Warhammer: Vermintide 2 News

Hello there, my name is Karl and I'm one of the designers on the v2 team. My task is to follow up our glorious leader's post on general necromancer production with some insight into some of the challenges and decisions we made on the gameplay level.

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[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Creating a career starts with a fantasy plucked from the Warhammer universe that we want to translate into our game. Usually the fantasy gives you a hunch about what tools the career possesses, how it is going to play and what role it will fill. The Necromancer deviated slightly from this. We knew that she was going to summon skeletons and throw death magic around. How exactly she was going to play and what role she would fill was a bit more of a uncertainty as player minions as a concept was completely new.

Raised skeletons in Warhammer lore are not known to be the most kill-y unit. They serve as a vanguard to keep their master and their more important units safe. A replenishable undying frontline. We drew inspiration from this and decided that this is what Sienna's skeletons should achieve at a base level. A sorcerer summoning their own frontline.

To keep this post to a reasonable length I won't go into detail about every iteration that the skeletons and AI versus AI fighting went through. Every aspect about the skeletons saw intense iteration, aspects such as summoning, formation, combat, health and duration to mention a few. The skeletons bounced between being her career skill and passive multiple times but finally landed as the career skill at the center of the necromancer kit. 6 summonable Skeletons that engage enemies near Sienna.



Process of tweaking aggro and leash range of skeletons when Sienna is not actively fighting.

As the skeletons grew into proper minions assisting Sienna in combat we could start to consider questions that a lot of summoner classes in games have to answer to. How are the minions tied into the second to second gameplay? Summoner control has two extremes with each their own audiences. One side being the micro intensive extensive control over the available minions, high skill floor and satisfying skill ceiling with a lot of expression. The other side is the more passive way where the summoner does little to impact the actual behavior of the summons but rather supports them with things like debuffs and control, letting their servants do the work for them. We wanted to place the Necromancer somewhere in between, allowing for some level of control to gain more from your skeletons without making it a barrier of entry to the career.

Without any player input the skeletons will stay near Sienna, attack nearby enemies and soak up enemy threats. To give players control (and tying in the skeletons in the second to second gameplay), we created three commands: attack, defend and release, granting players the ability to issue targets, reposition and even sacrifice their skeletal servants.

The nature of being a spell caster with 6 extra bodies around to soak enemy attention gave way to her two main roles. A backline spell caster using her personal frontline as a buffer while dispensing death and a control focused summoner utilizing the great threat soaking potential of minions to grant the party breathing room. This we felt slotted into the Sienna career lineup.



To reduce vision blocking when controlling a lot of skeletons only 4 are forced to move in formation in front of Sienna.

Regarding her weapons, one side was already solved. The Scythe, a staple to necromancers in any rpg and Sienna's first proper two handed weapon. Great weapons with great cleaves are nothing new to Vermintide and Sienna was missing out on the fun.

The Soulstealer Staff required a bit more pondering. Here the challenge was to find gameplay in the form of spells that were different from her other staves but still befitted the Warhammer lore of necromancy. The staff saw many iterations and we decided on the flavorfully on point soul drain which is slow but tackles even the biggest of brutes. Building on the theme of control we also gave the staff a haunting curse allowing the necromancer to keep multiple elites under control as they are brought low by her Necromantic magics and servants.



Trying out the Soulstealer Staff with the “Cursed Blood” talent.

To go along with her weapons and calcium crew, Sienna's main passive Malediction of Nagash causes her Necromantic magics to increase the damage the enemy suffers from her. The intent behind this passive is to transform Sienna's damage over time effects into a way to enable other parts of her kit whilst also tying in the fantasy of necromantic magics draining enemy vigor.



Which brings us the Necromancer’s talent tree. The main purpose of the Vermintide talent trees is of course offering different ways to play the career within its allotted gameplay space, but also to extend the career into more specialized versions of the power fantasy. The challenge then is to provide the players relevant options for specialized playstyles that slots appropriately into the lore. The identities we selected that would serve as guidelines were summoner, caster and melee. 

[h3]The summoner works with their undying servants and their talents affect skeleton numbers, strength and how often they can be summoned. Suggested talents for a summoner build.[/h3]

• Vanhel’s Danse Macabre: Sienna gains 12% attack speed when 4 or more Skeletons are raised.
  
• Spirit Leech: Killing an elite enemy restores 15% cooldown.
  
• Army of the Dead: Raise Dead now causes Skeletons to remain for 20 seconds before decaying.
  

[h3]The caster sees their skeletons as shambling batteries of magic to be used as sacrificial pawns in their flurry of magical spells, their talents affect ranged power, overcharge management and damage over time effects. Suggested talents for a caster build.[/h3]

• Death Ascendent: Casting spells grants 5% increased Ranged Power for 6 seconds. Max Stacks 5.
  
• Lost Souls: Venting 20% Overcharge unleashes a soul that steals health from a nearby enemy, restoring 2 temporary health.
  
• Barrow Blades: Skeletons now carry two cursed blades. When raised, and when attacking, they ignite enemies, causing damage over time.
  

[h3]The melee fantasy is for necromancers who prefer to utilize their instruments of death at close range, their talents affect melee prowess, control and survivability. Suggested melee build talents.[/h3]

• Reaping: Critical strikes have Unlimited Cleave and 25% increased Power.
  
• Soul Harvest: The Malediction of Nagash rips the soul from targets that die. Harvesting 8 souls causes the next attack to be a guaranteed Critical Hit.
  
• The Curse of Undeath: Casting Raise Dead reduces damage inflicted on Sienna by 80% for the next 3 hits.

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While the goal is to create talents that enhance the tools and feeling of a specialized build, the aim is to create talents that don't pigeon-hole players too much and are useful on their own to allow for tinkering and mix-and-matching.

So whether it is halting the enemy advance with shambling walls of bone, shriveling the enemies life essence or swinging big scythes around we hope that you will enjoy bringing death to the enemy in one way or another and we look forward to your response on the necromancer. As we pick up on our efforts to balance and evolve the game, we will keep a close eye on the numbers as the necromancer and her bad to the bone crew of restless dead enter the fray.

Fatshark said it would continue to support Vermintide 2 after the launch of Darktide and has done just that, with additions like new free levels and remastered levels from the original Vermintide. Next up, pyromancer Sienna will finally get her fourth career: the necromancer...
Read more.

My name is Joakim and I'm the design director on Warhammer: Vermintide 2. I've been a part of Fatshark even longer than Lohner and for 15 years I've been working mainly with level creation and design in pretty much all of our games. Earlier this spring I took on the role of leading the design vision and direction of Vermintide 2 - like being the resident mission giver.

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Now that the long-awaited career for Sienna - the Necromancer - is just around the proverbial Ranaldstrasse corner, I want to look back at the journey leading up to this point and show you some behind the scenes production footage in this dev blog.

But first, if you haven’t read the narrative lore post then go here to get the story.

When the team started exploring what Siennas new career could be, they started with our three general career goals in mind:

• To create a career that was fun and cool, and that had its own gameplay space in the lineup.
  
• To explore something new that helped us innovate a technical aspect.
  
• To delight you with something unexpected yet plausible for the Hero.
  

The idea of a Necromancer has been kicking around for a long time - it was already in the back of our skulls when starting work on the Grail Knight. The team knew from the onset that we had to explore something that wasn’t a fire wizard simply because it would be challenging to carve out a gameplay role that didn’t cannibalize on her regular careers. From a tech perspective we also dreamt of something akin to a pet class with a summon & control type of gameplay. Together with the End Times storyline a Necromancer ticked all of those boxes.

[h2]Creating the Concept[/h2]
We started out creating a concept for the Necromancer. We do similar concepts for all things that we create, highlighting details and material references so that our outsourcing partners have a clear idea of the direction we want.



Looking at the career designs it was clear that the Necromancer would be the most complex class of the bunch, and that it made most sense for it to go out last. That would give us confidence in figuring out good practices for careers in general and it gave us time to plan and lay the groundwork for the technical side of things. Most work was put into the career highlight: the skeleton minions.



[h2]Creating Sienna’s Minions[/h2]
We call them minions rather than bots because even though they feel similar they don’t share the same code or design space. Sienna’s skeletons are actually rather like a friendly faction of their own, sharing behavior and movement with Vermintide’s enemies. That meant a lot of work, both from a pure visual and combat behavior perspective but also balancing their presence and relative player positioning so that they didn’t end up being too noisy or obtrusive. It also meant a lot of bug fixing.







So having done the groundwork we now have a bit of tech in place for enemies fighting enemies. We’re pretty excited toying around with that for the future. :)

After a lot of prototyping the skeleton behavior was getting to a good spot, enabling us to focus on presentation and tweaking.

[h2]Bringing the Necromancer to (Un)Life[/h2]
Career production started in earnest earlier this year with creating the Necromancer's basic building blocks - her weapons, the character model and the minions. The initial idea was of Sienna using ranged attacks to soften up enemies but having a heavy hitting toolkit to finish them off. In the beginning it might have been a bit too heavy hitting.



This combat style saw several iterations in both functionality and appearance, and the way she played was changed and tweaked over several months - a special shoutout to our alpha testers who provided invaluable feedback and insight on direction.

The team worked hard to ensure we fulfilled what players would expect from a Warhammer Fantasy Necromancer. The career not only had to play well, we also had to make sure she looked the part, and stayed in keeping with the miniatures and Warhammer Fantasy lore. Extra care was put into nailing down how she could summon skeletons, which saw us going back and forth with it being an active or passive ability (and trying out different alternatives for visual presentation).



Of course, having figured out a design doesn’t mean the work ends then and there - it’s all about finding that sweet spot between gameplay balance, performance targets and sheer fun. Some ideas didn’t make it, but the team sure had fun exploring them. :)



We’re super happy to soon release the Necromancer and the recently deceased upon Helmgart and surroundings, and we hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes blog. A big thank you to all our players and our fantastic community. And rest assured, we’ll be back soon enough with more cool things to reveal in the next dev blog showing you what actually made it into the career.

Come along Darlings, let's go save the world.

— Joakim, on behalf of the Vermintide 2 team.

The Ubersreik Five have been through some stuff haven’t they? Confounding the evil machinations of the Skaven at Ubersreik (even if they couldn’t quite save the city in the process). Then thwarting the Pactsworn alliance in the depths of Helmgart (again, a bit late to actually save the city, but who’s quibbling?). Little did they know that these weren’t isolated invasions of the kind the Empire has endured since its founding, but harbingers of a new and terrible age: the End Times, when the laughter of the dark gods finally swallows the world.

The Five have known for a while that something isn’t right, of course. Tzeentch, the Chaos God of Change, has been dabbling away with the causality of the mortal world, tangling fate and destiny into new designs for no other reason than because he can.

[h2]Divine Interventions[/h2]
This isn’t to say that our bold Five have drawn the attention of the Chaos Gods … well, perhaps the odd curious eyeball from time to time. It’s more that they’re caught in the ripples as the dark brothers hurl stones into the pool of reality. They’re not alone in that. The wider world has problems of its own beyond marching armies and bloodthirsty warriors.

But nor have the Five been completely untouched. Other entities have manipulated our heroes for their own ends. The goddess Lileath - known to Bretonnians as the Lady of the Lake - anoints Kruber as one of her Grail Knights, even as Kerillian falls from her light and under the sway of the bleak Cytharai goddesses. Be’lakor, the Dark Master, deceives the puritanical Victor Saltzpyre into seeking the Citadel of Eternity - and then a Warrior Priest’s mantle - for reasons of his own. And it may yet be that Bardin’s embrace of the newfangled and oft-cursed engineer’s vocation is not so whimsical as it seems.

Now, as Geheimnisnacht draws near, it’s Sienna’s turn.

[h2]Death Unleashed[/h2]
Since time immemorial, a network of elven waystones has channelled the eight Winds of Magic - the stuff of Chaos itself - into the Great Vortex at the heart of the high elven realm of Ulthuan. But as the End Times gather pace, this network is failing, and one being in particular seeks advantage in that calamity.

When Nagash, the Great Necromancer, conspires to yet another resurrection this fateful Geheimnisnacht, he has more in mind than a simple return. Reborn, he lays claim to the Wind of Death, becoming a veritable god … and in the process making his dark art of Necromancy more accessible than ever before.

As the End Times gather pace, countless wizards dabble in necromantic magic out of pride, desperation, greed or simple curiosity. Balthasar Gelt, Supreme Patriarch of the Colleges of Magic will become the most prominent of these, wielding the dead as a weapon to contain the northlander invasion.

[h2]The Lure of Necromancy[/h2]

The sorceries that empower Necromancy are hollowing and dangerous. But then all magic is corrosive to mortals, to greater or lesser degree. It’s why so much of even the simplest spellcraft is bound up in ritual and somatic conjuring - it gives a wizard a means to minimise their exposure and their risk. And of course, necromancy’s great power arises through the most selfish of means: the binding of other creatures (albeit dead) to one’s own will - and having absolute dominion over anything - much less (once) living creatures seldom ends well.

Given these physical, mental and spiritual pressures, it’s no wonder that Necromancers turn evil - or else go so mad as makes no difference. When the boundary of mortality becomes so blurred, death loses its meaning - especially the death of those who stand in one’s way. And death is … so much tidier than living. Skeletons don’t talk back. They don’t need food or encouragement. They simply await their next command. And is it really so evil to press the dead to service if it saves the living?

Such was certainly Balthasar Gelt’s logic during the End Times, and he was by no means the first. So many of the Necromancers who rose to bedevil the world first began as wizards driven by simple curiosity, only to be led astray, one misstep after another.

[h2]A Darker Path[/h2]
Perhaps Sienna’s reasoning is much the same? Of all the Ubersreik Five, she’s the first to be appalled at the carnage and cruelty they encounter. More than that, though Saltzpyre has struggled to give her the benefit of the doubt, her impetuousness and her addiction to magic have always threatened to lead her down darker roads. Perhaps Nagash’s unshackling of the Wind of Death simply presented an irresistible opportunity?

Maybe - just maybe - a third party fanned those flames during her recent periods of absence from Taal’s Horn Keep? The daemon Be’lakor has manipulated our heroes at least since they returned to Castle Drachenfels. Is Sienna his latest toy? Or perhaps Sienna found a secret mentor, just as Gelt fell under the sway of Vlad von Carstein? Stranger things have happened in the shadow of the Chaos Gods.

Or is Sienna’s twin sister Sofia to blame? She’s always served as Sienna’s dark mirror, a soul free to act however she wished - to embrace all that magic has to offer - while Sienna strove for discipline. Did the Five’s battle to reclaim Olesya’s tower gather old resentments to the surface?

It may even be the case that Sofia’s influence is of a more direct kind … there is little more dangerous - or desperate - than a Necromancer’s spirit.

Whatever the truth, we’re going to find out together in the weeks and months to come.

The End Times have barely begun, and the Ubersreik Five have battles yet to fight.