Warhammer: Vermintide 2 News

Thanks for stopping by this brief update! This week saw the experimental PC Beastman-taming-beta come offline and the changes, along with some additional fixes, put out to the live version of the game. Hopefully, you’re finding a better balance of bad guys in your adventures. Thanks to those of you who tested the beta and provided feedback! You rock!


With March 8th approaching, we’re looking forward to celebrating the two year anniversary since Vermintide 2 was released on Steam! We’ve only have you all to thank for the success of Vermintide 2, of course having joined us on the journey so far, or part of it perhaps, yet here reading this post all the same. So again, thank you for being here and we hope you enjoy what we have in store for you for 2020 and Year 3, or ~ 2524 IC!

To celebrate the anniversary we’ll be letting the heroes loose on the streets of Helmgart to have A Quiet Drink (hopefully) and relax a little. They’ve earned it! The special adventure map will be available between the 5th and 12th of March and will be partnered with a limited time Quest reward to mark the occasion.

We’ll also be hosting a Fatshark Stream on the 6th of March where we’ll grab some devs, do some Show & Tells, check out some mods and play some games with you all.

We’ve also partnered with a bunch of Streamers you’ll no doubt know, they’ll be celebrating along with us and all of you over on Twitch where we’ve armed them with some Swag to distribute as they see fit! We’ll get a schedule up and announced next week, but in the meantime chuck them a follow and you’ll be informed when they come online!

FUPLAAYZ
https://www.twitch.tv/fuplaayz

WARWITCH TV
https://twitch.tv/warwitchtv

GOOFGUY
https://www.twitch.tv/goofguy

HELLOFLOWER
https://twitch.tv/helloflower

ISHKA TV
https://www.twitch.tv/ishkatv

MOOPSHARK
https://www.twitch.tv/moopshark

WALKERTRIPS
https://www.twitch.tv/walkertrips



Yesterday we pushed out a bunch of fixes for the console versions of Vermintide 2. With a bunch of crashes fixed, players should also experience much better connection stability with other players and be dropped far less frequently from matches where the host as unfortunately crashed out. Thanks for reporting these issues to us and bearing with us as we get these things patched up!

The process on consoles is much more complex than the relative freedoms we have on Steam to push updates more frequently, so we genuinely feel for you during times of instability. It’s never our goal for you to feel alienated or left behind and we do appreciate it can feel that way. We just want you to know it’s neither malice or lack of care, just things (processes mostly), are very different on these platforms.

Thanks for checking out the experimental beta this past weekend and giving us your thoughts and feedback on the changes.

Overall the changes were received well and as such we're putting those changes live, including the reintroduction of the unintended mechanic which allows for some customisation of Heroic Deeds. The full patch notes for this release are below.

• Changed how enemy faction populations are determined in the missions. Skaven and Chaos now have a higher chance of appearing in a mission compared to Beastmen. Should mean less Beastmentide across the board.
  
• Beastmen can no longer spawn in Blood in the Darkness. They don't like being inside spooky castles.
  
• Polished Ungor and Gor attack damage triggers. Should now feel more fair with the attack animation.
  
• Added an exploit that allows players to customise their Deed difficulties and map choices.
  
• Fixed a crash in the dialogue system when a client joins an on-going game.

Added since Experimental Beta closed

• Added VFX to the end event fight in Blood in the Darkness.
  
• Fixed some broken ledges before the end event on Blood in the Darkness where bots with weak knees kept faling off from.
  
• Fixed an issue with being able to lock out teammates in the first event on Blood in the Darkness.
  
• Fixed enemies not being able to path to players through the door during the end event on Blood in the Darkness.
  
• Fixed an issue with not being able to join or matchmake in to a Weave lobby queued for ranked play.
  
• Fixed a crash that could happen during Lord fights.

Hope you've had a groovy week. We've not got it all right have we. But hats off to you for letting us know where we misstep. We genuinely appreciate it.

Today we're putting an Experimental Beta out to Steam, available for all owners of Vermintide 2, but with particular emphasis on the Beastmen available for Winds of Magic enabled lobbies.

[BETA ACCESS DETAILS ARE AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST]

You've fed back to us that there seems to be a disproportionate amount of Beastmen in your Vermintide. For some time now we've been fettling with Beastman presence throughout the game on an internal version, and are ready to bring those changes in to a beta for your feedback. There's also changes to Ungor and Gor attacks damage triggers, we're hoping these are more in line with their animations so there's less chance of them getting off cheap shots.

We also heard that we really shouldn't be fixing the Heroic Deed exploit that some folks used to spice up their Deeds before we have improved the Deed system for players. And yep, we agree that removing that was tone deaf (feel free to blame Hedge!). In the meantime, we've reintroduced that to the game.

• Changed how enemy faction populations are determined in the missions. Skaven and Chaos now have a higher chance of appearing in a mission compared to Beastmen. Should mean less Beastmentide across the board.
  
• Beastmen can no longer spawn in Blood in the Darkness. They don't like being inside spooky castles.
  
• Polished Ungor and Gor attack damage triggers. Should now feel more fair with the attack animation.
  
• Added an exploit that allows players to customise their Deed difficulties and map choices.
  
• Fixed a crash in the dialogue system when a client joins an on-going game.

To install the 2.2.1 Experimental beta, please:

• Right-click Vermintide 2 in your Steam library sidebar 
  
• Select 'Properties' 
  
• Select the 'Betas' tab
  
• Expand the dropdown and select:
  2.2.1_experimental

A 12mb download for the patch Experimental branch should then start downloading. If the download does not start automatically, please restart the Steam client. It's also around 12mb to switch back to the LIVE version.

PROGRESS WILL BE PERSISTENT BETWEEN THE TEST AND LIVE GAME

If you're playing the experimental beta and wish to provide feedback or report a bug, please do submit those to the dedicated categories on our official forums:

https://forums.fatsharkgames.com/c/V2-Exp/EXP-feedback/60
https://forums.fatsharkgames.com/c/V2-Exp/EXP-Bugs/61



Join Tim, Tom and Tuva over on Twitch today at 13:30 UTC where they’ll be talking about the Experimental Beta.

https://www.twitch.tv/fatsharkgames

From today you can play the second chapter of The Curse of Drachenfels update, Blood in Darkness, on PC. This update is part of Season 2 and is free for all owners of Warhammer: Vermintide 2, and consists of 3 new missions in total. The final chapter is aimed to be released in March. You can find more information about Season 2 here.

Lohner has received a new shipment and you can now find an increased stock in Lohner’s Emporium of Wonders purchasable with shillings.

With the release of Chapter 2 the Year of the Rat event ‘Rat infestation’ has come to an end, and we hope that you enjoyed it.

[h2]FEATURES[/h2]

• Blood in the Darkness - the second mission in the Curse of Drachenfels adventure.
  
• More cosmetics added to Lohner's Emporium

[h2]FIXES[/h2]Levels

• Old Haunts - Increased difficulty on events (Champion and above).
  
• Old Haunts - Fixed some stuck locations.
  
• Old Haunts - Fixed some respawn issues.
  
• Skippergate - Fixed another one.
  
• Weaves - Fixed crashes for clients when joining a session.

General

• It's no longer possible to switch map whilst a vote is in progress.
  
• Fixed a crash caused by interacting with chat/friend list buttons whilst purchasing a store item.
  
• Fixed crash caused when player gets healed while leaving the game (mainly death mutator in Weaves but was possible outside of that, albeit rare).
  
• Fixed a crash that could occur on metal mutators when you finish the arena with buff still applied from the mutator as the host
  
• Fixed quest timer in Okri's Challenges being drawn under the quest descriptions.
  
• Fixed an issue where Kerillian's Spear and Shield illusion "Princess's Glamour-Shield" awarded from the Point Well-Made challenge displayed a placeholder name.
  
• Fixed the Quick Play bonus not being awarded when joining into a keep.
  
• Bogenhafen cosmetic counts should now tally appropriately when considering items purchased from the Emporium.

2.2.0.1 Hotfix.
- Removed deprecated Dark Omens challenges from Okri's book

Thanks for stopping by to check out the latest dev update from the Shark Tank here in unusually unwintery Stockholm.

This week is what’s known as a ‘Hack Week’ here in the office. What does that mean you might ask? Well, think of Hack Week as an opportunity to do something different - so long as there’s some theoretical or actual value in what you’re doing, and have a pitch for it. Some will end up hacking alone, whilst others will form a team and get cracking on something bigger, or requiring multiple disciplines. They might work on something totally new, or continue something they worked on in an earlier Hack Week. It’s an opportunity to learn and grow and maybe even result in something new for Vermintide 2, or even spawn a new project altogether!

You might see a 2D artist taking a crash course in Blender, or you could see QA have a go at building a level [did you know about - Trial of the Foolhardy in Vermintide 1 and Screaming Bell in Vermintide 2 were QA babies!].

Other features of Vermintide (and the tools that build it) have been the result of hackweeks, such as:

• The ‘Social Wheel’.
  
• ‘Weekly Event’ mutators.
  
• Hearing-impaired accessibility.
  
• A bunch of internal tools:
  • Monitoring our build-system.
    
  • Optimized generation of reflection probes for rendering.
• Twitch Mode 2.0

We will avoid saying what’s being worked on at present, as we don’t want to set up false expectations that something will get into the game. There’s some cool stuff though, so hopefully, you can see the fruits of more hack weeks in the future!


This week the Year of the Rat event went live, where pesky critters roam the keep and a new limited availability portrait frame is up for grabs. A patch has shipped today to fix a few issues that arose with this update, mostly crashes as well as some fixes to leaderboard progression in the Weaves.

You’d think that enabling critters in the keep was as simple as a toggle box but really it’s much more complex than that, and some crazy issues arose upon toggling that hypothetical box. They need somewhere to spawn, a navigational mesh so they know where they can and cannot go and places to try and escape to. Other issues arose from enabling keep critters as well, which happened to have a knock on effect on spawning behaviours in the various game modes.

Our QA team had to build and test 10 different candidates for this fairly simple sounding update due to some of the unique complexities the changes presented - this is more than some much larger updates will see!

A cute and seemingly simple idea can really cause problems if it’s not something considered during the much earlier production phase. But solving those issues now does open the door to more potential Keep shenanigans in the future.


Last week we revealed the name of the map coming in Chapter 2 of the Curse of Drachenfels updates. Blood in the Darkness is due to come out in mid-February. It is currently undergoing testing and we will announce the date when it is in a good state.. We are, however, now able to show you a couple of screenshots from the upcoming adventure map right here!





The release of Chapter 2 will see more cosmetics being added to Lohner’s Emporium as well, including some hats you’ve seen before and some you haven’t. These will all be available for various amounts of Shillings.