on arrival. Excellent use of dev time, 11/10. Versus is fucking gay and I lost a bet on whether or not it would actually come out.
Just to drive all of this home, the story of Darktide is an almost 1:1 retelling. The game received two betas and a sort of early access period. The first beta was invite only and the second was technically closed but everyone who requested access got in. I got into both and there wasn't a whole lot of difference besides some things like psyker feeling distinctly weaker. Almost all of the feedback from both betas was negative and the final product appeared to change nothing. All of that good will that Fatshark generated from between 2020-2022? Gone.
Darktide launched with a mere 4 classes (down from 15 at VT2's launch) all with the same type extremely limiting of 6-rows-of-3-skills skill trees, weapons felt like a downgrade considering just how intricate some of VT2's combo chains could be, there weren't as many maps available, map tilesets were reused (most of DT's maps share tilesets with 3 or 4 other maps, it's neither a good thing not a bad thing, just a thing), enemies were buggy, there were only two bosses, the story was nonexistent despite touting some well respected 40k author penning the narrative, crafting DID NOT EXIST, you weren't guaranteed ANYTHING at the end of a match, weapons were extremely unbalanced, blessings were extremely unbalanced, there were no weekly quests, upgrade material costs were through the roof, THE STUPID SHOP WAS ON A ROTATING HOUR TIMER REQUIRING A THIRD PARTY TOOL TO CHECK ON WHAT WAS BEING SOLD THAT FATSHART TRIED THEIR ABSOLUTE HARDEST TO KILL OFF, the dialogue was a downgrade, server issues were rampant (and still are), the game was always online, there was no way to create solo or private lobbies, you couldn't select any map, just what was available, the hardest difficulty wasn't hard, people were griefing games because of penances, but the cash shop looked great oh wow it's exactly like that one meme.
Anyway, I shit all over the game until about two years ago when I came back after the skill tree rework. I'd actually like to apologize to the guy earlier in the thread that I called cattle. Just to outline what's been fixed and what remains, here you go:
-Bad skill trees [fixed and constantly undergoing additional fixing]
-4 classes [now there are five and the skill trees facilitate a lot more playstyles to limited effectiveness]
-Lame weapons [many are still lame but the new ones feel better]
-Limited map selection and variety [there are more maps and new "biomes" if you want to call them that]
-Buggy enemies [they're still buggy]
-Only two bosses [now there are five types]
-Nonexistent story [it's still irrelevant]
-No crafting [crafting works well and you can roll it exactly how you want]
-No drops [every map drops something]
-Unbalanced weapons [this is more of an issue at high skill play]
-Unbalanced blessings [ditto]
-No weekly quests [they exist but they aren't really anything at all]
-Extreme material costs [a non issue]
-The shop [it's easy to get items with ideal stat allocations, the shop is irrelevant]
-Character barks and dialogue [gotten better but not as good as VT]
-Server issues [still there]
-Always online [never going away which also means no modded difficulty which hurts the game's longevity but high tier havoc is pretty hard]
-No solo lobbies [still no]
-No private lobbies [they're there now]
-Limited map selection [still limited but you can pick whichever out of the ten that are available and choose any difficulty]
-Damnation not hard [try havoc 30+, it's no C3+DWONS but it's def a challenge]
-People griefing because of pennances [they locked the griefable pennances behind private lobbies which is kind of gay but I get it]
-Cash shop [still gay]
That should get you up to speed. I'd say the game has been in a good spot ever since the crafting patch a little more than a year ago.
